One of the most interesting jobs I ever had / did.
I was still in high school and a friend asked me.
"Do you want to go catch chickens with us?"
Yes, the big 18 wheelers you've seen hauling chickens to the processing plant are stacked with crates filled by catching the chickens by hand.
No. 1 the crew gets there after dark. The birds are calm. If they get upset they will get in big heap and ones on the bottom will smother.
To keep the birds in the dark, the white bulbs are replaced by red bulbs. That is because the birds are color blind. With red bulbs in the sockets they see very little.
As a catcher, the job is to reach into a group of the birds and grab three or four by the legs. Then carry them out of the chicken house, a long low roofed barn holding hundreds (a few thousand) birds. Then put the birds in the crates out by the truck.
If you are at the truck, the job is to close the crates after the right number of birds are in it and stack it on the truck.
We caught all the birds in a laying house, large hens and roosters, the hens had been laying eggs for some time. I heard they were sent to the "soup line" :)
It was exciting, but dusty, the birds would squawk and cluck as they were carried upside down to the crates. Sometimes they would flap their wings a bit.
It was good work, especially for a teenager looking to put a bit of gas money for the weekend in his pocket.
There was an older fellow with a colorful nickname that led our crew, "Coon" Cummings was his name, a fine man to work for, God rest his soul.
4 comments:
You described this so well I was able to picture it in my head. :)
Interesting post. My dad used to keep chickens when I was young and there was quite an art to catching one.
Oh yikes! I don't know if I could ever do a job like that, just knowing what was gonna happen to the poor chickens :( I'd feel so bad lol.
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Wow! Definitely not a job I'd want to do!
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