A coworker had been wooing a preferred young lady for several weeks, but he had not told her much about his work. Finally she agreed to go to dinner and then a movie, and P. was walking on cloud nine. Everything went perfectly up to the time that the bill for dinner was presented. P. retrieved his wallet, opened it wide for all to see, and to his embarrassment out floated several chicken feathers. P. spent the remainder of the evening trying to explain that he caught chickens for a living. I suppose all wasn’t lost since he eventually married the girl and raised a big family, but at least on one occasion he was caught up short for adequate explanation. I know that feeling since I have been trying to explain my involvement in the chicken business for the last 50 years. It started for me during the summertime when I was about 12 years old and ended temporarily when I finished high school, only to reappear 30 years later, not exactly a quick payback for all the earlier work.
I was called into action initially because others didn’t show up to catch his chickens, and Mr. Dennis needed some help. The chickens were out of feed, and the truck designated to carry them to the slaughterhouse was already in position to be loaded. What could he do but ask kids if they wanted to earn some spending money? I was asked, along with others, and 4 or 5 of us accepted. None of us had two nickels to rub together, and there’s nothing quite like being broke to provide motivation to work, even if it meant to catch chickens. That described me, and while I was from an otherwise wholesome, functional family, we didn’t have extra money for me to spend, and anyway it wasn’t such a big deal to catch a few chickens if you’ve been raised on a farm, so my parents said, “go ahead.”
In those days, farmers raised chickens much as their parents had raised them, barnyard style. Instead of buying 200 baby chickens to grow and eat throughout the year, the farmers, mostly the women, now raised them in batches of 3,000 to 6,000 per barn, 3 or 4 times per year. The farmers bought feed for the birds from a nearby feed mill unlike their parents who bought it one sack at a time from the local grocery store’s feed room. The feed was often in sacks and was distributed by hand on a daily basis, and water was provided in concrete troughs placed on the floor. Gas-fired brooders were available to help keep baby chicks warm initially, and they were on pulleys so they could be raised or lowered as needed.
After about 9 weeks confinement in a barn, it was time to carry the chickens to market, and that is where I was called into action. When I accepted the job I didn’t know that we caught the chickens at night. We arrived at the barn about 10:00 PM, and almost immediately someone unscrewed all the lights in the barn and replaced one bulb with a 25 watt blue-bulb. This was sufficient light to make vision almost possible, but only in one small location inside the barn. After a few minutes our night vision improved somewhat so that I ran into something every 15 minutes, rather than constantly, for the remainder of the night. Brooders had short legs and a foot on each, and they were suspended from the roof so that the foot was even with my forehead, an excellent location for self inflicted lobotomy.
Without lights for sight the chickens hunkered down, and to catch them you simply bent and picked them up. A worker showed me how to pick up the chickens by grabbing one leg between your thumb and forefinger, and then he showed me how to swing and twist the chicken so that it draped behind my open hand. That part was easy enough, but he didn’t explain how to avoid the free leg, talons flared, of a frightened chicken. The birds flapped their wings incessantly, squawked loudly and clutched at any object with their free talons, and since my shoulder was available it was what they grasped. After a few times catching chickens, I could always pick out other chicken catchers in a crowd since they often had festering and inflamed scratches the length of their arms. A chicken’s foot was contaminated with everything that was found in the chicken house, and those contaminants were transferred to the open wounds created by the talons. When we had caught a clutch of 4 chickens in each hand, we carried them to the people on the truck or to an intermediary. This meant walking a distance of perhaps 100 feet each direction, a time consuming process.
On the very first night that I caught chickens for Mr. Dennis I learned a valuable lesson. We weren’t very efficient catchers, and near daylight we were still trying to catch the last of his chickens. That is when I discovered why the lights had been turned out. Chickens, on seeing the light at dawn, began to stir and look around, and as we bent to pick them up, they jumped up, ran about 2 steps, and leapt into flight and soared the length of the building. It took about a half-hour to catch the last 100 birds. Modern birds in the poultry industry are too heavy to fly so modern catch and haul workers may work long after sunup, as required, without having to catch birds on the fly.
The chickens were hauled to slaughter in wooden coops, 16 birds per coop. Usually we toted 8 birds per carry to an open window and handed them to a person standing outside the window. The blue bulb had been installed near this open window and this really ignited wing flapping and jerking motions by the birds. After I dropped a few handfuls of them, I soon learned the proper technique involved in the handoff process – not exactly rocket science, but still I didn’t want to drop them if for no other reason than that I didn’t want to get laughed at by other workers. After my initial experience, the people must have noticed something useful that I did since I was soon being asked to work 3 to 5 nights per week.
The work pace in catch and haul operations was furious, but it was not very heavy lifting, compared to working with cucumbers or at a sawmill. We got paid per truckload at the rate of $3.00/truck/person so it was to everyone’s advantage to load as many trucks as possible in the shortest amount of time. For about 3 years, I worked with crews composed of one or two women, two or three teenagers (I was one of the teenagers) and one man. The man usually worked between the house and the truck, and there was another crew of two or three people on the truck. The women were about 5’2” and weighed perhaps 150 lbs each, but they were tough as boot leather. However, their short legs couldn’t keep up the pace that was needed, so the women worked on their knees, caught the chickens, handed them to us, and we carried the birds to the window or truck. Fortunately, the women had more sense than the men and tied handkerchiefs over their noses to prevent constant inhalation of the dust from the litter. One distinct problem, at least for me, of this work was that everyone viewed it as a 2nd job, and their day jobs were fulltime. Consequently all were sleep-deprived and interested in sleeping every available spare moment. Thus, I never got to know much more than a person’s nickname as no one wanted to talk, much less gab with a kid about something.
The women could catch chickens at Mach I speed, so to keep up with their pace we trotted, rather than walked. Some nights we would load 2 or more trucks per night. When we loaded more than 2 trucks, we often worked from shortly after dark until just before sunup, but the pay was great, and to make $12.00 per night was good money in those days. As a bonus, when track season arrived I didn’t need to train much for the ¼ mile dash as I had been in training 3 to 4 nights per week most of the winter. I won most races that I entered, even beating boys who were bigger and faster. All my stamina in the race was undoubtedly directly related to working at a fast trot for hours while carrying about 30 lbs of chickens to those trucks.
Over the years I worked inside and outside of the barns for various types of crews, and I preferred working outside, although the work was a little trickier than inside. Outside, between the barn and the truck one person carried chickens and handed them to a person on the trailer. Then the birds were stuffed the birds into wooden coops through an opening about 1 foot X 1 foot, and this maneuver took skill as the owner couldn’t sell birds with broken legs. They had only the moon and stars as their guiding light sources. On nights when inclement weather factored into the process, this was a very difficult task. The coops weren’t large and once 16 birds were stuffed inside they could not turn around, so they sat quietly for the ride to the processing plant. Each truck could handle 6,000 birds. Another delicate job was stacking the coops so that they didn’t shake loose on the bumpy dirt roads and get dumped into a ditch somewhere along the route to the highway. Even one coop set askance on the others could result in the entire stack being dislodged, and that was never a pretty sight. In the summertime we worried about chickens suffering heat stroke but in the winter we worried about them freezing and solving either problem was always a lot of work, especially if foul weather was present.
The last stage of the operation was to haul the chickens to the abattoir where they would be processed. I did this infrequently because I caught chickens at night during the school year, except for times of the year when I was involved in nighttime sports, such as basketball. Often someone from the catch & haul crew picked me up after school, carried me home to change into work clothes, and drove us (up to 3 hours) to a work site. We caught chickens in a territory that was bordered by Gilmer and Tyler, TX on the south side, Hugo, OK and DeQueen, AR on the north side, DeKalb, TX and Bonham, TX, on the east and west sides, respectfully. We caught chickens until the wee hours of the morning, and I was often dropped off at school with just enough time to run to the gym, shower and change into acceptable clothes for classes. I tried unsuccessfully most nights to sleep in the car to and fro the job site. In spite of this kind of schedule and a lack of sleep, I managed to graduate from high school with grades that were acceptable for entry into college. Considering that cellular repair, cell replication and overall bone growth is maximum when a growing animal sleeps, and minimum when they are awake, was it any wonder that my height did not increase after I was 12?
There were both immediate and longer-term consequences of chicken catching, and I know some of these firsthand. Workers, and I was one of them, tended to cough a lot, sometimes for years afterward. People who worked inside the barns without protective masks have often been diagnosed with multiple respiratory problems, mainly acute and chronic bronchitis. This is not surprising now, but in those days no one thought much about the work environment, but we should have. Chicken litter was composed of dried and wet manure, feathers, insect parts, rat droppings, wood shavings, and dirt and spilled water. These were ideal nutrients and at an ideal temperature for the growth of bacteria, yeast and fungi. If the litter got wet, microbial metabolism released enough ammonia to choke a person. All the materials, including the microbes, were powerful antigenic materials, and some of the microbes were opportunistic pathogens. A second problem was the environmental issue we created. If left untouched, litter in a barn will eventually form compost that can be used for soil amending, but we cleaned the barns after each cycle of chickens and dumped the raw materials on the pastures. Today many of those areas of the US are contaminated with large amounts of minerals that may have potentially harmed the environment, so this practice was discontinued. In modern operations, growers remove the litter about once/year, compost it properly and then sell or use the product. About all that is needed to accomplish the process is to turn the materials once per week.
In 1955 when I started, the US poultry industry generated perhaps 1 billion birds/year, if that. Some pioneers of the industry were at work in those days: John Tyson, Frank Perdue, and Bo Pilgrim and companies founded by them now produce about 80-90 million chickens/week. Remarkably, chicken prices in 1960 were almost identical to those in 2004, and this was accomplished by massive industrialization of the industry. The size of the barns increased from little 2400 ft2 buildings to massive 20,000 ft2ones, and I have seen barns in Thailand that are 3- to 4-fold larger than our largest. An average of about 24,000 birds/cycle, 6 cycles per year are produced in one of our barns. In the formative years of the industry, we caught 9-week-old chickens whose live weights were about 3.5 to 4.0 lbs, but the industry geneticists advanced the growth rate so that a 5.25 lb bird (average of males and females) can now be produced in 6 to 6.5 weeks. While many among us have criticized the industry for many obvious problems, it has remained one of the best examples of how industrialization provided more and better food, at improved prices, for our people.
15 to 20 years ago, chickens were still caught by hand, but the labor-intensive handling of chickens by several people between the catchers and the truck had disappeared. Now a large forklift and stacks of plastic coops that were constructed like large chests of drawers were brought to the work sight. The forklift, known as the chicken hawk, was used to remove the plastic coops in huge stacks per maneuver, and then the operator placed a stack of coops next to the chickens inside the barn. When a catcher pulled a drawer part way open, grabbed two handfuls of chickens, and stuffed them into the coops, they did not walk more than 5 steps. Once full, the chicken hawk was used to carry the chests of drawers and placed them on the truck. Thus, a major portion of what we did in the old days had been mechanized, and today a barn with perhaps 4 truckloads of chickens in it can be loaded in approximately 3 to 4 hours, something that would have taken us all night. All the feeding, watering and mediation processes have also been automated, and birds are now raised in almost quarantined facilities to minimize the need for medications.
In 1989, I was working in a biotechnology company on a project to complete the development of a product for the oil-services industry. For our company, the Director of Research and I had worked diligently to identify other market opportunities for our product, and once he told me that some scientific articles indicated that soybeans contained a substance in them that was similar to the material we degraded for the oil company. He asked me, “Doug, do you know what industries, if any, would use soybeans?” Without hesitation I said, “chickens.” We subsequently developed a slightly different product for the animal feed industry to degrade the material in soybeans. In our tests, animals eating soy-containing feed with our product in it grew faster and used the feed more efficiently than animals that did not receive our product in their feed. We patented various concepts and methods to use the product to maximize growth rates of meat-producing animals. We did this in all meat-producing countries of the world, a winning situation for everyone involved, www.chemgen.com. Thus, a childhood work experience had paid off long after my youth, and occasionally a stock dividend check has arrived in the mail to supplement my retirement income – a very recognizable sign that catching chickens was a useful experience for a kid.
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