young research has found a method that can determine the sex of a chicken in early development by “ sniff ” the olfactory property emitted through the shell . If the technology is successfully scaled up , it has the voltage to avoid the culling of millions of live chick .

Over 350 million male chick are culled each class in the US . Since manful chickens do not lie ballock and ca n’t be fatten up up rapidly enough to be sell for meat , farmers only require a few to fertilize eggs , leaving the majority to be considered useless for industrialized ball product .

Just hours after wimp eggs brood , proletarian divide the males from the females , after which the males are put aside to be slaughtered . This typically postulate gas them with CO2or simply chucking them into a shredder .

To avoid mass - culling of newborn birds , technologies have been developed that can sex the chicken before they think up , either by sampling the inside of the eggthrough a diminutive holein the cuticle or imaging through the cuticle .

Scientists at the University of California , Davis and SensIT Ventures , Inc have recently look to come up a young way to determine the sex activity of a chick egg as early as potential without open it .

Their fresh method affect sticking a suction cupful on the shell to cull up on volatile organic chemical emit by the embryo . They then determined the sex of the unborn wench by using chemical analysis techniques , such as gasolene chromatography / multitude spectrometry .

They concluded that this method acting was able to right identify male and distaff embryos at eight days of incubation with 80 pct accuracy , based on two hour of sample distribution .

A key characteristic of the new method is that it could , in possibility , be integrate into the current industrial process without too much hassle . The patented applied science has been licensed by SensIT , which take aim to commercialize the method acting .

For now , male chick culling remains an inevitable part of industrialized egg production . However , researchhas express that the public is often incognizant of the current drill of killing male wench and is appalled to hear about the gruesome process . what is more , they do appear to support option to culling , such as early sex determination of eggs .

With raw engineering like this , the hope is that resilient culling of chicks could become a thing of the past times .

The study is print in the journalPLOS ONE .