Snatching Victory From the Jaws of Defeat

I let the chickens out of their chicken yard today. You saw it. I took pictures. And then, I went back inside because it's Friday and I was actually working. I had a meeting to attend, so I went back inside and looked over my meeting briefs and dialed in and started interacting with my co-workers.

And then I heard the ruckus.

I know that the other people on the phone heard the gasp. I put them on hold and then ran outside. The chickens were cackling and squawking when I first heard them, but there was nothing now. Nothing except a dog with a chicken in its jaws. He dropped the little body when it heard me coming and ran back up the driveway. I stopped to look at the bird, but it was dead. Running up the driveway after the dog, I passed another dead chicken. I chased the dog to its house (next door), and asked Greg, its owner, to keep it inside until I'd found all my chickens. I told him that the dog had killed at least two, and he said that he was very sorry. He admonished the dog and put him in the house.

Coming back down, I found another dead chicken near the creek, and one in my neighbor's back yard. Further exploring turned up one more dead one near our propane tank. That's five. Five little dead bodies. I counted five live ones inside the coop, and another few underneath. I chased the ones underneath into the yard and closed the gate.

I made another sweep of the neighbor's yard, and went to the neighbor across the creek and found nothing, but coming across the bridge, I saw another one sitting on a wall. She was in shock. She was standing on a wall staring down at the dead ones and didn't move when I went right up to her and picked her up. She quorked a little as I carried her, and once I set her down in her own yard, she perked up and walked in. I turned around and here came another one down the driveway. Two more were hiding in the woodpile. We found Cargill under the deck and coaxed him out with raisins, his favorite treat. When Pirate Guillermo went to shut them up for the night, another one was hanging out under the henhouse. All told, we found five dead and eighteen alive. I don't expect to see the other three alive again, as the nights here are cold and full of predators.

Of the five dead ones, three had been too badly mauled to be worth dressing. Yes, you heard me. The remaining two were dressed. No, I've never actually plucked a chicken before, and I have to say, I didn't do a terribly good job. Part of the problem is that a lot of the feathers hadn't quite come in yet. A lot of them were still downy or so tiny that there wasn't much to get hold of. The hardest part was not, as I had anticipated, cutting off the head. We had plucked them first, and cutting off the head was actually quite simple. The harder part was taking out the guts without messing them up. That was quite tough and took some careful doing.

What we ended up with was two carcasses with some torn skin and a couple of punctures. They're badly plucked, but that's okay because I'm taking the skin off them and making them into sausage with onions and sage and parsley and cranberries.

I'm sad that it happened this way. They should have had a relatively stress-free, painless death, away from the other chickens who were traumatized afterward. They should have died as well as they lived. But I'm happy that I didn't fall apart and that the plan held true. I dressed them as well as I could, and my daughter helped. I'm actually pretty proud of myself.

And for those of you who doubted I would be able to do it, you can't have any sausage. So there.