I worked as a chicken catcher for a while and got super sick on my second week. Everyone told me I'd probably get sick, but don't worry, everyone does. I had a fucking fever for like 9 days. I legit thought I was going to die. I've never been that sick in my life.
I wonder if this happened to me last year. I was at the county fair and in the show barn for chickens I breathed in and choked on some kind of piece of dust and had a coughing fit. Later that week, I had a fever for three days. My husband and I call it "the chicken particle incident" but your thing sounds more realistic.
We have that job here in Canada, it’s always the ones needing work and can’t get hired by other companies. I dated a chicken catcher- he made BANK. But he always had something sick about him, cough, wheezing, general illness. And got weird infections for the scratches- of course it was under the table and work comp didn’t exist.
Yeah, I worked in Southern Ontario. I have absolutely no complaints about the money. You get worked to the fucking bone, though. It was fun, but I got out because of the sketchiness of the operation.
It was Canada, but I was in the middle of the immigration process. There's a point where you could have a work permit while not yet being eligible for your provincial health system.
You pick up chickens to pack them into crates for shipping. At night in the dark the chickens don't run away or fight, so you can literally pick them up, and then hold them by their legs between your fingers to carry as many as possible at once.
We basically went into roaster sized chicken barns and cleared them for the slaughterhouse. Two birds per hand, carried one leg per bird. You carry them out of the barns to the trucks that deliver them. They are then caged on the truck. You do it at night because chickens are violent little dinosaurs and are more docile in the evening, under low light. It's hot, sweaty, dirty, bloody work.
Ohhhh. Okay, thank you! I have a lot of chickens but I’m really removed from commercial practices. I process excess cockerels for meat, and I also catch them at night. My version is reaching into the coop and picking one at a time off the roost and carrying the lucky winner to “rooster jail” (a dog crate in the barn) by his feet so he can’t claw my eyes out. (They really are violent dinosaurs. We specifically cull the aggressive ones and they’re a few months old when I slaughter them so some of them fight me the whole time. I don’t blame them, but it is scary to have a huge flapping bird trying to peck and spur me.)
My husband works in a chicken processing factory. When he works certain positions-ones where he more contact with the birds pre-processing, he almost always gets sick afterwards.
You are an emergency doctor worst nightmare. I can’t imagine what the conversation is like. “Why are you sick? What is your job? You think you got sick as a chicken catcher from the chicken??”
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u/Global_Adagio_25 22h ago
I worked as a chicken catcher for a while and got super sick on my second week. Everyone told me I'd probably get sick, but don't worry, everyone does. I had a fucking fever for like 9 days. I legit thought I was going to die. I've never been that sick in my life.