How to Break a Turkey

"Breaking" a hen is the term for holding a hen and bending her into position so that the vent or cloaca is forced open, making it easier for the inseminator to insert the straw and squeeze off a shot of diluted semen.

How to break a turkey hen: Grab a hen by the legs, near her feet. The hens weigh 20-30 pounds and are terrified—beating their wings and struggling in a panic. After all, they have been through this at least once a week before. The hens are very strong and hard to hold. Once you have a good grip, you flop her down chest-first on the edge of the pit with her tail end sticking up. You put your hand over her vent and tail and pull her rump and tail feathers upward. With the hand that's holding the feet, you pull downward—"breaking" the hen so that her rear is straight up and her vent is open.

At the factory farm, baby chicks have the ends of their sensitive beaks cut off before they are dumped on the floor of the shed. They will grow up without their mothers to raise or protect them.

DeWayne sticks his thumb right under the vent and pushes until the end of the oviduct is exposed. Into this, he inserts the straw/tube and pulls the trigger, and a shot of compressed air blows the semen solution from the straw and into the hen's oviduct. Then both men let go and the bird flops away onto the open end of the house floor.

Routinely, methodically, like a machine, the breakers and the inseminator do this over and over, bird by bird, until all birds in the house have run through this gauntlet.

The semen comes from the "tom house," where the males are housed. Here, another man, Harold, extracts the semen bird by bird. He works on a "bench," which has a vacuum pump and a clamp to hold the tom's feet. From the vacuum pump, a hose runs to a "handset," which holds the syringe.

I help Harold for a while. My job is to catch a tom by the legs, hold him upside-down, lift him by the legs, and set him up on the bench on his chest/neck, with his vent sticking up and facing Harold. Harold takes each tom, locks his crossed feet and legs into the clamp, and lifts his leg over the bird's head and neck to hold him. Harold has the handset on his right hand; with his left hand, he squeezes the tom's vent until it opens up and semen oozes forth. Harold holds the sucking end of the glass tube just below the vent and sucks up the few drops of semen. We do this over and over, bird by bird, until the syringe body is to capacity. Each syringe body is already loaded with a couple of cc's of "extender," a watery, bluish fluid that he says has some antibiotics and stuff. Harold takes each full syringe body, puts in a plunger, and then swirls it until the semen and the extender are mixed. As each syringe is filled, I run it over to the hen house and hand it to the inseminator and the crew.

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