Is eating commercial chicken bad for your sperm count?

I don't know about England, but here in France the answer is 'probably not'. The reason is the way chickens are reared in the open air free to range and they are slaughtered around 12 weeks (not 5 ½), so just before cockerels become a problem. Anyone using feed with hormones or antibiotics would have to declare that and would then sell nothing as the French are very particular about their food and the way it is produced. Apparently cage hens eggs have such a small market now that all the producers here are going out of business, so they are taking the cages out and producing 'barn' eggs in the buildings.
 
As soon as you try to avoid chicken in the UK you notice how heavily we rely on as a staple. A good 60% of sandwiches (sometimes more) are chicken, chicken and bacon, chicken salad etc... I cant bring myself to eat it, partly because I now look at a drumstick and see my own birds (somewhat silly, I know) but also knowing how industrially pumped up they are.
The French are very sensible to reject it. Valuing quality, even over quantity and price. I don't understand why bargain brand buy one get one free can be used to sell anything in seemingly enormous quantities.
Is it me? Do I want a baguette for a pound? How is that even possible without being made of cardboard?
On the brighter side - that's the male pill sorted :)
 
When I do buy chicken I always get organic from Waitrose and the flavour is far superior than the ordinary basic stuff, even if not so good as something reared in your own field. Last week I got a whole chicken for £10.50, which yielded 6 portions of meat and 6 portions of beautiful chicken-and -veg soup from the carcass plus a handful of veg. I agree with you, Rick, about avoiding cheap mass-produced chicken, and I don't even like eating commercially produced eggs at this time of year when my own hens are moulting, unless they're organic as well. I wonder if fertility is also affected in the cock birds for breeding, presumably produced from the same bloodlines as the hens?
And can anyone please explain how on earth they fertilise all those hundreds of thousands of hens which go on to produce fertile eggs for the next generation of mass-produced chicks? I think it's obviously some insemination process, I don't suppose there are lovely big farms somewhere with nice big pens each containing a cock bird and a few devoted hens. But how do they get the sperm out of the cockerels and into the hens??? This must be a mass industry that we never seem to hear anything about, probably because of the welfare issues involved.
 
rick said:
The French are very sensible to reject it. Valuing quality, even over quantity and price.
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They don't value animal welfare anywhere near as much, though.

I live in an area where GM trials and various other scientific research is done right outside our door. Maybe if I were to let my meat birds free range outside of our garden some really strange offspring might produced...? :ugeek:
 
Marigold said:
And can anyone please explain how on earth they fertilise all those hundreds of thousands of hens which go on to produce fertile eggs for the next generation of mass-produced chicks?
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Good question! Now on my to do list to research over the holidays.
 
Let's hope so, way too many people crammed onto this planet already. The reason no research has been done on this specifically is probably because they are still looking into a gazillion other potential causes which are higher up the list.

Millions of people out there don't have the luxury of choosing between organic and cheap chicken, their choice instead is one of cheap chicken or no chicken at all.
 
Prepare to be staggered Evie!
When I got my first 3 hybrids from a school hatch it was with the information that they had come from Hyline and that set me off on searching around to see how it works. The eggs for layers and broilers are a commercial laboratory output. The birds are a product that is genetically 'manufactured' to be extremely consistent and productive (that is to say precision genetic selection for the most part rather than modification. ) Its full scale engineering. I don't know but I would think that one cockerel probably fertilises tens of thousands of hens by artificial insemination. Being sex-linked hybrids, of course, their parents are not the same breed as the resulting chicks. Somewhere there is a fairly small flock of parent birds who will be exceptional specimens and very well looked after indeed. Probably free ranging in chicken paradise. Under them there will be secondary breeders supplying the industry and under them the pyramid grows to astronimical proportions!
Constant yellow rivers of sex-linked chicks on conveyor belts being sorted.
I did hear a while ago that it is now possible to sex a chick while it is still in the egg with a potentially huge saving to the industry as well as a saving of unnecessary distress but as with these new developments it is usually quite a while before they are widely adopted.
But then, as Dino says, they feed the world. I bet T-Rex didn't see that one coming!
 
rick said:
Prepare to be staggered Evie!
Its full scale engineering. I don't know but I would think that one cockerel probably fertilises tens of thousands of hens by artificial insemination. Being sex-linked hybrids, of course, their parents are not the same breed as the resulting chicks. Somewhere there is a fairly small flock of parent birds who will be exceptional specimens and very well looked after indeed. Probably free ranging in chicken paradise.
!
Click to expand...

Yes - but that STILL doesn't answer my question!
HOW IS IT DONE?
I know that hens store sperm for up to three weeks and once covered by a cockerel, subsequent eggs may be fertile for that period of time. This is why you have to leave 3 weeks or so between cockerels if you want to change the parentage and be sure that the sperm is from the new male. So presumably the hens could be inseminated every 3 weeks or so, but this might depend on where they were in their cycle, maybe, and I still don't know how you would get the goods from the cock bird and into the hen. I suppose it would be indelicate to use a turkey baster?
 
Apparently, and surprisingly, artificial insemination isn't practical with chickens. There are videos of AI for chickens on youtube but it seems to be used in breeding to boost fertility and only occasionally. The sperm degrades within minuets apparently so its small scale stuff.
Still doesn't really answer the question though - I wonder how many cockerels that takes, to keep the production line rolling?
 
The bit of sexing embryos whilst still developing in the egg is correct - this year or last year it was reported that Germany was going to make it law and the male chicks will be destroyed well before they're fully grown, they'll force large scale breeders to use the technique and also outlaw the killing of male chicks in by throwing them alive in a mincer - and maybe the other ways of destruction, too, can't remember the details (nor, annoyingly, how the sexing-in-shell is done).

But as Marigold says, that still doesn't answer her question. Can't imagine it's done by AI, far too many chickens required. Are those cockerels super shooters? :)
 
Well, SOMEBODY must know, it's obviously big business involving huge numbers of parent birds.
I feel like when I was a kid, in an all-female family, at a girls' school, having rejected the gooseberry bush and the stork as impractical, trying to work out the mechanics of human reproduction in the days when nobody told young ladies the details about how exactly to go about it. With no chance of researching the internet in the 1950s, I remember light dawning after I read an explanatory limerick on the wall of the school toilets. Compared with the other theories it seemed equally improbable, but I resolved to give it a go when the opportunity arose.
But it didn't say anything about chickens.
 
This will hopefully shed some light.

http://www.incip.org/index.php/component/k2/item/88-artificial-insemination-in-chicken
 
Fascinating, thank you Dinosaw.
So that's how they do it in Kenya. Anybody found anything about how it's done in the E.U, or about how a large fertile egg farm is managed? They must be quite common, seeing as there are so many thousands of chicks required, not only to become egg laying hens or meat birds, but also to replace the parent stock - I don't suppose they go on anywhere near retirement age! We are all familiar with pictures and articles about intensive egg and chicken meat production, and surely there must also be regulations etc for the management of breeding farms?
 
I found a figure for 2012 of 6.8 billion laying hens that year (producing 65.5 million tonnes of eggs, though that was a different source and there seems to be a wide range of estimates.)
So at least 13.6 billion eggs were hatched, half being male.
If the breeding stock were producing 300 per year each (maybe?) then there were 78.7 million parent hens
With 10 hens to a cockerel thats 7.9 million males (assuming AI was fairly small scale in 2012 (I think it probably still is, particularly for layers who don't have the weight problems of meat birds)) and lets face it, the labor force work for chicken feed!
Now I'm losing the plot,but,
If a hen needs to be inseminated once a week? 52 weeks in a year (average around the globe)
that is 4.1 billion matings a year - thats 130 fandangos a second!
... something not right there - I think ...
Its quite a lot!
 
The same way I would imagine Marigold, just with more staff stimulating more cock birds and inseminating more hens. If you imagine a production line of cocks, hens, extractors and inseminators you can produce an awful lot of fertile eggs. One sperm harvest from a cock will in theory produce 140 chicks as it will produce enough sperm to fertilise 10 hens for 14 days. Therefore you roughly only need one cock for every 140 hens in reality as you would inseminate on a rotational basis. If you imagine that a facility with 14,000 hybrid layers would produce close to 4.2 million fertile eggs per year (14000 hens x 300 eggs) then you would only need 100 cocks for 4,200,000 new chicks per year, providing that is that i haven't missed out a zero somewhere at this late hour. So 1000 cocks for 42 million eggs, 10,000 for 420 million and so on. How long would it take one person to extract semen once they got good at it?, a couple of minutes?, boring job but even if you call it three minutes a go you could be extracting semen from 20 birds per hour, 140 per day if we call it seven hours allowing for breaks. One days work by one person could produce enough semen to see 1400 hens made fertile for a fortnight during which they could produce nearly 20,000 fertile eggs.
 
And then presumably the hens would have to be kept in batches numbered 1-14, and after they had arrived at Day 14, there would be another gynaecologist appointment, after which they'd pass along the conveyor belt to Pen 1 again. Actually it's probably less than 14, as there must be a drop-off in fertility towards the end of the 2 weeks, not a clear cutoff point.
And no chance to complain about sexual abuse,for either gender. I think my girls are luckier than they know, living in chaste single-sex retirement, where the occasional egg is greeted as a praiseworthy present.
 
http://www.msdvetmanual.com/poultry/artificial-insemination/overview-of-artificial-insemination-in-poultry

I'm getting whacked just thinking about it! With turkeys? I bet that builds your biceps :)
 
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