One time, when I was in YMCA Indian Guides, we took a Thanksgiving field trip to a Turkey Slaughterhouse. The assembly line was turned off, but we saw where they stripped the feathers off of live Turkeys. We saw where they hung the bodies on the conveyor belt to move to the room where they cut them up into portions. I was seven years old.
It was very bizarre. We were all first grade age boys. A group of ten men and fifteen boys tour a Turkey slaughterhouse, having fun. The factory was totally clean, except in the corners of the rooms on the floor were still some small tube like segments about 4 inches long and a half an inch in diameter.
They looked like segments of some kind of organic tube like a trachea, or intestine, or "something." The facility was quiet and empty and clean and the guide enthusiastically described the manufacturing process of turning live turkeys into trays of meat. THEN, we went outside and took photos with the live Turkeys in the pen that escaped the slaughter -- just by luck. They were beautiful white feather birds and it was a cold Chicago weather day.
The thing I remember most vividly was the rotating tube that removed the Turkey feathers. It was about four feet in diameter and the walls were bristling with short wires pointed toward the axis of the cylinder. We were all first grade boys, so we could have easily fit into that tube ourselves. When activated the tube rotated and a high rate of speed. The turkeys were forced into the entrance of the tube and by the time they emerged screaming from the other end the wires had stripped all their feathers off their body. Then, the turkeys were killed and hung by their feet on hooks on the overhead conveyor belt so the blood could drain out. Happy Thanksgiving.
This occurred in 1963 or 1964 at Thanksgiving.
copyright (c) 2019
William Schaeffer
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