Damn - for a sec there, I thought I was going to be the guy who gets to point out the glaringly obvious. Back in the late 1980s, when I was a young lad looking for some pocket money, I was offered a day-job at a chicken farm right near the city, taking chickens from their cages, and loading them into the back of a truck rig. It was a horror of it's very own, and an experience I will remember forever. Pam Anderson VS KFC...WTF 1865David Cole ROFL, that's very funny. :) But you know, pooty animal husbandry practises have cost meat farmers and places like KFC a lot of my money over the years... We'd open up a little cage, grab the bird by it's twisted, useless legs and go to the next cage until we had a couple dangling from each hand. I've seen tv shows and movies about how in Viet Nam, they'd torture prisoners by doing something similar to that. Then you'd take them and throw them in a box quick and jam the lid down so they didn't get away on you. The little buggers all took exception to the abrupt and painful moving, and most showed their displeasure by flapping their wings and squawking the whole way, so you had to grab those gimpy legs damned hard to keep them from slipping out. I'd wager they didn't enjoy that either. When the box was full, they'd slot it in the back of the truck, and we'd start a fresh box. You've probably seen those weird-looking tractor trailers around town that are filled with plastic drawers on each side. That's what we were filling. Took a half-dozen of us hours to load the trucks, and we were hustling - rule one was MOVE! As you would expect, we dropped a few. There were two or three thousand total, I believe. Under these rows of cages was a long concrete ditch to catch and collect the chickenpoo. Any bird that dropped in there watered in the stuff, as it was deep, the birds were coated with poo, and we were told to ignore them and get on with the job (And for Christ's sake, stop dropping them!). Some had their wings broken because they were flapping them when we pulled them out of their cage or were trying to stuff them in a box. Some got away from us at the loading dock, and fell under the truck's tires, to be squashed as the truck slowly pulled away. Or partly squashed. (They couldn't walk out from under the tires - their legs were twisted and useless from never being used - the most they could do was right themselves up mostly, and watch as the tires got closer and closer.) We were told to ignore those ones too. Like the poochickens, these birds were no longer worth selling, or even the effort of jumping down and snapping their necks. If it dropped, it stayed there until we were done loading up and the trucks were out of the way. I will always vividly remember watching a truck pull away, and seeing a bird's pink and tan intestines strewn along by the tires. That sucker lived for probably a good five minutes, if you can call that living. If that sort of crap still goes on, and some girl with big breasts can do something to change it, then I'll accept that that's what it takes and cheer even while I'm paying the extra nickel per bird it'd probably cost to enforce some sort of decency standard. DMen
|
