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Areas of Routine Violations (cont'd)
B. Catching, Carrying, Loading and Unloading of Birds
The vast majority of poultry in Canada are hand-caught in the production shed, manually carried, and
manually loaded and unloaded at the slaughterhouse. Hand catching involves a standard crew of
seven to eight unskilled workers catching approximately 7,000 birds an hour. (Shane, 2002, p. 44).
Young men are most often used which frequently leads to rough-housing, aggressive chasing, grabbing
and punching of birds attempting to escape (footage available, taken by report-writer, 2007 and 2008).
These crews are paid not by the hour but by the number of birds loaded, pressuring the young men to
work faster, thus compromising the care of birds.
Birds are grabbed and held upside down by one leg. Workers grab two birds per-hand with turkeys,
and up to four or five per-hand with chickens. "In a study conducted to examine the effects of catching
methods, researchers found that lifting birds up by one leg resulted in about three times more fractured
bones than catching by two legs" (Rosales, 1994:205).
Birds are frequently injured during the process. Injuries sustained include fractures to the legs and
pelvis, hip dislocation, tendon damage, ligament trauma, hemorrhaging, detached femurs, ruptured
livers, crushed heads and dislocated necks.
"Hip dislocation occurs as the birds are carried in the broiler sheds and loaded into the
transport crates. Normally the birds are held by one leg as a bunch of birds in each hand. If
one or more birds start flapping they twist at the hip, the femur detaches, and a
subcutaneous haemorrhage is produced which kills the bird. . . . Dead birds that have a
dislocated hip often have blood in the mouth, which has been coughed up from the
respiratory tract. Sometimes this damage is caused by too much haste on the part of the
catchers" (Gregory 1998 cited in Turner, et al., 2003, p. 21).
It must be remembered that nearly all meat poultry in Canada suffer from some degree of degenerative
joint disease because they have been genetically selected for fast growth at the expense of joint and
bone health.
According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's statistics for 2001-2005, of the 580 million broiler
chickens, 32 million egg-laying and breeding hens and 19 million turkeys transported to slaughter each
year, approximately 2,420,000 arrive at the slaughterhouse dead.
One UK study found 51 percent of dead-on-arrival birds died from heart failure: "Presumably the
physiological responses associated with the stress of catching, loading and transporting the birds had
been too much for the cardiovascular system to cope with" (Gregory & Austin, 1992, cited in Turner, et
al., p. 22).
Another study found that of the broiler chickens who were dead-on-arrival at the slaughterhouse, 4.5
percent had dislocated hips (Gregory & Wilkins, 1990, cited in Turner, et al. p. 21).
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