Slashdot Mirror
Chicken Run
Applying modern technology to the task of corraling chickens for the slaughterhouse results in a chicken-catching machine that surprisingly is not as gruesome as it appears. Never thought about a "chicken vacuum" before? After reading this, you won't be able to get it out of your head. :) Sadly, scientists are already researching ways for the chickens to fight back.
will chicken eventually learn to avoid the machine after a while?
This is more of a "News for Farmers, Stuff that Moos" story. But from a technological viewpoint, it's an interesting story. I for one didn't realize that chickens bred for meat were actually allowed to run free (albeit in a darkened warehouse). It's actually more "humane" than I had thought.
But this isn't really an advance in treating chickens more humanely. The farmers profit because of 1) reduced labor costs; 2) reduced worker's comp claims; and 3) reduced "breakage" allowing them to send more chickens to market. I can see why animal rights groups would be supportive of this technology, but it's really only a change on the level of replacing the axe-man with the guillotine.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Anyone else seen Baraka?
Among other glorious and terrible images, there are shots from a chicken processing plant. It shows thousands of chicks tumbling off a conveyor belt, swirling down a giant metal funnel and having their beaks burned.
as a job in my teens:
1. It is probably one of the worst jobs in North America. It stinks like ammonia all day in the barn, it's hot, hard to breathe, and they leave the lights off to calm the birds. (picture rolling yourself up in a thick blanket that 30 people have urinated on, and stay in their all day with the heat cranked up in the house). When you get home from work, you have to strip naked before you go in your home, and hose off in the yard, or the smell gets everywhere. (I took to burning clothes at one point outside.)
2. Unfourtunately, I can't possibly see this machine keeping up with a human. When yo get good at it, you can catch and hold 6 birds at a time. And, regardless of what the article says, it's very easy to catch a chicken in a dark barn with practice. It's just hard work.
Basically, I can't see this replacing cheap student labour. Just my two cents.
I read recently about an experiment in permaculture, which is the science of making food production ecologically sustainable. The Chinese have been making an art of it for thousands of years, with complicated interlocking cultivation systems, where the waste from one part is always recycled in some other part.
In this system, chickens were kept in small flocks in 20x20 foot covered cages. The cages were on wheels. Small herds of cows were also kept, in constant rotation among many small pastures. After the cows were done in one pasture, the chicken cages were rolled in. The chickens broke the cow patties apart looking for bugs, which were plentiful. This allowed the cow manure to break down faster, resulting in quicker regrowth of the grass, as well as lower rates of disease among the cows. The chickens were healthier as well, and got to run about and hunt for bugs, which if I were a chicken, I would vastly prefer to living in some overcrowded factory. Overall, the production of both beef and chicken increased dramatically over other organic ranching methods, putting it on a par with non-organic methods.
The inventor of the system based the idea off of the fact that in nature, herds of wild ungulates are always followed by flocks of birds. Pretty clever, eh? Another thing: you don't need a robot chicken catcher, you just wheel the cage up to the slaughterhouse and pull the chickens in with a net.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yes, but it their path to their destination traumatic or humane?
Temple Grandin did research and studies on humane cattle harvesting. As it turns out, it's not only better for the animals to die in a non stressed manner but it's better for the quality of the meat and the profits of the company.
Very interesting story.
http://www.grandin.com/
Interesting read.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Well there are many ways to slaughter animals, but not too many of them are feasible at the scale at which chickens are usually done. You can gas the animals, It's not overly painful but then you need to keep a ton of poisonous gas around, and run the risk of accidentally gassing your co-workers, not good. Furthermore, I don't know much about chemistry but I can guess that eating gassed meat isn't too good for you. You can lethally inject the birds but then you'd need more syringes than an army of heroin junkies, and the cost is insane. And who would adminster the injections? a squad of specially trained monkeys I think not. However, injections are not too painful, but at the same time they can make the mean poisonous.. You can Chop all their heads off, while they're still running around. But that's really messy, and painful to boot, espescially if it's not done right because they keep running around. Not good. You could shoot them all, painful as hell, and uses a lot of ammo, and you'd need you own team of snipers for a bigger abatoir. Plus gun shot wounds are hard to explain at the grocery store. You could drop them off something high. But that would bruise them, amongst other wounds, and that's not good for the bottom line.. So I can't really think of anyother way to kill large amounts of small creatures. Sure electrocution is not the best way to do it, but I guess we just have to hope that some creative person can think of a way. Until that time, I think that the most cost/humanity ratio would have to be electrocution.
This reminds me of a story I heard once about a type of beef that costs hundreds for one steak. It's from some asian country (japan, most likely), and the cows are nurtured and cared for their entire lives by people, on an individual basis. They're treated like humans, basically.. costly, costly meat. Forget what it was called, though. Maybe someone can remind me.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!1!11!! I've DONE this job, lots, catching chickens in the dark and putting them in cages. It's one of the "fowl"er jobs out there. If at all possible, it's scheduled on new moon nights,or as close as possible, as dark as possible. On one farm where I worked doing this (back early 70's,pure fox platinum blonde farmers daughter, weekend job, etc, you know how it is....), we'd even ride up in the front end loader and put a hood over the public street light on the road out front, to further make it darker. The darker it is, the less they freak out. Next, the farmer, who was a closet alky and hid bottles from his old lady all over the farm, would give all us young fool morons dragooned into this cluck burger transportation service multiple shots of his wild turkey. Thus fortified, we are off! You slide into the chicken house, bend over, feel along the floor, find a chicken leg and snatch it, holding it with one finger, you find another, and another, three in each hand finally, for a total of 6. Then you trudge outside to the truck, load these now non-sleepy bundles of flapping indignation into wooden cages, then someone else would stack the cages. Back and forth and forth and back, on into the wee hours. This was BUHZILLIONS of chickens per chicken house, usually over 20,000 or so. That farm was slightly different from the story, these were egg layers going to the battery cages, before that, free ranging in open houses. Same deal though, ya gots to get cackleberry squatter from point A to B. Each chicken ran around 6-7 lbs. Do the math by the end of the night of what you probably carried in livestock tonnage, maybe 4 or 5 guys doing it.
I think I made a whopper 2 clams an hour back then. If it wasn't for that girl, well, I just don't know how long I would have done that job...
Is there anything about broilers (the 8-week wonders) being so young that makes them more pitiful than the other ends of the spectrum? All they are is a population which has been bred (selected) for certain traits; I doubt very much that they feel any more discomfort in their lives than laying hens, and probably less.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Apparently there is all kinds of high quality beef in Japan prohibited from exporting, something about protecting its domestic beef industry. The restaurant buys the entire cow live, and they do all the work in-house. Everything of the cow is used - the menus are made out of the leather of their previous purchases, the bones are used for soup. Those wacky japanese love their stuff fresh..
Mmmmm, steak tartare. Mmmmm.
Scrape filet mignon fine, with a sharp blade, add a raw egg (you can skip this, but the scraping leaves the fat on the back of the blade, and some find the resulting meat a bit dry -- the danger of raw eggs is duly noted), some fresh ground black pepper, shallots (just a hint), and smear thickly on freshly baked Cuban bread, like 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick.
Mmmmm.
Of course, you'd damn well better trust your butcher. Beef is one of the few meats that are generally safe to eat raw: about the only thing it hosts is penicillin. However, if fouled from the contents of the entrails (E. Coli), or comes from a cow infected with Mad Cow disease (transmitted via the spinal cord and brain), it can be dangerous. In the simple case of surface fouling, of meat from an otherwise disease-free cow, a quick searing will do the trick. This is why rare steaks (from a reputable source) are perfectly safe to eat, but rare hamburger is not.
Now, in the case of steak tartar, the meat has to be free of contamination from the start, and shredded with clean knives, hence the need to trust your butcher.
You could've hired me.
Yeah. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. One of the creepier diseases out there.
And the infectious agent is impervious to normal cooking methods.
I interned at a gelatine processing plant a few years ago. They didn't have anything for me to do for my first few days, so they gave me a book to read that had some bearing on the industry (I think it was this one, but I can't recall for sure). It detailed BSE and it's human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease.
Wow. It's the stuff of nightmares - you lose your mind slowly, there's no known treatment, it can't be easily detected, the prions (damaged proteins that are the carriers) are indestructible, etc... No wonder the US cut off imports from Canada when a single infected cow was discovered in Canada.
Worst part, CJD can have an "incubation" period of years.
When they actually find a treatment for the disease, I'll be quite fascinated to know how it works.
0x0D 0x0A