AR-News: (US MA) The chicken hangers

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

President Bush has proposed an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that 
could provide broad new rights to millions of undocumented workers. But how 
are they faring now? A look at how immigrant workers from Mexico are changing 
the face of the poultry industry in the South. 

Written and photographed by Russell Cobb / Laurel, Mississippi
Published Monday, February 2, 2004






A tractor trailer packed with broiler hens on the way to a chicken processing 
plant, which is a common sight on a Mississippi highway.



Chicken processing is a dirty business, but no job in a poultry plant is more 
dreaded than “live hang.” Here, workers known as “chicken hangers” grab 
birds by their feet and sling them on to fast-moving metal hooks. This is the 
first — and dirtiest — stage of poultry processing. The birds, weighing 
approximately five pounds each, fight back by pecking, biting, and scratching the 
hangers, who wear plastic cones around their forearms to shield off chicken 
attacks. Then, as workers finally hoist the birds onto the hooks, the chickens 
urinate and defecate out of desperation, often hitting the workers below. 

The next stage — the “kill room” — may be bloodier, but most of the work 
there is done by laser-sharpened buzz-saws; only rarely does a chicken slip past 
the saw with its throat intact. Although no one has figured out how to 
sanitize the nasty job of hanging chickens, poultry managers pride themselves on the 
efficiency of their plants. One plant manager in Laurel, Mississippi, 
described his plant to me as “an automobile factory in reverse: They put cars 
together, we take chickens apart.” 



full story:

http://inthefray.com/html/article.php?sid=208&mode=thread&order=0



"The world is a dangerous place,
not because of those who do evil,
but because of those who look on and do nothing.",
Albert Einstein

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