MetaFilter posts tagged with poultry

Cluck. Cluck. (Thwack)

Chrischris — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:20:16 -0800

How to Butcher a Chicken. From killing to plucking to gutting and freezing, Herrick Kimball takes the budding poultry farmer step by step through the process.

Chick Sexing

parudox — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:14:53 -0800

"Over and over he scoops up a chick with his left hand, expels its droppings with a squeeze of his thumb, opens its vent with his fingers, peers through the magnifying lenses attached to his spectacles and determines its sex." It's a dirty job (YT). Sexing chicks early is important so that the cockerels can be separated and culled^ or fed to be broilers^. The obvious differences take weeks to develop, so when the vent sexing method was developed in Japan in the 1920s, professional chicken sexers became sought after. After years of training, they can sex a thousand day-old chicks an hour with 99% accuracy. In many cases the sexer cannot say why he made a particular decision. The method is learned mostly empirically and is not open to introspection, which has made it of considerable interest to philosophers and cognitive scientists. Vent sexing is in decline, however, owing to development of feather sexing (i.e. using breeds with differences in feather length or color). Would you like to learn to sex chicks? There are plenty of resources, such as A Guide to Sexing Chicks (1935). Better yet, The Specialist Chick Sexer is a modern treatment (there is an extract and another poultry essay available). You can sex all fowl, actually. Cognitive scientists, philosophers, and psychologists all like chicken sexing. Biederman (of geon^ fame) and Shiffrar showed (PDF) that novices can be trained to decent accuracy with explicit perceptual clues. There's a discussion of chicken sexing in the defunct PSYCHE-B cognitive science listserv (more useful archive here). Scroll down to see it, particularly Bruce Mangan's post. (There was an earlier post, and the main link is good if you can get access.)

It Takes a Tough Man...Poultry Processing

Miko — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:27:22 -0800

This is Our Slaughterhouse "I never thought of making a documentary. It took a friend to convince me that not everyone grew up working in a slaughterhouse. I realized the slaughterhouse I had worked in all those years was bizarrely entertaining enough that it might make an interesting documentary..." 22-minute short film on a small-scale poultry processing plant.

Rare Livestock Breed Conservancy

OmieWise — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:52:32 -0800

The Last Days of the Ark: "We found that in 90 to 95 percent of turkeys produced worldwide, the genetic stock comes from one of three breeding stocks" but there are heritage breeds being preserved throughout the world. American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. Heritage Breeds Conservancy. Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Rare Breeds Canada. Rare Breeds Australia, with by far the best Breed Profile pages. New Zealand Rare Breeds. Desert Heritage Breeds. Rare Steeds. "Eating these breeds may be the best way to save them", so, for shopping. [more inside]

Next up: Remote cockfighting!

nTeleKy — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:25:33 -0800

Poultry Internet!? YES! Though poultry have been known to have high levels of cognition and feeling many of us with busy lifestyles have a hard time fulfilling their needs. And some poor souls can't even be near poultry as a result of allergies. What to do? Why not a cybernetics system allowing for network-enabled remote haptic stimulation and feedback of poultry? Confused? Well, there's "The Office System where user fondles with the doll." and then that hooks up to "The pet (rooster) with pet dress." hopefully recapturing "our sense of togetherness with our animal friends, just like times gone by on the prairie, village, or jungle.". A bit of oddity brought to you by the Singapore Mixed-Reality Lab, who actually do a lot of cool stuff like AR human pacman; and they've got the videos to prove it.

Broccoli, anyone?

NedKoppel — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 07:30:58 -0800

"Use of wood chippers has not been endorsed by the AVMA as an acceptable means of euthanasia for poultry." This story is old (June 2003), but it sure did catch my eye. There but for the grace of Fargo...go the chickens. Broccoli, anyone?

turkey tips

stbalbach — Tue, 25 Nov 2003 19:17:10 -0800

Melinda Lee's Turkey Basics includeing the Ultimate Brine and cooking the turkey upside down so the breast-meat stays juicy. If you are doing the Brine start now. What other last minute Turkey Cooking Tips?

Theeeeeeeo! You got to stop using the zipangededly googly JELL-O mold with the meat! And stop hanging out with the Cockroach!

Stan Chin — Mon, 25 Aug 2003 09:45:58 -0800

It's Lunchtime. You know what that means: Meat. Mmmmmm... I'm salivating like Pavlov's dog just looking at it! What's that? You're in the mood for poultry? So tasty. Bill Cosby from Leonard Part 6 would be proud! (Whoever else has seen that movie gets a free Hat of Meat. I vaguely remember it, but suffice it to say they don't make enough movies where the hero wields raw meat as a weapon against has-been disco queens and her army of gay bodybuilding henchmen.)

monkey-mind — Mon, 08 Jul 2002 07:44:02 -0800

Perdue to become the next Intel? According to today's Washington Post, researches at the University of Delaware have filed a patent to improve microchip performance by replacing silicon with a compound made from chicken feathers. Test show that chicken feather chips are twice as fast as silicon chips. If this works, be on the lookout for chicken farm IPOs.

tsarfan — Thu, 29 Nov 2001 11:55:54 -0800

Did anyone actually make Turducken last week? I figure since you have to de-bone everything, if I start now I might be ready by Christmas. But will it be worth it?