🚀 go-pugleaf

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