I'm Going to Hell

I let my 5-year-old take severed chicken feet to school for show-and-tell.

Don't look at me. She practically begged to be allowed to take them. She wanted to play with them and keep them forever, but as we all know, nothing is forever. And on their way to "not forever," some things get very smelly.

Peaches washed them and I put them into a ziploc, which I then ironed shut. I was afraid of her dragging them out in front of everyone and having a zillion 5-year-olds get some exotic gross disease from handling chicken feet.

There were four feet total, from two different birds. It was easy to tell, because one set of feet was the color of pig skin, a sort of very delicate peachy-pink. The others were waxier looking and bright yellow. The pink ones belonged to the buff orpingtons, who, like most natural redheads, had very pale skin. The yellow ones belonged to a silver-laced wyandotte. The bright yellow feet makes a nice contrast with the black and white of the body.

Chicken feet are a lot bigger than you'd expect. The "foot" extends from the hock (the part where the drumstick ends) down, and on these 11-week-old chickens was about four inches, ending at a foot that had a good 4-inch span, each foot ending in a nail that looked as though it could do some damage. The Pirate and I own a pair of champagne flutes that have as their stems pewter dragon claws holding sapphire glass flutes. The model for those dragon claws was transparently a chicken.

The skin of chicken feet is also a lot softer than you'd think. It feels like the skin of your knee or elbow. So, not particularly soft, but not exactly alien and scaly (if your knees or elbows are alien and scaly, I'd suggest Corn Husker's lotion). If you hold the feet by the shank (the long, skinny part) and flap it around, the fingers flap wildly. You can use them as little puppet hands.

I would think that the fascination with the feet would be a pretty obvious thing to anyone who hasn't ever been around the chicken butchery process. My own mother says that she used to play with the feet and the windpipe all the time. But I also know that there are a lot of people who just won't see it that way, and who will be upset by it.

Come the apocalypse, I'm not letting any of them into my bunker, though.

Killing Time

Yesterday, I killed the first of the roosters. It took me a while to get up the gumption, because doing any task for the first time seems to require an amount of gumption that is substantially more than my usual reserve.

I fastened the killing cones to the saw horse with no problem. Once that was done, I realized that the ends of the cones were a lot closer to the ground than I was hoping, and I had no idea how far through the chickens' heads were going to stick.

I put the sawhorse near the kitchen door, went inside and sharpened a boning knife and a cleaver. I took the boning knife outside along with a plastic bucket about the size of a coffee can. Once I had everything together, I went to go get a chicken.

I knew which one I wanted. I had already decided to do the largest of the barred rock roosters first. He's the biggest rooster we have, but nondescript other than that. I had made a leg crook out of a thick piece of wire and a 3-foot length of stick. The leg crook is for catching the chickens. You reach out and hook it around the chicken's leg, theoretically, so that you don't actually have to chase down and pin the chicken, which can be pretty difficult.

I went into the chicken yard with the thing, and they all ran away from me. It wouldn't have mattered what I was carrying. My entire body could be covered in cracked corn and they'd run because they're chickens, who are programmed to do that. Then I started trying to hook their legs with the stick, and once the barred rock realized he was for it, he started getting silly, sticking his head into the holes in the chicken wire trying to get out, but making himself an easier target. I wasn't ever able to get the hook around his leg, but it was easy just to reach down and pick him up. I carried him upside-down by his feet, up around the back of the house and onto the deck near the back door.

His body was hanging down, but his head on its long, flexible neck was pointed up at me, regarding me with exactly the same expression that all chickens have all the time. The absence of lips or eyebrows removes a lot of emotional cues, as it were. He wasn't struggling, he wasn't clucking even. He seemed calm and a little removed from what was happening. I've heard that holding chickens upside down makes them dizzy, but if he was dizzy he wasn't disturbed by the feeling. It at least makes them very docile.

I put him into the cone. If he'd wanted to, he could have stretched his head down and touched the ground with his beak. I was worried because it made seeing what I was doing a little more difficult. Nonetheless, I took the knife and grabbed his head. He put up no resistance at all. I ran my fingers over the area behind his beak and just below his ear, looking for a pulse that would indicate an artery, but my own heart was pounding, competing with his tiny flutter. I finally found it and mentally marked the place, but as I put the knife to his throat, I realized that no knife in the world was going to be sharp enough to do that movie thing of just running it horizontally across the skin and slitting the throat. Not without slashing open his windpipe, which I particularly wanted to avoid. I had to actually poke the knife through the skin to cut the vein. I expected some kind of spatter of blood, like a movie, but there wasn't that. What I got was first a few drops, then a slow trickle of blood thicker and more viscous than pancake syrup. It looked sticky, and there was hardly any of it. As the knife poked into the chicken's neck he had quarked a little, but was quiet now. I did the other side, just to be sure.

The blood was coming out, but so slowly that it seemed like he would take hours to die. Given how thick and adverse to flowing the blood was, it seemed like he could very well heal up and go on to lead a long life if I let him. I was saying prayers and talking to him, telling him that I knew that his sacrifice would mean that he could be reborn as a higher being, more capable of enlightenment, and then I stopped talking to him because the reality was that I was only talking to myself and it sounded dumb.

I stood there contemplating the chicken, who was now head-down in a white plastic bucket that had perhaps a quarter-cup of thick, bright-red blood in it, and realized that I couldn't cut the neck anymore without risking cutting the windpipe, and besides, it would have bothered him. I went inside and referred to one of my many books, which said that the next-best thing to do is to put a broom handle on the chicken's neck and pull the feet up, breaking the neck.

I pulled the chicken out of the cone by the feet and picked up a heavy iron rod. I put his head down on the ground, lay the rod across his neck, and gave a yank. I didn't realize that, since I had already cut through most of the skin of his neck, there was precious little holding his head on. That precious little wasn't enough, and his head just snapped off, and it was only then that he started registering something like a vigorous objection. His wings flapped and his feet kicked in my hands. I stuffed him back into the killing cone and left him there to convulse and bleed into the plastic bucket.

Given my initial fear that bleeding him out peacefully was going to take a very long time, having pulled off his head entirely still left him twitching for a good five minutes, which, when you're watching something awful, is a very long time. In retrospect, the good thing about the way I eventually did it was that I was certain that he was dead, whereas if I'd left him to bleed quietly to death, he would have been unlikely to convulse and I'd have no way of knowing he was dead until he started to go too cold for plucking.

I had brought out twine and a plastic bag and once the feet stopped kicking I looped the twine around them and then around the porch railing. I picked up the head and put it in the plastic bag and started pulling feathers. The body was still warm and the feathers pulled out easily. This part was as easy as doing the last ones.

I had brought it inside to finish the process. It's cold out, and the bird was getting hard to pluck out there. It was mostly done, and I did a much better job of getting all the feathers off this time. Wearing vinyl gloves helped, as did the fact that more of the feathers were mature and therefore easier to remove. The bird was still kind of skinny in the breast, but not terribly so.

Peaches and the Pirate came home from the airport as I was finishing up the plucking, and Peaches helped by scooping out the internal organs. She didn't object at all, in fact, she wanted to do it. She looked at the viscera after it was all out and identified different parts of it. She wants to be a vet and is taking all things animal very seriously. After I'd cut off the feet, we laughed as I played with them like little puppet feet. They look suspiciously like Yoda's hands, only with longer fingers and skinnier arms.

I thought about taking pictures, but decided against it, and not because I was afraid of offending my friends' delicate sensibilities. It came down to this: it just seemed disrespectful. I raised this chicken to feed myself and my family. I knew from the moment it arrived at my house that it was destined for this, and it seemed insensitive to the nature of its sacrifice to objectify it like that. I didn't want to put its final suffering on display for the amusement of my friends.

If you'd like to come on a day when we do another few (and I'll be better at it then) you're welcome to. But you won't be seeing any pictures of the process here.

What I Did Over My Xmas Vacation (All 2 Hours)

We put in a new chicken yard. It's 2-3 times bigger than the other one, and on the other side of the henhouse. It's also got a lot smaller poultry netting (that's farmer talk for "chicken wire"). It's the yard we're going to let the new babies into come spring.


For now, here's Cargill, keeping watch on top of the water cooler. Not that he's a particularly effective watcher. This morning I was working from home. I could hear a Stellar'sjay screaming outside. Now, as we all know, Stellar's jays are the playground tattletale of the bird world. If you didn't know, you do now. I went outside to see what wild feather this particular jay had going on. It was one of the wyandotte roosters outside the yard, strutting around. After ten minutes of chasing it around trying to catch it (and being hampered by the new chicken yard), I finally got smart. I put all the other chickens back into the henhouse, opened the gate to the yard and just stood there while he strutted himself right back in.

After all, he's just a chicken.


And here he is, back with his cronies.


And here is their view. Over the holidays, it's been exciting. At one point, the creek was up over the gabion wall and lapping at the edge of the yard. The chickens couldn't have cared less, but the people in the house were freaking.


Take a careful look. The first culling of the chickens is slated for this weekend. The first will be the largest barred rock rooster. After this weekend, this yard is going to look a lot emptier.