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NICHOLAS ZAMISKA, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, reports:

As a 5-year-old on his family’s farm in the Netherlands, Harm Kiezebrink wondered why his father instructed him to drown newly hatched male chicks in a large plastic drum inside the hatchery.

The answer: male chicks are slaughtered because they won’t be able to lay eggs and because they will be too scrawny for meat.

Mr. Kiezebrink grew up to become an expert in this unusual field. Today, his family company sells killed chicks to zoos and falconers. And it has developed technology for efficiently killing birds.

Now he is also taking his skills to some places that need them urgently: Asian nations fighting bird flu. He has brought them some of his bird-slaughtering machines, such as the AED-100, which kills about 10,000 birds per hour, catching them by the feet and dragging their heads through an electrified pool of water.

Avian influenza, a disease that afflicts birds but that can also infect and kill human beings, continues to plague Asia. Though there’s no evidence that the virus is able to pass easily between humans, scientists believe that it could mutate into a form that could cause a world-wide pandemic. Health authorities have taken to responding to outbreaks by ordering farmers in surrounding areas to kill their chickens, ducks and geese. Millions of birds have been destroyed.

That hasn’t been easy to accomplish. Overwhelmed farmers have stuffed their birds in sacks and beat them, buried them alive or tried to set them ablaze.

In the past two years, Mr. Kiezebrink has worked with health officials from nearly a dozen countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Vietnam, China and Thailand, on how to safely and quickly eradicate birds that may have been exposed to flu. “He’s one of Europe’s, if the not the world’s, most prominent chicken killers, for want of a better word,” says Roy Wadia, a spokesman in Beijing for the World Health Organization, which has worked with him in China.

His consulting work has also provided him with a platform for his efforts to sell his bird-killing machines. So far, they’ve proved to be too expensive — as much as $600,000 — for those prospective customers.

Mr. Kiezebrink says his work is driven by a personal passion: His father, also a bird man, died in 1997, at the age of 64 of a mysterious flu that Mr. Kiezebrink is convinced was avian.

Mr. Kiezebrink, who is 46, didn’t plan on a career in poultry. Though he didn’t tell anyone at the time, he says that as a boy he was horrified at having to drown chicks. He says he grew up resenting the farm his family had worked on for more than a century.

His 72-year-old mother, Anky Kiezebrink, remembers that drowning the chickens did bother her son. “He was always trying to think of another way to kill the chickens,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Putten, Netherlands.

When he turned 17, he left the farm to study mechanics and for a time worked on a tanker transporting chemicals between northern Europe and Russia. He was sure he would never have anything to do with chickens again. “I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible,” he says.

After a string of jobs in his early 20s, he ended up as an insurance consultant. But in 1995, after 20 years away from the farm, he got a call from his father asking him to return to help the family business.

His mother wasn’t surprised he returned. “It is in our blood, chickens,” she says. “We were born with chickens.”

So he went to help his younger brother, Hanno. The company, Kiezebrink International, based in Putten, kills male chicks just a few hours old, freezes them, and ships them to zoos around Europe to feed to birds of prey such as owls and falcons. A kilogram of frozen chicks costs about $1.20, and the company shipped about 35 million chicks last year.

In 1997, Mr. Kiezebrink’s late father, who had traveled often to do consulting work on other farms, went to teach the workers on a farm in Indonesia how to determine the sex of chicks only a few hours old.

Upon his return, he came down with a flu-like illness. He quickly developed a very high fever. Twelve days after arriving home, he died.

What exactly killed him was never clear. Knowing that he had been in contact with poultry in Indonesia, Dutch health officials investigated the death, and sent his organs to a laboratory for inspection. The investigation was inconclusive, the Kiezebrinks say.

Soon after his father’s death, Mr. Kiezebrink established a chicken-culling consultancy in his name. The Herman Kiezebrink Institute, a for-profit company in Wageningen in the Netherlands, now has 120 chicken-killing machines and about a dozen employees.

Mr. Kiezebrink and his new organization were called into service in 2003 when there was major outbreak of bird flu in the Netherlands and officials ordered a mass slaughter.

Together with other contractors, Mr. Kiezebrink killed more than 40 million birds in the Netherlands and Belgium in about two months. Mr. Kiezebrink had done a handful of kills during local salmonella outbreaks using a new carbon dioxide-based slaughtering machine, but the big Dutch kill raised his profile.

Since then, Mr. Kiezebrink has been called on frequently. In early 2004, he worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Thailand and Vietnam, both of which are wrestling with frequent outbreaks of the virus.

That same year, Chinese health officials were wrestling with an outbreak of bird flu in Jiangxi province, and flew in representatives from WHO, including Mr. Kiezebrink to assess their culling efforts. He suggested the use of sentinel animals in flocks to gauge whether chicken vaccines were working and advised officials to cover dead chickens with calcium hydroxide and more than a foot of dirt to prevent further infection.

WHO officials say they were aware Mr. Kiezebrink has attempted to sell his machines while also serving as a consultant, but didn’t see a big problem with that. “It’s a field that has very few experts at that level,” says Mr. Wadia, the organization’s China spokesman.

Mr. Kiezebrink also pitched officials on his AED-25, a mobile unit that electrocutes the birds, for around $60,000, promising that it would deliver better and more efficient results. Chinese officials were interested, but the price of the machine was too high, according to Xie Donghui, an official with Nanchang Veterinary Bureau in Jiangxi Province who sat in on Mr. Kiezebrink’s presentation.

Lately Mr. Kiezebrink has been focusing on developing a cheaper version of his machine to sell the Chinese. He hopes to land a big sales contract for the dozens of culling machines he has in a warehouse. But his nightmare is that avian flu will sweep the globe, and he carries a stash of the anti-flu drug Tamiflu with him everywhere. “You pay with your life if you make a mistake,” he says.

—- Cui Rong in Beijing contributed to this article

Write to Nicholas Zamiska at