Meat + Poultry - September 2005 - 45

Grandin says that when there is not an urgent
need for new technology, support is often
hard to find.
(Photo by Kevin Molony)

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September 2005

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system sprouted when a consortium of animal welfare
interest groups known as the
Council for Livestock Protection joined forces to push for a
kinder, gentler way for the Kosher slaughter of calves. The
group was made up of interest
groups, led by the American
Humane Society, which would
not likely invest in furthering
the cause of meat processing companies. "You have to
remember, this was the 70s
and things weren't quite as
radical as they are now," says
Grandin.
The group was willing
to pony up seed money for
the development of a better way of handling calves in the
slaughtering process, specifically for
kosher slaughter. The C.L.P. gave a
$60,000 grant to the Univ. of Connecticut to conduct research for the
development of a different way of
holding the animals. While researchers were conducting patent searches
for any existing technology, Grandin
says a shop worker at the university
suggested a simple first step toward
improvement, which was to place
two pipes underneath the animals so
that they would straddle it. "They
tried that and discovered it was a real
nice, low-stress way to handle the
animals." The only problem was, as
Grandin would later discover, the bars
were too low, an issue that she would
later refine.
Two of the leads on the project, Walter Giger and Ralph Prince then went
on to build a plywood prototype of a
conveyor system for calves and sheep,
but it wasn't something animals would
always willingly hop on and ride. They
determined it was a good low-stress
method for holding an animal. "This
was still light years away from something that would work in a real plant,"
says Grandin. Giger and Prince published information on their prototype
in 1977 in an engineering journal.
The prototype eventually ended up
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in a trash pile in one of the universityowned barns. "I saw it there and saved
it at the last minute," she says. Grandin
turned trash into treasure, tweaking the
prototype and inventing an entrance
that didn't cause animals to balk before
walking into and riding the conveyor.
Now that the technology had gone
from conception to a prototype, the
next step was to take the technology to a plant. Part of taking that next
step also involved accessing more
seed money. "The consortium put up
another $100,000 in grant money so
we could take that plywood thing and
turn it into a real system. It was up to
me to make it work," Grandin says. At
the time, the crude prototype had no
shackle system or any type of entrance.
It was also not designed for different
sizes of animals.
Armed with another grant, she took
some drawings, a mind-full of visions
and the plywood restrainer to a nearby
shop, Clayton H. Landis Co., Inc.,
Souderton, Pa., in hopes of making a
metal version of the wooden prototype.
"We hauled it over to Clayton's and
we used it to get the exact dimensions
to build the conveyor that the animal
rides. We built it and put it into Utica
Veal." The job was far from over as
Grandin then had to design an entrance
that worked, which was accomplished
by making the leg-spreader bars high,
almost to the belly of the animal. She
also had to engineer adjustable sides on
the conveyor, to accommodate various
size animals without pressing on their
leg joints. "I figured out a clever way to
do that, got it in to Utica Veal and got
the thing to work."
Once Grandin saw that the system
was working on veal she immediately
began thinking how it might work on
large cattle. "I was stunning calves
on it and was thinking, 'Oh, man this
would be the most fantastic thing if we
had this for big cattle, that would be
just absolutely fantastic.'"
That was the next step, which again
required an investor willing to pony up
a big chunk of money for technology
that wouldn't be addressing any imme-
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Meat + Poultry - September 2005

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