Chicken Vacuum

Someone asked me about the video for the E-Z Catch Chicken Harvester, so I'm posting a link to the movie.

The original page (on the manufacturer's website) used to have a movie of the machine in action, but they took it down shortly after it got linked to by BoingBoing.net. I figure there are two possible reasons they took it down: 1) their sysadmin noticed that serving movies to hundreds of thousands of people uses a lot of bandwidth, or 2) they got sick of people calling them about their "cruel" machine, and decided it was bad PR to leave the movie on the site (it looks menacing in a photo, but you can't really appreciate this thing without seeing it in action).

Further reading about the product reveals that it's actually quite humane - the other method of gathering chickens is to just go around and grab them by the neck, which causes bruising and more pain than being vacuumed up. KFC encourages its suppliers to use chicken  harvesting machines.

Today, for the first time, I had to consider the question: "If I had to be forcibly moved, would I rather be grabbed by the neck by a 4,000 pound being (20x my current weight), or vacuumed up by said being?" I pick the vacuum.