Domestic chickens

Domestic chickens are the living bodies at the center of Höppner’s evening work on a poultry farm: he catches them by hand, packs them into plastic crates, and helps move those crates toward a truck. The handling is hurried and physical, and the farm’s routine treats the birds as units to be processed. A chicken foot severed during loading makes the cost of that routine briefly visible, only for the shift leader to answer the injury with a joke.

The Farm and Its Work

The poultry farm consists of enormous sheds between villages. Manure from the chickens is spread on the surrounding fields, and the wind carries its smell from one village to another. This landscape makes the animals’ presence impossible to contain within the sheds: their waste and the farm’s odor extend into the everyday world beyond the workplace.

Höppner works there in the evenings twice a week. The job is an ordinary source of income, but its repetitive tasks place him directly inside an industrial process. His work is not abstractly described as farm labor: the account follows him into Hall 9, where he puts on boots and joins a chain of workers responsible for emptying the building before midnight.

Capture and Confinement

A row of plastic crates divides the hall, with the chickens crowded together behind it. The first bird is comparatively easy to catch. The worker grips it by the legs with one hand and pins those legs between two fingers of the other. Each additional chicken makes the task harder. The birds struggle violently; once four hang close together in one hand, however, they can no longer move freely. Catching more with the other hand is difficult because the first hand is already occupied.

The next step is to push the birds into crates with two hinged lids. The lids are pressed shut, converting a handful of struggling animals into a load that can be carried away. Workers have to concentrate: if too many wings are broken while the chickens are being forced inside, the slaughterhouse will complain. The possibility of injury is built into the task’s practical vocabulary, measured not as an interruption of the operation but as a problem that may bring trouble later.

A Production Line of Workers

The work is divided into roles. Some workers stuff the chickens into crates; others carry the crates outside and throw them up onto the trailer, where another worker catches and stacks them. The sequence is compressed into three job names: stuffers, carriers, stackers. Each role advances the birds along a chain from crowded shed to truck, while the deadline of clearing the hall by midnight keeps the process moving.

The division of labor also disperses responsibility. One person catches and confines the birds, another transports the crates, and another stacks them. Yet the physical consequences can emerge at the handoff between tasks, where a crate’s weight and the birds’ position matter as much as any individual worker’s intention.

The Severed Foot

While carrying a crate out of the hall and throwing it onto the trailer, Höppner is struck in the face by something flying toward him. He first thinks it is a lump of dirt stuck to the crate. On the ground he sees a chicken foot: the bird had pushed it through the plastic grid, and the crate had severed it during stacking. The injury appears not as a dramatic interruption but as a small, concrete consequence of packing and handling the animals.

The shift leader dismisses the incident as minor because the foot is lying there. He recalls another chicken leg that hopped into a field, stumbled over a molehill, and flapped about without managing to get up again. His anecdote turns an injury into workplace humor, and the bird’s helpless movement into a punchline. The contrast between the animal’s damaged body and the shift leader’s casual response shows how routine can make violence seem unremarkable.

Narrative Significance

The chickens are not individualized, and the episode does not describe their lives beyond the shed, the crate, and the route toward slaughter. Instead, their treatment is rendered through the precise demands of Höppner’s work: grip, crowd, pack, carry, stack. This limited working perspective gives the production process its material detail without disguising what it does to the animals.

The account also sets bodily vulnerability beside the discipline of employment. The workers must meet a deadline and avoid breakage that would bring complaints, while the birds’ fear and injuries are absorbed into the shift’s ordinary procedures. The severed foot briefly interrupts that efficiency with evidence of harm; the joke that follows closes the interruption down, revealing how easily the production line can continue.