on Life, Death and Chickens part II

This follows the previous chicken musings found at: http://strawbeaner.blogspot.com/2012/10/on-life-death-and-chickens-part-i.html

So Thanksgiving was the big day; the end of the line for one rooster.

We salute you, who are about to die

No graphic pictures will be displayed here of blood or guts; I'll keep it to familiar pictures of either 100% live or a view you'd easily see in a grocery store to avoid making anybody lose their lunch. But the process is something we had to research extensively beforehand.  To those interested I highly recommend the following in order of usefulness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_S3P0eU0lE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy_vutu5qO0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDtXeMHOMLw

Staring into the end

So this is our poor rooster pre-execution in our makeshift killing cone.  In theory, the guy gets a nick to the jugular and bleeds out.  He's already pretty calm as a result of having a bunch of blood to his head.

Now, a lot of what I had written before had dealt with the suspected emotional reaction I might experience as a result of this slaughter, and what philosophical lessons I might learn, particularly in the question of whether or not it is ethical to kill, in this case, an animal for food.

Perhaps because we had done so much study the night before, or maybe because I was simply in the right mindset, but there was very little emotional kickback from this slaughter.  It wasn't that I felt bad about the process, nor was it that the rooster itself was annoying and mean and killing it was just desserts or at least the solution to a problem.  The slaughter itself was quite clinical. 

But I say this with some reservation on two counts.  I ended up not actually doing the killing part.  Previously, Kyle (some random dude I happen to live with) and I agreed to take on the tasks that we would rather do.  He preferred being the executioner.  I agreed to do the evisceration.  He was supposed to also do the plucking, but it ended up falling mostly to me, no big deal.

The second count was that the slaughter did not go perfectly and neither of us feel great about that particular aspect of the day.  It is somewhat ambiguous as to how much that had a cruel impact to the rooster.  Our number 1 lesson in this experience was that our knives were not sharp enough.  We had sharpened them with great effort, but even when I was preping the carcass, it was constantly a problem for me as well.  We will not be doing this again without professional and/or an electric sharpener.  

It can't be discounted as well that the actual killing was further hampered by our inexperience, and thus our lack of confidence.  The poor guy hung upside-down for a decent amount of time as we tried to locate the jugular while avoiding the windpipe, and of course the spinal cord (of course this would have proven difficult to separate anyway under our set up)  I attemped to help Kyle locate the jugular, and used the descriptions offered by the above referenced videos to determine where to cut, but we never felt solid that this really was the best spot.

Kyle's first attempt did not even break skin.  We got out other knives, including my very sharp but very long slicing sashimi knife.  When he finally was able to cut through skin, it was not clear whether Kyle had cut enough.  There was clearly blood, but it didn't come out at as fast a rate as the videos, so we both became concerned that we were adding additional duress.  Were we?  I can't know.  

Finally Kyle had to take out his pocket knife to further open the artery, because it had a bit of a saw.  And finally it seemed to do the trick.  The rooster shuttered a bit, but according to the above videos, that is bound to happen.  To be sure, per the second video, I suggested Kyle also stab the rooster in the brain which Kyle did very successfully.  At that point we were confident that he had to be dead.  Surely nothing at this point could be causing him pain.

And even now we can't know if it was a post-mortem reaction or if the rooster was really still alive, but he pulled his head up, certainly appearing alive.  This was quite disturbing to myself, and even moreso to Kyle, who was right there and responsible for giving the guy a quick, clean death.  We have no desire to cause any more pain than is required.  To a slight degree, we panicked.  Kyle tried to break its neck to ensure the rooster was dead.  Even as I heard a loud snap, the guy was still lifting his head up.  Again, we don't know why.  But we didn't want to chance it.  We wanted to be 100% absolutely sure he was dead, so we had to chop off its head.  By that point the rooster had lost the vast majority of its blood, so we didn't have to worry about contaminating the meat, however it is an unfortunate circumstance that we didn't/ don't know our impact to the rooster himself was.  

At this point, Kyle was clearly shaken.  Well after the slaughter, he noted that was the one thing he felt bad about; that he couldn't do it cleanly and quickly.  I took on de-feathering.

 scalding pot of water that we dipped the rooster into to loosen feathers

At this point, I realize that in spite of the panic we were previously in, now that it is over, there is little remorse at the concept of the rooster being dead.  As I dip the guy in the scalding water (which loosens the feathers), tie him up and begin to pluck, I also see this transformation occurring from live chicken to dinner ingredient.  Per the first video, I really like her commentary expressing how as she also was plucking, she contemplates how she has a live chicken, and then she has a dead chicken, and is left wondering, "where does the [living] chicken go?"   

At this point I realize that part of the reason why this is easier than I might have expected is that I am completely comfortable with this carcass.  I like to cook and have bought and made whole chickens before.  As I take away feathers, what remains is something quite familiar.  If I had to butcher an animal I had never prepared in the kitchen, would this clinical look at death be so easily obtained?  Part of me suspects no.  

The beginning of evisceration is hard.  Don't want to pop any internal organs.  The end is messy and gross, having to scoop out those organs.  Neither of them is emotionally distressing.

By this point, absolutely nothing is bothering me.  I should note that chickens are kinda stinky on the inside and out when you kill them.  That is why I am wearing the kerchief which did its job 100%.  while this picture is taken before I took out any innards, this very picture doesn't look like anything past someone taking a store bought chicken and cutting it up outside.  It is hard to get disturbed at something that is so commonplace, whether it is a terrible thing or not. 

I should note, a few months back when our hens were all starting to lay eggs and look like actual chickens, instead of cute fuzz balls, we had to start taking the concept of slaughter seriously, as opposed to some pie in the sky notion that would happen one day, was when I started getting nightmares.  Not of killing chickens, but of killing my cats.  I had a couple of very vivid dreams when I physically slaughtered my cats - particularly my cat "Q", but "Arashi" as well sometimes - sometimes by accident, like running them over, but mostly on purpose, by slitting their throats.  I'd wake up nearly inconsolable, much to Kyle's confusion. This likely was in part due to me still being sad (and perhaps guilty though I'd never admit that) to this day of my poor cat, Gordie Down, a small, rough and tumble girl calico cat I had before Q, who was run over while I was still living in Indianapolis.  However, the impending chicken slaughter was the catalyst for it all.

The issue that this all boils down to is one of permanence.   Slaughter, or killing at all, is something that you can never take back, regardless of your reasons or emotions at the time of the action.  We can turn a new leaf and think back on an event like slaughtering, and have different emotions given the state of mind we are in.  We can never change what happened however.  (This was a huge part of the cat nightmares, where even as I was killing the cats, I was already regretting what I was doing, but I couldn't stop since if I had, it would have been even worse, a mortally maimed feline)  Once that person, character, creature, is taken off the stage, they will never return.

And that our rooster is never returning to the stage, that we will never see him accost one of the hens and mount her, or crow in the morning, is not a point of sadness, neither is it a point of happiness.  It just is.  Our chickens are not family, whereas our cats are, yes that is a part of it, but I still find myself mourning a cat in the street or news of a friend's friend's death, so that isn't the whole story.  More I think of it in this way: I have done the best I can by that chicken, I gave it a good life of running around the yard, being able to be a chicken.  If I were a chicken, with a chicken brain, in spite of the whole death thing, I think I'd be one of the lucky ones to be a chicken here, at this house.  

It doesn't justify the execution, but I don't think it makes the execution a reprehensible thing either.  It just is.