Warning: Images may be upsetting to some readers
As a fairly frequent meat-eater, I had always hoped to someday try my hand at humanely slaughtering and processing my own chicken. When I started raising egg-laying hens in my backyard in Brooklyn, I considered the possibility that these birds might come to meet the sharpened edge of my knife after their first year of laying. Two years later, sentimental attachment to my backyard flock keeps me from culling them. Fortunately for me, they still all lay almost an egg a day which allows me to justify the dodging of a grisly task.
(Photograph by Alex Brown)
The opportunity to finally take a more hands-on approach to meat eating came when I was notified by the staff at a nearby high school that a Cornish Cross hen was taken onto the premises as a practical joke and left there. No one wanted to handle the matter so eventually I took the bird into my care. Cornish Crosses are a very common commercial hybrid chicken, bred specifically for meat production. They grow to full size in about 6-8 weeks for speedy harvest but with such rapid growth comes many ailments such as organ failure and bone breakage. Chickens of this kind don't typically live very long for this reason.
This hen came from a poultry slaughterhouse in the neighborhood. If any reasonable person had seen the condition she was in, they certainly would think twice before ordering a bucket of cheap fried chicken from a fast food joint. She had mites in her feathers, was grungy and her digestive tract was fairly rancid. I kept her quarantined in a large crate with straw, organic feed and water. I gave her a much-needed bath and brought her crate outside daily for fresh air and sunshine. After a few days of this treatment, she began to look much healthier. Her feathers, comb and wattles all got a little brighter, her eyes more clear, her digestion normalized. A couple extra days of this and she would be a chicken I'd be happy to eat.
I had moments where I wondered if there could be another fate for this critter; I could take her to a shelter where she'd likely be euthanized or she would succumb to a multitude of ailments that her breed often suffers from. I could take her to a farm where she'd likely get picked at badly by other chickens and possibly killed by them. The more I thought about it, the more apparent it became to me that giving her a bit of comfort and then swiftly dispatching her really was the most sensible thing I could do. Besides, I EAT chicken. I should be comfortable killing something if I am going to eat it, right?
Monday was set to be the day. I set her up outside in a shady part of the garden that morning for the last time. I gave her some clover, fresh corn and spent grain for her last meal, which she seemed to enjoy. I sharpened the new #9 Opinel I had bought for the job. Per recommendations given to me by experienced butcher friends, I set up a scalding/defeathering station, a processing station, and fashioned a killing cone from a traffic cone purchased at a nearby hardware store. Once everything was in it's place, I walked over to the cage, opened it and allowed her to come out on her own, which she did with no apprehension. I gently picked her up and caressed her until she fell asleep. Once she was relaxed I inverted her into the cone, stretched out her neck and cut her throat.
(Photograph by Alex Brown)
Killing a chicken was easy but hard. The feeling of her blood spilling over my hands will never leave me. The act of plucking off her feathers, eviscerating her carcass and the moment when a living thing became food, in my hands, right before my eyes, were tremendously profound. A series of a-HA moments, for sure. As a backyard homesteader, I doubt this will be the last chicken that dies by my hand directly, but I do hope that I can give every animal in my care the sort of life it was intended to live before harvesting it's body for nourishment. A life taken is owed some sort of compensation. A life of quality is a small price to pay, I believe.
(Photograph by Alex Brown)
Tonight we are cooking poached chicken with wild thyme and fiddleheads for dinner. With the bones I will be making stock with herbs grown at the farm I work at part-time. This is the moment of truth. I did my best to honor a life while it was lived, and it will likely inform my dietary decision-making for a long time. I don't think I'll eat meat as often as I did before. How is it possible to truly appreciate what another being has sacrificed for us if it is commonplace?
Follow Megan Paska on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bkhomesteader
Like you, I think everybody commenting here is opposed to the abuses of factory farming, including a couple of the REAL farmers commenting here!
When I ate a vegan diet, it was basically to remove my support from factory farming. I've gone back to being an omnivore (or more accurately, to eating an omnivorous diet, since we're all biological omnivores whether we like it or not), but I make sure that my meat, eggs, and dairy are humanely sourced. My abhorence of factory farming remains unchanged.
If the vegans here would simply admit two things - 1) that not all forms of raising animals for food are equally cruel, and 2) that regardless of what you choose to eat or not eat, animals are a necessary part of sustainable agriculture - I would basically have no problem with them. But then, I guess they wouldn't technically be vegans in the strictest sense if they admitted those two tenets; they would just be vegetarians who also choose not to eat eggs or dairy.
Thanks again for that really wonderful comment.
As far as not needing meat goes, if that is a fact, why didn't our ancestors evolve eating grass and shrubs? It is a helluva lot easier to take down a small bush than it was a wooly mammoth or bison. Do you reckon ancient man thought, "hell, it might be fun to try to kill something 1000 times bigger than me with rock spear. I might get squished like a bug in the process, but that meat tastes so good it is worth it"?
Rational people get that there is a difference between animals and people. Ethical people realize they can eat meat, and it can be humanely raised and slaughtered. People with no grasp of reality think you can farm sustainably without animals. None of them actually make their living doing it, but they feel it could be done, and can always post a link to a "credible source" that backs that up, although they have never done it successfully on a scale large enough to feed many people either.
The movement to raise and butcher your own meat is incredibly threatening to vegan radicals, because it will prove once and for all that will not put people off of meat.
It proves once and for all that eating other animals is totally Unnecessary.
Hey grumpy,
AR radical cult member here! Don't you think your tone is a tad offensive to people trying to improve the lives of animals, never mind counter-productive to helping perhaps meaningless animals? I wish you could see the blatant arrogance, ignorance, and justification in your own deeply flawed statement above.
Firstly, to put things in perspective, it doesn't matter if you're a 4 year mentally retarded child or 40 year old genius, fear is fear, pain is pain. They may not be able to express it the same way, but it's real. Secondly, if you use a "perceived" degree of intelligence as a condition to justify/minimize their pain tolerance (perhaps to make it easier to eat), what happens when you apply that sarcasm to pigs?
"Your way" of thinking once opened the door to slavery, even if it's a "stupid" chicken. And we wonder why the world is evil.
In my own opinion, it is the "God" crowd that has caused more harm, war and pestilence throughout history than any farmer could ever do. There is nothing more evil than murdering, raping and subjugating people in the name of a love for some blasted "God." And, GODSWILLFIRST, if you support *just about ANY* organized religion, you are very likely contributing to that, even still.
People eat meat. It is a great thing to see more people raising and butchering their own meat. Slavery has absolutely nothing to do with eating meat, normal people know this.
Our animal brothers and sisters died for us to eat and people treat it like it's nothing.
I hate to see the animals mistreated and abused while they are alive.
It's not right and there is going to be a high price to pay for it.
www.wegmanscruelty.com
Not a defense of the American Omnivore diet, or commercial farming methods, which is way off base, but to exclude animal products entirely- just makes me sad thinking about it.
To be honest, I eat mostly vegetarian. It's not ideological, I just don't like the taste of meat. Eggs and cheese are good.
My daughter tried to become a vegetarian. She was bothered by the stories of cruelty and chose to avoid meat for about a year. Then she noticed that she was having difficulty concentrating in school, didn't have the energy to go out with her friends, and couldn't donate blood because her iron levels were low.
We talked about the issues of animal cruelty at factory farms, and the problem of meeting her dietary requirements in such a busy world (she's taken college courses in biology, human anatomy, and chemistry, so that was pretty easy for her to understand). She decided that the most ethical choice she could make was to only eat animals that we have raised. She still eats cheese and drinks milk from the store, but feels that she has reduced her overall impact to an acceptable level.
Her grades are back up, she isn't getting sick all the time, and she seems happier now that she's made the switch back to eating meat a few times a week.
That's an important question Megan, especially when one becomes aware that life is always sacrificed for other life, no matter what your philosophical, religious, or dietary beliefs or practices are. At the risk of sounding too wishy washy, I can only say that making the effort to reconnect with how food is produced, in a hands on practical sense, is a great way to answer that. Kudos.
Just that chicken alone made 9 meals? You used nothing but the chicken and water?
Because a whole chicken, including the skin, is about 1,400 calories ... max. Meaning, you got about a paltry 155 calories from the chicken for each meal.
So, you got "three meals" from the chicken yourself. Assuming you eat three meals a day, are you saying you get by on 465 calories a day?
Saying that you got "three meals" from this one chicken is extremely disingenuous at best.
And to put this into perspective ... the foods below are the caloric equivalent of a dead chicken body ... and are nutritionally superior.
2 cups dried lentils = 1,400 calories
6 cups cooked brown rice = 1,400 calories
6-7 cups cooked beans = 1,400 calories
14 medium large apples = 1,400 calories
I agree that part of respecting the animal who gave its life for your sustenance is getting as much out of it as possible. It tears me up when people will, say, debone a chicken, or carve a turkey at tableside, eat the meat, and throw the bones in the trash, when one of the most useful, nutritious, and delicious foods you can eat is bone broth, in all its marrowy goodness. If you braise the bones, then crack them and give them a long slow simmer, you can extract just about every possible remaining nutrient from them.
I have a ziploc bag in my freezer right now with the bones of a chicken I cut up the other day; they're going into the crock pot for broth to make a vegetable soup, along with the giblets I saved. For flavor I'm also throwing in the rind of a block of parmigiano reggiano I finished, which would otherwise end up in the trash. There is just no need to waste food!
That one chicken managed to feed me, my boyfriend and my neighbor 3 meals each. That's pretty remarkable. No waste there and we made it stretch. I don't think people should be going around killing chickens willy-nilly (without some sort of instruction beforehand) but I do believe if a person raises a chicken and kills it with their own hands the chances are much greater that they will go out of their way to find methods to use all parts of the animal.
Our concern is the neighbors? Not so much about them thinking "there goes those two hippies next door again," but more along the lines of being respectful living in such tight quarters as big city folks do.
Again, kudos to walking the walk. I know my wife and I joke about what we would do during a zombie apocalypse (too many real world scenarios for global peril so we wrap it up into one nice fictional bundle) and have concluded I could kill the animal, but not gut it; and she could gut the animal but not kill it. We'd survive, but it would take two of us to do what you did alone.
I find a new reason to love that woman every day!
Vegans, your meal caused the death of a few beings as well. Not just in the farming process, but also in the form of pest control both in the field and in storage.
Well then by all means, let's dig into some flesh that we've killed with our own hands.
Remember, if the animal trusts you it just makes it that much tastier.
Whereas the meat from one single cow could be the source of beef for an adult for several years, a single acre of perennial grassland can be home to more than a million creatures, whose habitat is obliterated when it is plowed to make way for rows of the shallow-rooted annuals of plant agriculture. Many of those creatures are every bit as sentient as a cow, and many of them die horrific deaths in the process.
Later in life (the 1980"s) I worked in a slaughterhouse as a security guard. I got to see up close and personal what killing an animal looks, sounds, and smells like. That was enough; as a result of that experience I do not eat meat. I am fairly certain that a lot of other people would come to the same conclusion, had they been subjected to the same experience.
I get that for some people a "one on one" relationship with an animal intended for slaughter is somehow empowering, or even cathartic. I even get that some people believe that the act of hunting is a response to some primal urge. Whatever. I disagree with them.
I most certainly could not kill anything that had its life entrusted to me. There is simply no need...
it to give you pleasure at the expense of it's life.