andre@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Andre Burgoyne) (05/10/87)
Note: This is being cross-posted to the groups that have recently held animal rights or plant rights ( that was ca.general ) "discussions". Followups to sci.misc only, please ( too bad there is not an eng.misc, since this is really an engineering question ). Anyway, there was an article in the Los Angeles Times last summer about the poultry industry. It described some of the machinery that is used to deal with the live ( but doomed ) chickens. One of the machines is fed live chickens on a moving belt at a rate of three per second. The output of this machine ( described by the Times as a whirling, steaming, slicing mechanical wonder ) is packaged chicken parts, ready for loading on trucks. The mechanics of this seem interesting. We would guess that chickens do not just line up in a nice formation to make the job of the machine easier, so it must have some mechanism to deal with live birds in random configurations. Some of the ways we have thought of don't seem too plausible ( e.g., grab their feet through trap doors in the belt and pull down. This would simplify the problem, since you now only have two states too deal with, but somehow, we doubt it. Others here at Caltech have suggested that the chickens are perhaps killed before they are sorted, for example, by low rotating knives at neck level, but it seems that headless still living chicken bodies would be even more of a pain to sort! The best we could come up with was to steam the live chickens, thus killing them, and, as an elegant side effect, getting rid of the feathers too. But we digress... ) Does anyone out there know how this is actually done? How does this machine work? Why is this technology used on chickens but not beef or pork? -- "Juggling - It's not just a job, it's a way to drop a lot of things on your feet at once" Andre' "5 balls" Burgoyne Tim "almost 5 clubs" Smith andre@citvax.caltech.edu sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim