Another slaughter day

Today we decided to slaughter the remaining nine birds from the elder flock to make room for the new hens in the coop.  It has gotten urgent, since the smaller coop is far too tight for 12 mature hens (at least by our standards), and the old flock has been slowly reducing its egg output.  We were down to about three eggs per day, and falling.  The time had come.

Last weekend, we killed one bird as a test.  We built the killing cone, stuck her in head first, slit her throat, poked her brain, and snap - like a switch - she was elsewhere and we had a chicken to pluck.  The feathers sloughed off like a jacket and the bird was eviscerated and in the pot before the bread was out of the oven.  Simple.

Today, not so simple.  First, slaughtering nine birds is not just nine times more work than one.  You need an assembly line and a system, which we had.  We put all nine birds in a box, and planned to kill them all, then I'd pluck them as S. eviscerated and packed for them in the freezer.  This was a good system, but more involved than the solitary reverence we bestowed on our first kill.

Second, during the kill, for some reason I could not severe the spinal cord on a single bird.  What had been so simple a week ago turned out to be devilishly tricky this time around.  Maybe it was the pressure of so many birds, or maybe it was over-confidence from last week, but it made the slaughter take a lot longer.  The birds still bled out and did not suffer, but the key to an easy pluck is to sever that brain stem.  After three hours shelling reluctant feathers from nine birds, lesson learned.

Still, in a bit under three hours S. and I killed, plucked, cleaned, and stored nine birds.  We did so humanely, and with little mess.  (Ok, there was a little mess - I took my clothes off right away, threw them in the washing machine, and immediately took a shower).  The goal was to cull the flock, but we took what would have been wasted and put it up for later, for soups and stews this winter.  It would have been easy to skip this step, and, at hour two covered in feather goo, I was temped.  But we stuck it out.

While we did this, I was struck by the work I expect others to do on my behalf.  When I buy chicken from the store, somewhere a worker is doing this dirty job for eight to ten hours per day, everyday, for little pay and less recognition.  It suddenly seems so strange that we should take this necessary but unpleasant task of slaughtering animals for our food, burden one person with the responsibility, and then hide them behind closed doors while we enjoy our meals. (I know, we should all be vegan, but read this or this).

For what it's worth, we took that responsibility ourselves today.  It was a bit unpleasant and we clearly have a lot to learn.  But it was humbling to participate in the death of those birds, and to make room for our new flock to thrive and enjoy their chicken-y existence until their time comes.  I won't relish that time, but I will participate and take responsibility for the life we bring to this farm.

As Joel Salatin says: "Our animals have a good life and one really bad day".

We should all be so lucky.