UNIQUE JOB: The touch of a chicken sexer

Mohamad Abdul Hamid loves telling people what he does. After 13 years on the job, he still finds it funny when people react to his job description: chicken sexer.

Mohamad is the only Malaysian who is able to tell the difference between a male and female chick just days after they hatch.

He laughingly recalls how hard it was to convince his wife’s parents that he makes a decent living, when he first asked for her hand in marriage.

"They didn’t believe it was a job and that it paid well," said the 30-year-old.

Commercial hatcheries need to know what sex the chicks are at an early age, so that they can give the hatchlings the appropriate feed and meet the needs of the chicken farms.

Egg farms don’t want males, while broiler farms — that raise chicken for meat — want to breed cockerels and pullets separately.

Cockerels are often castrated and raised as capons for meat.

Chicks of the wrong sex in any of these lines are unwanted, and culling the unwanted sexes early reduces costs.

Mohamad is one of only six chicken sexers in Malaysia, said Datuk Francis Lau, president of the Federation of Livestock Farmers’ Association.

The other five are Filipinos, hired on contract, said Lau, who is also executive director of Leong Hup Holdings Bhd which owns the Leong Hup Grandparent Stock Hatchery where Mohamad works.

Without Mohamad, the hatchery in Merlimau, Malacca, would discover the chicks’ sexes only four to six weeks later.

The hatchery is the country’s largest producer of day-old chicks.

It produces 90 million day-old chicks a year, and supplies 30 per cent of the market for these creatures.

Mohamad "does" about 700 chicks a day, or three chicks every two minutes.

He began working at the farm when he was 17, feeding chickens, then went on to help the chicken sexers. He later went for training in Medan, Indonesia.

"It’s a delicate job, and part of it is messy, but it pays well," he said.

He earns a four-figure monthly income, he added.

What Mohamad does is called vent sexing, first discovered by the Japanese and is a difficult skill to master.

Taking a chick in one hand, he uses the other to squeeze the creature’s rear and expose the vent, the opening through which birds both excrete and urinate. The genital organ is inside the vent.

It sounds simple but the professional vent sexer has to study the organ’s external appearance, which can fall into as many as fifteen basic patterns.

"It’s a precise art," he said. And even after 13 years, he still makes mistakes, he concedes.