PREPARATION OF POULTRY PRODUCTS 



317 



marketed with the feathers on. In general practice with poultry, 

 however, dry picking is done while the bird is dying, when it has 

 lost consciousness and is insensible to pain, but when the relation 

 between nervous and muscular systems still continues. Good work 

 in dry pitking depends first upon the proper sticking of the bird.^ 



Note. When the sticking is well done, the feathers come off quite as easily 

 as with good scalding, but with a poor stick they come harder, and an inexpert 

 picker is likely to break the skin and perhaps tear the birds badly. As in scald 

 picking, the picker works 

 as much as possible with 

 his hands, wetting them 

 at intervals to make the 

 feathers stick to them, 

 removing the feathers in 

 handfuls, rubbing them off 

 and unless pinfeathers are 

 very small, taking them with 

 the others. The pinfeathers 

 and stubs that are not taken 

 in this way must be re- 

 moved one by one. For 

 this (in both methods) the 

 professional picker uses 

 a short knife, either seizing the stub between his thumb and the blade, or 

 shaving it off. Practice, and a certain aptitude for such work, are required to 



Fig. 325. Gang of poultry pickers dressing geese 



^ The principle upon which this process is based is best explained by refer- 

 ence to a phenomenon which every one with a little experience in handling poul- 

 try has had occasion to observe. If in catching a bird one grasps it by the tail, 

 some of the feathers are likely to be pulled out, and if the hold is only on the 

 feathers, the bird will probably escape. If the bird is caught by the thigh, unless 

 the hand quickly closes very tightly on it, a good many feathers may be pulled 

 out just by the action of the closing of the hand on the leg, and by the momentum 

 of the bird. Not infrequently, when caught by the back with so insecure a hold 

 that the person catching it feels that he has hardly more than touched the bird, it 

 loses feathers. Considering how hard these feathers usually are to get out when he 

 wants them removed, the poultry keeper always feels somewhat surprised at the 

 ease with which they come out under these circumstances. There is plainly a 

 direct relation between the mental condition of the bird and the tenacity of the 

 feathers. When the bird is in a state of fright, the feathers loosen, and their 

 loosening may enable the bird to escape. The same effect on the feathers is 

 secured by paralyzing the bird by stunning or by piercing the brain. It is also 

 secured when the bird is killed by dislocating the neck, or by wringing the neck, 

 or by beheading, though in the last two cases the complete severance of the head 

 makes it impossible to direct the flow of blood and begin picking immediately, 

 and so the feathers are relaxed a second time by scalding. 



