OM in the News: The (Gentler) Chicken-Killing Assembly Line

I was 7 years old when my Dad proudly took me to the Dubuque (Iowa) Packing Co. to show me what he did as a supervisor in the cow butchering department.  I won’t go into graphic detail as to how the animals were queued up to have their throats slit.  They were stunned first to make the process as pain free as possible.

Maybe you can see why yesterday’s New York Times (Oct.22,2010) front page headline, “New Way to Help Chickens Cross to the Other Side”, caught  my attention. It turns out that chicken producers, egged on by animal rights groups, are also switching to a system of killing their birds more humanely. The new process uses gas to render the chickens unconscious before they are hung by their feet to have their throats slit.

“When you grab a chicken, turn it upside down and put it on the line, its stress, stress, stress”, says one chicken producer.  The new system is not only meant to be kinder to the animals, but to plant workers as well. Dealing with struggling, flapping chickens–like dealing with bellowing cows who sense impending doom– makes meat processing plant jobs among the worst in the country.

This topic can fit in your OM course in 3 ways: (1) students have strong opinions about the issue of  how we slaughter animals (see the Ethical Dilemma box on pig production in Ch.7, Process Strategy); (2) when you discuss job satisfaction/motivation in Ch.10, it makes the point that not all jobs are easy to staff/manage; and (3) this is a classic case of an assembly  line, in Ch.9’s photo, at the end of the chapter.

Discussion questions:

1. Does killing chickens this way make you more comfortable with the  production process?

2. How are most chickens raised in preparation for slaughter?

3. Will it be easier to market a chicken as “killed stress-free”?