This is Mr Rooster.  He won't be getting "the knife" today.  Only the hens are on the cutting table.

Efficient Chicken Processing

Part of my mission here is to acquaint you with the lesser known areas of culture and Thailand lifestyle.   I live in a smaller city in Issan and I'm about one step up from true "out-in-the-sticks" country living.   We have an airport within a reasonable driving distance, we have a Lotus Tesco (here only a couple of years) but, we don't have any fast food franchises nor English cinemas.   Further, we don't have any Beer or Go-go bars.  There may be 50 to 100 foreigners in the surrounding area and on any given day, I might see 1 or 2 around town.   Primarily, I'm in the real Thailand.  I can make a run to the post office, gas up my motorcycle and place an order for lunch at a small restaurant in 10 minutes flat.   As far as I'm concerned, if I can run my life and business without stress, and I can exercise, and sleep when I feel like it; I'm in heaven.  

Out here the Thai economy is sleepy and the average person's time is inexpensive.  Many goods and services are rendered by hand.   One of these offering is the raising and processing of chickens.   I have not been to any local chicken businesses and so I do not know much about the formal chicken business, but I have seen the smaller "mom and pop" chicken hobby/businesses.  One of the more interesting parts (perhaps you may call it morbid) is the slaughter and basic processing of the chicken.

This is a key element to the chicken business.  It has to be done everyday and someone has got to do it.   In the west, larger chicken farms have fancy machines to systematically kill and dismember the chicken.  Here, as you will see, it's done by hand.

I would tend to believe that most chickens are handled this way because chicken farms tend to sell the live chickens.  They don't kill and package the meat as you would see in the west.  They the sell the stock down into smaller groups, closer to the end users because refrigeration is expensive.  From what I have seen, in most cases, the chick goes from the farm to the restaurant vendors hands without ever being refrigerated at all!

So, the slaughtering process is most certainly done by hand in many cases here in Thailand.

Immobilization

The first step is gathering them up and binding their feet.  They also grab the birds from behind and bind  their wings together.  They don't tie anything on the wing, they twist the wings in a circle until the feathers interlock and get hung up on each another.  The birds are not strong enough to pull their wings apart and this renders the bird basically immobile and completely docile.

 

Nothing Like a Good Bloodletting...

Once they are lined up, the next step is harvest off the blood.  The blood is cooked by something that works like a double boiler.  The blood becomes a solid block and that is cut into sections and sold as food to be eaten along with the chicken meat depending on the final dish.

Let me be very clear here.  The chickens are not killed by any means other than (for you CSI fans) "death by exsanguination".

The chickens you see lying on the ground have already been drained.  They don't die immediately.  They are nearly motionless with lazy eyes and they look like they are going to sleep.
The "executioner" has to pull some feathers off the neck to locate the artery.   The chicken seems to "wince" when the cut is made.  Once the fluid is moving it's a smooth operation.   It take a minute or two. 
Occasionally, we need to lance that neck once more to keep the juices flowing.  Oh boy, it's almost dinner time.

Whoa, almost forgot, Time for Plucking

 

The women tend to the do the plucking.  This is fairly low tech with pluck pluck here and pluck pluck there...

(I keep getting these visions of the Thai Traditional 2 hour massages.... I think I'm way over-due for one)
Doesn't this look like just like the rubber chicken toys that we see in the west?   I've never seen a chicken like this before and now I see just where the makers of the rubber chicken got their inspiration.

I didn't ask this guy to hold the chicken like this.  I'm not exactly sure why he did.  Perhaps this is one of the ways they evaluate them for size.
Nothing like a little hot tub action! 

If he is sold, he will be sold intact with head and feet still on the body.  When you first see these cooked birds hanging in a window it's a little shocking at first.   Both chickens and ducks are treated in the same way.  If they are boiled the entire bird will be intact and on display.

By the way, this is the same type of pot and fire that is used to boil water in the preparation of sticky rice.  The pot is aluminum and below is charcoal that is made from wood.

 

  

But Wait, If You Order Right Now You'll also Receive this Free Gift!

But the fun doesn't stop there...  You can feast on the entrails.

 

There are the small intestines, the heart, the gizzard, claws, stomach and a few other things that I've never seen before.

 

It's fun for the whole family.   All the bargain basement price of about $1.50 an entire bird.

 

I didn't try the entrails, but I did have some of the breast and a small spoonful of their freshly harvested white ant larvae as a side dish.

Please note that the pictures you see here are of the poorest of households.  They live in the more remote sections of the country and rely on rice farming, small chick farms, taxis driving, or in some cases fishing for a living.  Some also work for other businesses.  And let's not forget, some live off the money their daughters send home from Bangkok/Pattaya.  Most normal Thai households have more cement areas and ceramic tile.  The people in these pictures have dirt floors below their stilted wooden homes.

I wonder if I'm going to receive hate email from Pamela Anderson???  One could only hope.

Thanks for joining me for this short article.  There are a lot of interesting things to see here in Thailand.  Sometimes it's hard to get out get out of the tourist areas to actually see the real people and experience their view of life.   You just don't know how to value your place in the west until you have seen the basic farmer with simple tools making a living with the ground he stands on.

John Galt