Behold the E-Z Catch Chicken Harvester. Once upon a time, chicken farmers had to spend hours running around manually grabbing chickens and stuffing them into coops. So a company called BrightCoop has invented what is essentially a vacuum for chickens — it has rotating circular sweeps, much like the ones you see on street-cleaning machines, that automatically gather up the chickens and hoover them into pens. BrightCoop has a site — which cheerily boasts “LIFE JUST GOT EASIER” — that lays down the technical specs for the E-Z Catch:

Position of rotating drums hydraulically adjustable for: various chicken sizes, distance between drums, speed of rotation of the 11.5” rubber fingers and height for house conditions. Drive wheels on drum assembly are hydraulically driven and steered independent of main power unit.

Rotating drums can be tilted forward or backward, hydraulically, to adjust for litter condition.

To truly fry your noodle, check out the video BrightCoop posted online, in which a worker mows the device straight into a massive herd of chickens and the E-Z Catch sucks them into its maw. I’m no animal-rights freak and eat plenty of meat, but seriously, this thing looks like some sort of freak bastard love-child of The Matrix and Soylent Green. PETA couldn’t have imagineered a more perfect image for the utter creepiness and sociopathy of industrial animal-farming. I have to admit, at first it made me giggle a bit — c’mon, a chicken vacuum? — but after a while it queazed me right the heck out.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)