A method and device as described above are known from NL-A-9301238, which describes the removal of bone from meat of a complete poultry leg. In this case, the area around the tarsal joint is clamped, and an incision is made around the drumstick in the vicinity of the tarsal joint in such a manner that the bone is reached. In a subsequent operation, the meat on the drumstick is pulled apart or stripped off the drumstick bone with the aid of a stripper mechanism. After a drumstick tendon has been severed in the vicinity of the knee joint, the meat is stripped off further in the vicinity of the knee joint, after which a thigh tendon is severed in the vicinity of the knee joint. Then, the thigh meat is stripped off the thigh bone and separated from the leg.
The known operation of removing bone from meat of an entire poultry leg takes place in a bone-removal device having a number of processing stations, in each of which at least one of the separate operations is carried out on the leg. The legs are supplied resting freely on a conveyor to a table and are hung in a clamping-head mechanism by an operator. The clamping head can move over the table, the latter subsequently being displaced between the various processing stations located above the table. During the processing in each processing station, the clamping head is stationary and cutting and meat-stripping tools are moved towards and away from the leg. The resultant meat which has been separated from the bone is discharged using a second conveyor.
One drawback of the known bone removal is that the operations provided for this purpose take place in an independent bone-removal device to which loose legs have to be supplied in an arbitrary orientation. Since the legs, prior to the bone removal, are generally situated in a conveyor of a slaughter line which is also used in earlier operations, such as halving the body of the bird and separating the legs from the body of the bird, transferring the legs from this conveyor to the conveyor of the bone-removal device requires certain logistic features, and hanging the legs in the clamping-head mechanisms of the bone-removal device requires the use of at least one operator, which facts increase costs and reduce the reliability of the bone-removal process.