Slaughter Day

My parents live on 10 acres of land, and a small petting zoo to boot. A skittish donkey, two attention loving dogs, three mischievous cats, five ornery goats, and a coop full of chickens. It is the later that created today’s adventures.

This past summer, in an effort to add to their current flock of hens, my father acquired a batch of chicks, but didn’t sex them. He ended up with several roosters, which are essentially a waste of feed. Our neighbors hate them because they crow constantly and they abuse the poor hens. Apparently a rooster's main goal in life is to be an annoyance to both man and beast alike. My father’s brilliant solution was to raise the roosters to full size, when we could eat them.

Killing the chickens is easy enough, but preparing them to be eaten is not. A chicken must be drained of it’s blood, plucked and properly gutted. As shocking as it may be, that packaged pink material doesn't magically appear in shrink wrap. Having grown up in suburbia, none of my family, had ever carried out this process. Thankfully, my sister bought a book to instruct us in the proper slaughtering techniques. (I apologize to my vegetarian friends, who will be horrified by this whole idea.)

After months of fattening and planning, today was slaughter day. Of course, I was assigned plucking duty, which is seriously the most thankless job. You never realize how many feathers a chicken has until you are asked to removed them all. Four hours and six chickens later, my hands were stiff and sore, and my whole body smelled like wet chicken… There are people who are professional pluckers, and let me just say, those people must have the strongest hands. A good chicken plucker can pluck a chicken clean in a matter of minutes. I think I averaged an hour, and was frequently tempted to simply remove limbs to avoid having to pluck it.(I mean, how much meat is on the wing anyway?)

I almost wish we had pictures of the ordeal. It was freezing cold outside, so we ended up moving inside halfway through. By the end of the day, the slaughtering area was a mess, our kitchen was full of feathers and chicken pieces, our clothes were smelly, and we were all exhausted. All this for a few lousy pieces of meat…

Slaughtering chickens is hard work!