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.
Some of the biggest fans are animal-rights groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The machines are far more gentle on the birds than human handlers are. "We support using machines that reduce the panic, fear and horror of chickens," says Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns, a Machipongo, Va., group that opposes eating chickens and also runs a sanctuary for a few lucky birds that manage to escape the farms (usually by falling off a truck).
They do realize the bird's final destination, right?
Mike
â¦to toddler size, this could revolutionize the daycare industry.
KFC will never seem the same again with Colonel Sanders driving that thing.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
McDonald's Corp. is encouraging its chicken suppliers to mechanically collect at least half the birds it buys by year's end.
McDonald's actually uses real chicken?
Looks like a cross between an EE grad student's robotics project and something out of the Transformers.
Hook up a flamethrower to it, and we've got a mobile autonomous BBQ station. Where's Mark Pauline and Survival Research Labs when we need 'em? Bring on the Chickenators!
McDonald's actually uses real chicken?
For the McRib!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mr. Tweedy: What is it?
Mrs. Tweedy: It's a pie machine, you idiot. Chickens go in, pies come out.
Mr. Tweedy: Ooh, what kind of pies?
Mrs. Tweedy: Apple.
Mr. Tweedy: My favorite.
Mrs. Tweedy: Chicken pies, you great lummox!
Several years ago, I visited Oxford university on an open day. One of the students was developing an electric sheep-dog as a final year project. Since they did not have a ready supply of sheep, they were testing it by making it round up ducks. I can't help feeling that these two projects might be related...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Please don't refer to it as the "Chickenator". The technical term you should be using is the "Chicken Zamboni".
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
My appartment is about 1800 cubic feet.
There are exactly zero chikens in my appartment.
So: chiken density = 0 / 1800 = 0 = chicken vacuum
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
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
"The scoops are on the way!" - Soylent Green.
I did chicken catching once when visiting relatives out in the country. I must say that chickens are very stupid.
Imagine a large barn with chickens covering the entire floor. As chickens are removed from the barn the remaining chickens do NOT move into the empty space, they remain packed together as the barn empties. There is no chasing involved.
The chickens do not react at all until you grab them by the legs, the most common reaction is to peck, scratch or shit on your hands. And it stank.
I do remember that I was paid well (for a 13 year old) for a few hours work and the farmers wife had a very nice breakfast ready for us when we were done.
I certanly wouldn't want to do it for a living.
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...
You think we read this stuff for comment by the elite levels of the US corporate and academic sector. In Europe and Australia /. is preloaded in the Opera hotlist under Humour.
What else needs to be done to make chickens into batteries?
A five-man crew using a mechanical harvester can do the work of eight men
My god, it's like something out of science fiction.
For those interested, here's a link to the product page, with a handy dandy video of it in action.
Actually, the correct term is chicken "fluffer".
Berry tried everything to force the birds to move under their own power. He flashed strobe lights in their eyes...
Anybody else get the feeling he also tried a pendulum, but won't admit it?
You can't take the sky from me...
Where did you use the "=" sign there? You said scientists who create a technology should be put to death "at the least" (I'm wondering what your "most" would be...). You did not say the users of the machines should be put to death, you said the creators. That's like suing Ford for a drunk driver killing your relative. (Pssst... it's not equal.)
I didn't insult your education, call you a fool, or discuss your drug use or lack thereof. I merely said you were being hypocritical, and you didn't answer my question: do you eat vegetables for which you must kill the organism in order to produce the food? (Carrots, potatoes, beets?)
But carrots, potatoes and beets cannot regenerate; you kill them by harvesting them.
And just because a plant doesn't have a nervous system doesn't mean that you're not removing a life force from the Earth when you kill plants. They have a Kirlian aura which you're snuffing out. And check out PEVA, who argue that plants and even single-celled organisms can feel pain ("Some single cell organisms are known to react and withdraw (run!) from heat. Is this not a single-cell pain reaction without a complex human-like nervous system? How can a single cell make this determination without having a 'brain'?")
Oh, and as for religious references? Let's take Genesis:
Now, from Dictionary.com, dominion is:
Combining the two: God gave us supremacy over the animals. The power to govern, control, possess, and use them for our purposes.
And if you follow a more scientific track, we evolved as omnivores and the few people who I have seen attempt a vegan lifestyle ended up emaciated, weak, pale, and short. (Yes, this is anecdotal evidence.)
I'm not trying to pick a fight -- but you obviously are, given the wording in the great-grandparent post:
Calling something the truth without providing references is a Fallacious Argument. There's lots on that page; take your pick.I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The scoops are coming!
I missed the 'e' in 'humane' from this line in the article:
"Starting in the early 1980s, Britain's Silsoe Research Institute received about $200,000 a year from the government to design a humane harvesting machine."
I was told by an aquaintance who worked at a major airplane engine manufacture stories about this. (note to everyone - Boeing actually DOES NOT MAKE ENGINES - so it would be quite silly if they did compliance and validations on the engines as much as engine manufactures, no?)
Anyhoo - apparently the method of the "chicken cannon" uses anything from a quail to a small turkey. They bird is stuck in a ball-like styrofoam shell, and when the entire apparatus leaves the cannon, the shell disintegrates, and the dead bird flies toward the intake of a full-power jet engine at maybe 3-500 mph.
The thing is, though - unless you have some REALLY big birds, they (dethawed) don't do any damage to the engine at all. The highspeed photograph would show in one frame the chicken flying toward the blades, and the next frame the head is chopped off, and the next part of the neck, one after the tip of the chest, etc. Apparently the blades are going so fast that the chicken's inertia alone will let it "float" while being chopped up and spit out through the back.
The humorous part is when they lent the chicken-cannon to france rail companies to test their high-speed trains. Apparently when the french set up the cannon and fired the small turkey toward the front-windshield, giddy with anticipation of everything going well, the bird went through the widshield, punched a hole in the dummy sitting in the operator's seat, went through the wall behind the dummy operator, and landed about halfway down the train car after causing quite some havoc within it. Everyone was scratching there heads with jaws to the ground (obviously you would not want to drive this thing if it will leave you a turkey-sized entry+exit-wound). Eventually it turned out that it was because they only (!) thawed the bird for 6 hours or something... When they did it with a proper bird it damaged the wind(bird)shield but the driver remained intact.
moral of the story? you can hear some interesting stuff from aerospace industry engineers.
My life in the land of the rising sun.