Our second time killing & butchering a chicken

Posted by louisa on Monday 19 December 2011 in chickens | 10 comments

(WARNING: I’ve included a couple of in-progress pictures towards the end of this post and I’ve been very careful to pick ones that look little different to a bird you’d find at the supermarket. However, if you’re very sensitive, you might want to skip this article.)

We killed and dressed/butchered a chicken for the first time in 18+ months on Saturday – the first time since we had chickens of our own.

It wasn’t one of ours – our friend John B hatched some Silver Wyandotte eggs last year and they all turned out to be boys so they didn’t fit in well in his egg-laying matriarchy. They were becoming bullies so had to go. He brought one of the big fluffy boys to our house for us as his daughters have a bit of an embargo on him doing it at his house.

We killed our first chickens under his tutelage in April 2010 – just before we got our own girls. Again, they were some boys whose only crime was being boys – oh and forcibly having their way with John’s girl chickens, that was their crime too. We had already accepted that we had to be willing to kill chickens before we could keep them ourselves – for example, what if one was injured and needed putting out of its misery? or, as happened in this most recent case, if hatched eggs turned out to be boys. But as I mentioned in my blog back then, there was also the bigger picture to consider: if we only bought point-of-lay girls, then someone else was having to deal with the equal number of point of lay boys that were being born. (This great article by Throwback at Trapper Creek puts it better than I can.)