Gruesome. From To Fight Avian Flu, Dutch Farmer Takes Unusual Skills to Asia:
As a 5-year-old on his family’s farm in the Netherlands, Harm Kiezebrink wondered why his father instructed him to drown newly hatched male chicks in a large plastic drum inside the hatchery.The answer: male chicks are slaughtered because they won’t be able to lay eggs and because they will be too scrawny for meat.
Mr. Kiezebrink grew up to become an expert in this unusual field. Today, his family company sells killed chicks to zoos and falconers. And it has developed technology for efficiently killing birds.
Now he is also taking his skills to some places that need them urgently: Asian nations fighting bird flu. He has brought them some of his bird-slaughtering machines, such as the AED-100, which kills about 10,000 birds per hour, catching them by the feet and dragging their heads through an electrified pool of water.