Chickens, Part II

In the midst of my dream last night, there were chickens. Before the Pirate and I went to bed, we'd been talking about the need to get the nesting boxes done. I'd looked online at some nesting box designs and decided that we were planning something so elaborate that we'd never build it. We scaled back our plans and they'll be done in no time.

In my dream, though, the chicks were beginning to lay pullet eggs. My mother said that the first eggs the hens lay are small and have no yolks. I'm expecting them in March or April, so we'd better get weaving, hadn't we?

Speaking of getting weaving, the next batch of birds has been ordered. My friend Lauren wants a couple of araucanas, and I'd like a few araucana hens. I'd also like more of those beautiful black australorp feathers, so I got a few black australorp cockerels. And then I got a whole dozen (+1) jumbo Cornish crosses, straight run. They're supposed to be the best meat birds there are.

The next batch are due to arrive the first week of April. In the meantime, I have to get out all the tiny baby chick feeders and waterers and give them a good wash, set up half of the coop to accomodate the little dears, and put some new poultry netting in that half of the chicken yard. So, I've got a good weekend's work ahead of me making ready for Chickens, Part II.

Barnyard Redecorating

We've added a few things to the upper chicken yard - made it a little more homey. Now that the weather is getting a little warmer (and only a little) and there's daylight 12 hours a day (almost), it behooves us to make outside as attractive as possible.


The first thing was a trough feeder. For whatever reason, chicken scratch out of a trough is a delicacy, whereas chicken scratch off the ground is nasty. There's a rolling bar on the top of the trough that keeps the chickens from perching on top and pooping in the food.


Yesterday, the waterer was entirely frozen over. I couldn't pry the top off and ended up pouring hot water over it to melt the ice. Today, I took TWO pots of hot water. The chickens gathered around it like yuppies at a Starbucks.


And here's Cargill. Part of our redecorating effort was getting rid of the rooster population. We thought we'd done all of them, but I'm beginning to have my doubts. Look at Cargill - he's got a long mane and big, obvious sickle feathers in his tail. Another feature of roosters is saddle feathers - feathers just in front of the tail feathers that go from the spine, draping down either side near the tail.


Take a look at the tails here - on the brown one in the foreground, the orange-ish feathers near the tail are long and hang down. Saddle feathers. He also has a more developed comb and wattles, more like Cargill.


We should have butchered him with the other roosters, but it was hard to see at the time that he was a rooster. Maybe I just wanted him to be her. Mostly, I wanted to have some araucana hens so that we could have blue eggs, which we are now not going to get until October. I'm bummed about that, but oh well. We'll be eating brown eggs until then, I guess.

In the meantime, I've made a decision. We're keeping him. Because I have obviously failed at chicken sex ed, he gets clemency. His name is Arthur.

Morality for Beautiful Chickens

After the last round of chicken killing, there were various discussions centered around what it meant on a moral and ethical level to kill chickens for food. I must admit, I'm struggling with that myself.

I have been researching the concept of moral disengagement and its prevalence among executioners, terrorists and soldiers. My worry is that in killing my own chickens for food, I'm engaging in the same kind of slippery-slope thinking that devalues life and renders me capable of violence on some sort of larger scale.

At this point, my justifications are something like this: if you had to choose between:

1. living in penury and misery for a very short time and then being killed

or

2. living in comparative luxury and happiness for a slightly longer time and then being killed

which would you choose?

The Pirate brought up the point that there are crucial differences between a person and a chicken, and while I agree, I think that placing relative value on different forms of life is another slippery slope in itself. Then again, as he pointed out, the slippery slope I'm on goes the other way (from "I wouldn't kill a person because it's wrong" to "I will harm no living thing") and leads be to become a Jainist who eats only fruits that have fallen from trees and wearing a mask so I don't breathe in and thereby kill bacteria, etc.

I do believe that humans are on the earth just like other species to interact with the environment. And I also know that humans are disposed by genetics to be omnivores, eating both plants and animals. I guess I still have to ask myself which I think is worse - the moral disengagement that says "I am responsible for the food I eat and I will ensure that my animals are treated respectfully and humanely" and the more complete moral disengagement that says "I don't care where it came from or how it was treated - I want my food to be sanitized and anonymous."

You might consider taking the Peace Test to get a bead on your own moral disengagement. Apparently, it thinks I'm solidly in pacifist territory, which is okay by me.

End of an Era

Today, I had two friends over to learn how to slaughter chickens. My writers' group contains a large number of people with a sort of survivalist streak. All of us have made lists of skills that we need in order to be more self-sufficient. We can sew and cook and clean and all of those really minimal skills, and some people are getting emergency training, etc.

Lauren and Mike dragged themselves out of bed this morning and up into the mountains. First, we watched the chicken video I bought. I skipped right to the end where it showed how to kill, pick and clean the birds. Both Lauren and Mike looked a little down after the video, but nobody hesitated. Peaches caught the roosters and we put them into the cones and we all had a chance to cut their heads off with the hatchet that the Pirate sharpened. Lauren did the last one, and although she did a great job - severed the head in one go - it continued to cluck and thrash much more than the others, spattering everyone with blood. I got the brunt of it because I was holding it at the time.

The plucking was hard for the two first-timers, but it was really difficult the first time I'd done it. The whole five-chicken process took about 2 1/2 hours, as opposed to the nearly four hours that the last four-chicken process took. This time too, I was a little more careful with the eviscerating and saved the giblets. Mike likes to eat them himself, and Lauren's dog will appreciate them.

In all, I was really impressed with how well my friends did. The killing was emotional and hard. The plucking is just a pain in the neck. The cleaning is easily the smelliest job in the world. Afterward, everyone had a shower before being able to feel good again.

So now, it's just Cargill and the girls down in the chicken yard. Frankly, I'm really happy about that. All those roosters were getting very, very noisy.