On Life, Death and Chickens, Part III

This post follows: http://strawbeaner.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-life-death-and-chickens-part-ii.html

Today was a sad day.

Our golden colored Ameraucana, also titled "the ugly one" was culled.

Unlike the rooster we slaughtered last year, this was not something we had desired.  Indeed, due to the fact that she laid spectacular olive green eggs very regularly, and added a color to the flock that was quite unique, she was one of two we have never had any intention whatsoever of slaughtering, and had the specific intention of retaining.

The ugly one got this titled since as a chick, she looked like a drunken version of Martin Van Buren in chicken form.  Her shaggy bearded coloring was in stark contrast to "the pretty one", also an Ameraucana, whose coloring was neat, well patterned, and very attractive.  As the both of them reached adulthood, they both became pretty in their own way but the title stuck.

Unfortunately, while the ugly one was relatively smart (for a chicken) and pretty flighty and strong, somehow she ended up dead last in the hen pecking order, and was second only to our juvenile rooster prior to him experiencing his first crowing.  Once that happened, she became dead last, and very quickly, very first in terms of preferred mating partner of the rooster.

For the record, mating is not very pleasant for the hen.  The rooster climbs on her back, often bites at her neck to hold her down, and forces her butt up, and her vagina to poke out of her cloaca.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KBGEjVF-bM

As she was bottom rung, the ugly one was the go-to girl when all other hens were successfully avoiding him.  The books suggest having 7 hens for one rooster, so that the hens get a break every now and again.  However, of our 7 hens, 2.5 of them (the two plymouth bard rocks and for a time, the black austrolorp) actually are or were of a higher pecking order than the rooster.  This means effectively, at first he had only 4 hens, with that changing to 5 hens in only the last month or so.  He mated with her incessantly.  It got so bad she was losing feathers from behind.  Kyle picked up a chicken apron for her, which we thought was an end to the problem.  It did save her back from further de-feathering, but I suspect, only delayed future problems.

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly noticed a bulbous red glob on the back end of the ugly one.  I took no pictures of our particular chicken, but a good website to explain the situation is here: http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2012/04/prolapse-vent-causes-treatment-graphic.html



To explain what exactly this means, I will write the following paragraph in white.  Read if you have a strong stomach or can't comprehend any female anatomy anyway. 

Chickens have only one exit hole, a cloaca, also known as a vent.  Essentially, this exit hole is used by both an internal anus and vagina (or testes if a rooster).  When each one is used, it pops out through the cloaca slightly.  Thus you are not getting poop smears on eggs or calcium deposits on poop. 

The prolapsed vent meant that the vagina would not collapse after use, back into the body cavity.  It was sticking out and had to be manually pushed back in.  When this first happened, I managed to keep her in the garage, in a box to encourage her body to stop producing eggs, and give her time to heal.  This actually seemed to work, and after some lovely intimate sessions with the poor hen, we got it to the point where it wasn't protruding any longer.  Believing this problem to have occurred by excessive mating, we then separated the rooster from the rest of the flock.  All seemed well.


Unfortunately, a few days later it was sticking back out again.  I suspect this was because she had not actually fully healed at this point.  Before Kyle or I had noticed it, other hens of the flock began to pick at her exposed inverted vagina until it bled.  By the time we had separated her from the flock, it was in bad shape.  Still we tried, getting her some preparation H, and anti-biotics.  It was for naught as it did become infected.  The bleeding in addition to the poop coming out the same hole, naturally will not help the healing process.

To visualize, ladies, imagine that in giving birth, you exerted yourself so hard that your vagina inverted and stuck out from the orifice.  Now, your fellow lady friends notice this, but as you guys are unsympathetic chicken-personalities, they take out sharp pointy sticks and jab them at your wound.  You look weak.  They don't want to deal with anyone who is weak.  Finally, for some unexplainable reason, this causes you to be unable to defecate without doing so in your vagina.  This was our poor chicken, the ugly one.
Last night, it got so bad Kyle and I spent about an hour trying to help her finish laying an egg that couldn't pass as a result of dried puss and scab on the edges of the wound.  The poor girl was really in pain as we soaked her in a hot bath and tried to ease up the scabbing.  At that point, we realized she  had crossed a line.  We weren't going to save her.  She was looking healthy besides the wound, but soon the infection would set in, and she was going to die.



So Kyle and I made the decision to cull her, which is a nice way of saying slaughter, but for reasons of health or flock cohesion, rather than for the purpose of meat generation.  You can still get meat out of the process, but it isn't the goal.

She really was quite alert and in a good mood, even considering the pain of egg laying she had the prior night, and the fact that we had confined her and was withholding food to make the killing easier.  That perhaps made it even harder.  On the one hand, if we had waited until she reality of her condition finally took hold of her outward behavior, the meat would have been contaminated, and there would be no silver lining of use in the slaughter.  On the other side, laying troubles aside, she was as cognizant and energetic as ever.  Chickens start getting droopy and lethargic when they feel sick - the ugly one was none of that.

So that was sad.

Again, Kyle did the slaughter, I the evisceration.  I have a good excuse for this - Kyle lacks the fine motor skills needed to evisceration without popping poop everywhere, but I am not sure I'd be able to do it anyway.  I was tearing up, quite significantly, when I saw the limp carcass of the ugly one from the distance.  As Kyle noted, it is much more difficult to slaughter her, rather than the rooster we had a month, or the two cockerels we will be slaughtering in two months, because we had her over a year.  She was a familiar sight on the yard and as distinct a personality as chickens can be (they aren't terribly distinct, but their vocal sounds are).  And as she was on the bottom of the pecking order, you can't help but feel a little sad for her.  She didn't pick on others too much; she was the one picked on the most.  Her olive green eggs will definitely be missed.  They were delicious as well as pretty.

So now we have 5 laying hens, plus another hen currently brooding chicks, meaning she isn't laying.  A huge point of flock diversity is gone.

However, two of her eggs were a part of the batch of most recently hatched chicks.  We don't know their sex at this point.  We won't know for another few weeks.  However I believe we will replace her with one of them if at least one of them is a pullet (juvenile hen).  If they are both cockerels, Kyle is thinking it is time that sexually ambitious rooster find himself next on the list on who is to become delicious.

Can either of these guys fill their biological mother's shoes?

So what's the lesson to be learned from this?  Certainly neither of us want to have to slaughter those chickens who have been a part of our yard for an extended period of time.  Luckily, older chickens don't make for great meat anyway.  Slaughtering an animal that we expected to keep around with us also once again begs the question, should we be doing this?  Kyle believes that if we can't slaughter our chickens, that is, older chickens, maybe we shouldn't have chickens at all.  I disagree.  I believe the lesson isn't, "we shouldn't have chickens" but rather, "we shouldn't eat chickens".  One requires the death of a chicken.  The other does not.

I do not think my chickens are somehow more deserving of life than those chickens of factory farms, even those that are cage free and get to see a bug once in awhile in their live times.  I stick to the idea that it is still better for even the ugly one, that she was able to enjoy a chickeny life in our backyard and met a relatively painless end after all other options had been exhausted.  If that is not enough, than nothing is enough.  There is no justification in taking the life of any chicken.

Kyle and I have also agreed that barring a similar mortal wound, there is no way either of us could kill the most curious and intelligent of all the chickens: Penguin.

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.

on Chickens, Cats and Misogyny

I have a terrible and bad habit.

I read youtube comments.  I read newspaper article comments.  I read editorials.  I click the links rabid commenters use to justify their positions.  It is fairly poisonous, but I do it because I want to have a better grasp on what it means to be human, for better and for worse.  I feel this can inform my fiction writing.

After a long and tiring conference in San Diego, last night in our hotel room, I decided to just fool around on the internet as a way to relax.  I visited one of my favorite web comic's tumblr site, the creator of Hark! A Vagrant! http://beatonna.tumblr.com

She showcased a great deal of old anti-suffragette propaganda.  Note: I love old propaganda!  Communist Chinese propaganda is my personal favorite, but in general, propaganda from older times, where what we take for granted to be true or untrue now, can be very telling.  We see a lot of the same types of attacks between people on either side of the issues, the same method of boiling down and distilling well thought out rationale into offensive talking points and ad hominems.  Caricatures are made of complex and multifaceted people, in this case suffragettes, and detailing them as a large group of ugly spinsters.  It is scarily fascinating as we similar fights being waged now against marriage equality, or birth control as a point of health care.

But of course, I followed the links down the rabbit hole, to the places that archived these pictures and the comments surrounding them.

What I found is disturbing.

There are people in America who literally believe the 19th amendment should be repealed.  There are people who unabashedly believe that if they are married to a woman, what that means is the house they have is always the man's, the woman is only there to clean it and take care of the children.  There are people who believe that women who have career aspirations are being selfish and leading to men's misery.  There are also people who genuinely believe that feminism is the result of ugly old women reacting to the threat that men can go out and choose pretty young women in stead, in the form of prostitutes, and not say, because women wanted to have a little bit of self determination in their lives.  http://historyoffeminism.com/

This is not made up.

So why do I call this on Chickens, Cats and Misogyny?  Because it is interesting to see these aspects of humans as reflected in the behaviors and practices in other species.  There is a species that I own that clings very tightly to very gendered behaviors.  The girls do one thing, and if they are good at being girls, they stay.  The boys do another thing, and if they are good at it, they also stay, at least for awhile.  I am of course referring to my chickens.

As an interested party, I like this gendered set up.  I want chicken eggs.  I want my girls to be girls and lay them.  I want my boys to be boys and wake up the girls, get them out and pecking at food, and to inform and protect them in the case of danger.  As it is, our fully adult rooster is very bad at being a boy.  Roosters are supposed to eat last, and go in the coop last, to make sure all girls are accounted for.  He doesn't.  He is getting the chop.

But as much as I like the gendered roles of chickens, I am extremely glad to not be a chicken.  I'd also note that our taxonomy is also quite different, particularly in relation to the other animal I own: a cat.

Now my observations are skewed since our male and female cats are both fixed.  Additionally feral colonies, which are matriarchal in nature, behave differently than lone wanderers.  When left to their own devices, domesticated and abandoned cats will behave more or less in the same way, as long as they are not in heat.  None of the behaviors of my cats can be attributed to the fact that they are one sex or the other, excepting for Arashi when he humps a pillow, due to a late neutering.

I, personally, would much rather be more like a cat and less like a chicken.

But I digress.  I go down these rabbit holes to try to understand why people genuinely believe that my desire to be treated no differently from a man, to have a say in government and my life as much as a man does, is insidious; that me wanting to stand up for my rights is wrong while Washington, or Adams, or Jefferson wanting "freedom" is right.  And so I trolled.  But I trolled with a curious heart, even as I wrote on one website "Wrong!  you are wrong!  I have a she-wee, I pee standing up all the time!"  I only was obnoxious once.  The other trollings I did more was a reach out to develop this understanding.

Sometimes ridiculous claims in any debate come from a suppressed frustration about a real problem.  People who think medicine is evil are on the far spectrum of understanding that there is a profit incentive in modern health care, rather than a health incentive.  Women who think all men are evil may have had traumatic experiences with men.  It isn't a far cry to say men who think women shouldn't vote probably have had traumatic experiences with women, or they recognize that a majority of women voted for Obama, and they really wanted Romney to win.  This doesn't make anybody justified of course, but it provides a logical interface that I can engage directly.  It isn't a question then, of what they think men and women should be doing, but rather, a morality that thinks it is acceptable to silence people they do not believe in. 

All I can think about when I view the some of the other arguments against feminism is that, if we lived in a Chicken World, where the line between men and women was strong and would never fall, how much of life would I be missing out on?  I already have depression issues and have contemplated 自殺　in the past.  When do I least feel like that?  After a hard climb up a glacier laden mountain, during a board game with some of my male friends, meeting people in the community who thank me for doing my profession.  Those things would be forbidden to me in a Chicken World.  Or what of my sisters?  Much as I despise one of them, what a waste would it be to waste her talented mind doing something she is not as interested in doing; childrearing, instead of something she is interested in doing, electrical engineering.  Why in the world should she be barred from doing that which she loves when it is what she loves?  Anti-feminists say women are only truly happy with a family.  Even if that was true for every other woman in the world, why should any one woman be barred from making an alternate decision with her life?

After finally turning the computer off and laying in bed, trying to sleep, I realized something that means I won't be going down this rabbit hole again.  These people who live in the Chicken World, whether it be based on gender or race or any arbitrary qualification, they aren't where the interesting stories lie.  I try to get a handle on the diverse perspectives of people to develop believable characters, but you never really see characters like these in an engaging and thought provoking story.  Who do you see in these interesting stories?  You see the women who became fighter pilots in WWII to test out the planes that were to be taken out in the field.  You read about the young black boy who grew up in a poor inner city but is now a leading voice in the field of quantum mechanics.  When is the last time you read a compelling story where any of the main characters were people with one dimensional appraisals of huge swaths of the population? 

You don't.

So I'll leave them to their Chicken World.  I'm going to go lick my butthole and be a cat.

on Life, Death and Chickens Part I

Earlier this year, my boyfriend and I decided it was time we added chickens to our backyard garden.  We spend the better part of January and February building our A-frame mobile coop which is technically suited for 5 hens.  This was something I was thinking about doing for a long time, for a lot of reasons, and certainly we have already reaped the benefits of more eggs than we know what to do with.

But one major part of this experiment was to settle an ethical dilemma I've had since I accidentally left a worm on a sun-baked stair case and later returned to find it crispy; is it ethical to kill? 

There are meat eaters who abhor seeing a dead animal.  They want to remain unaware of how the slice of steak got on their table.  That is their own journey complete with their own moral reasoning.  For all I know they have already had this internal dialogue with themselves, acknowledged that meat means killing, are okay with that, and simply find a carcass stinky or otherwise simply don't like the aesthetics.  Who can say. 

I am not one of those people though.  I need to make sure I fully comprehend what I am doing when I eat meat, or eat anything, or do anything in general!  I want to make sure that every time I choose to eat meat, I am making a fresh cost benefit analysis, lest my decision making process be abandoned in lieu of rote behavior. 

And this is part of the reason why I wanted to get chickens; to determine if I can physically kill a being for my consumption.  If I can't, I am of the mind that I should probably become a vegetarian again.  I am not a person who is easily disgusted.  I often clean out the coop with my bare hands.  (Don't worry, I wash my hands before eating... sometimes :-P)  If the only thing preventing me from eating meat is that I cannot kill it, then there is no rational reason for me to say that I should eat meat, as the mere act of doing so is what is causing the killing to occur. 

If I have an emotional reaction, sympathy, for example, then why should I not have a similar reaction to the chicken whose fluffy butt has not been running around my yard?  I am doing the chickens no favors by supporting the propagation of large poultry houses.  In addition to being killed they are horribly treated for all of their short lives.  I am favoring the propagation of the Cornish Cross breed, a breed so anthropologically genetically selected that when a backyard chicken enthusiast like myself tries to raise them, they will at minimum get a 30% pre-slaughter mortality.  This is a breed who has been bred to grow so fat so quickly to be made for the pot that they have heart attacks and die before the 6-8 weeks needed to go to slaughter are up. 

A chicken still dies.  I need to make sure my rational, holistic knowledge of that fact is included in the cost benefit analysis, and killing my own meat is the best way to not forget any aspect of that fact.

We are not strangers to death in our flock.  It should be noted that we have had two taken by hawks; one of them was still a chick and had a little chick fluff left.  Then a week ago, one of our hens dropped dead.  We still aren't sure why, but we are suspecting that she was egg bound (where an egg/egg pieces get caught in her reproductive tract and block everything else.)  We weren't forcefully sad about the event.  My boyfriend keeps saying he is disappointed, not sad, that the chicken didn't make it to our dinner table.

But I am not wholly convinced by either of us.  Sometimes we bring it up, saying simply, "poor Not-Penguin". 

That being said, chickens are mean creatures.  Not-penguin, the term we used to differentiate this barred rock who died from the other two, was one of two chicks we purchased after the first hawk victim was taken away.  Because at that time the two of them were still babies while the other four were full fledged pullets (hen form, not laying eggs yet), they were really picked on.  The Penguin  and Not Penguin could be seen running through the yard together, often wing and wing touching.  After Not Penguin collapsed and died, the first chicken trying to peck at it and eat it was The Penguin.  So much for being butt buddies.

Is inter-chicken cruelty a good reason for why it is okay to kill these creatures?  Is the selfishness of the species what makes it okay to take away the one thing all creatures desire to do (survive)?  I am kind of banking on it.  How they view the world is clearly different from how humans view the world.  They are driven by instinct and outside events.  Death is what will happen to them, in any scenario, and they will never be authors of it.  That I have given them a good life while they are here is payment for the fact that I will profit from being that author.

Then again, sometimes I think, if a bunch of teenaged girls were locked in a high school, with ice cream, cheeseburgers and other treats in abundance to eat around them, would it be okay for us to kill them because they keep making fun of the ugly one and all they think about is shoes?

There will be a part II to these ramblings after our first slaughter.