Sadly, one of our chickens was injured (broke her leg) Wednesday and after examination we felt she would not get any better. This was one of our original (and un-named) Brit-reds. We decided we had to kill her so she wouldn't suffer and that she would probably make a tasty chicken dinner. While I've never actually had to do this I've always felt that I shouldn't be eating meat if I was not willing to actually kill the animal, so we made plans and prepped some hot water for plucking and cleared the counter & sink for the butchering. I still felt sad as I carried her from the coop to kill her and found myself apologizing to her in my head.
We are on a city lot so we don't have any of the set-ups that I've seen other people have who butcher several chickens at once. We simply dug a hole to hold the blood, feathers and guts (approx 2-2 1/2 shovels deep) held her on her back on a stump and slit her throat. We then tied some cord around her feet and dunked her in some hot water. The plucking was super easy-much easier than I expected, but I was very glad for the heat proof/heavy duty glove recommendation I read from other bloggers. I put on my waterproof gardening gloves and they worked great.
We followed this awesome butchering step by step guide which was super easy to follow:
http://butcherachicken.blogspot.com/ I'm very glad we did follow this site as it had this warning:
Please Note: When you cut into the bird’s body cavity, no liquid should come out. If liquid (i.e. yellow-colored water) does come pouring out of the opening, the bird is sick. Throw it away.
Unfortunately that was our bird-full of yellow-y liquid. We took all of the feathers and the carcass and buried it in the hole that we dug. How disappointing to have to kill one of our flock and not even be able to have a yummy chicken dinner-it felt very wasteful.
In the end I'm glad we did it-I would have hated to have her suffer more and we did learn a lot. Have you ever had to butcher a chicken? could you do it? I'm not entirely sure I would want to just because I was hungry which has me thinking about my diet and food choices.
I've been considering and looking into eating a more vegetarian diet for a lot of reasons lately, the big ones are:
- Cost of ethically raised/slaughtered meat is beyond my income level for more than 1 to 2 meals per week
- Environmental cost of commercial meat farming is too high
- I do not want to support commercial meat farming practices-the conditions the animals are raised in are terrible
- I do not want to support the practices or conditions of commercial slaughterhouses
It seems when I look at this list that there's really no question I should be being much pickier about the meat that I'm willing to eat and purchase. This doesn't mean there won't be a nice chicken dinner on my table in the future though
