Chicken dinner

Checking out the competition, July 2018

It's time.  It's been four months since Cookie hatched her first batch of chicks.  They're bigger than every other bird in the flock and eat more too;  they're also all cockerels.

I'm not going to lie, killing an animal is hard.  It's really hard.  The first one I properly did myself, the Australorp hen with the terrible prolapse, I afterwards had to sit down for a few minutes in order to stop shaking.  And killing her wasn't optional for me--to leave her alone would cause an already dying bird additional pain and suffering.

Killing for food is even harder.  Even though we had decided these cockerels would be food even before they were hatched.  Even though we deliberately did not name them or treat them as anything other than livestock--definitely not pets.  Even though they have long since stopped being cute fluffy chicks are have become annoying, aggressive young adults and are (still) viciously fighting each other.

I did it though.  I (with the son's assistance) have killed and plucked (and eaten, with the husband's help) the first two of four. We've given them a good life, and I gave them a quick, painless death.  And believe me, it was hard.  I find it difficult to turn off my empathy (I feel sorry for stepping on bugs or pulling out weeds, even!) but I know that something dies for every meal I eat, whether animal, plant, fungus...you get the picture.

And we've eaten every bit that we can from these chickens;  after three meals off the first bird, I made stock with the remaining carcass and then carefully stripped off every little bit of meat and skin to make a chicken pie later on.  We show respect by eating every edible bit (even the feet and giblets have gone to make stock).  The intestines, gallbladders, and heads we buried in the garden, as we bury all our chickens--the grave just slightly smaller, that's all.

Taking responsibility for my own food is important, more important than my precious feelings.  Those supermarket chickens I might have bought instead didn't get a life of sunshine, grass, and bugs--they got six weeks in a barn and their first glimpse of the outdoors was from a caged ride to the slaughterhouse.

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The husband is angling to leave one for breeding purposes;  I may concede, as they have been a fast-growing bird and could hopefully be a reliable source of meat.  To get four meals plus a big pot of stock off a four month old cockerel is pretty amazing--the last cockerel we ate gave us just one little meal, and he was six months old.  But we don't have a hen of their type/size (Australorp/Orpington), the only downside to that plan...