Feathers. Feathers EVERYWHERE!!!!!

Warning! Beware! Food ahead! If you are unaware of where your food comes from, and you might get uncomfortable finding out, please stop reading now. If you continue to read, you will see a cute little chicken become dinner.

 I am going to preface the business part of this post with a little quark I have. I hear a lot of people talk about getting "backyard chickens" or "I'm getting chickens so I can have fresh eggs everyday la la la." Now what most of these people do not think about is that some day, they may actually have to kill one of them. They have gone their entire life without ever seeing an animal killed and the thought of it is not pleasant for them. While chickens are fun to watch. They leave you delicious packages of protein every day. They help control bugs. Chickens have many beneficial traits. However, they are also an animal, that can get sick, hurt, killed, etc. So if you have never seen and animal killed, what are you going to do when the times comes where you have to, to end the suffering of an animal? Are you going to take your $2.99 chicken to the vet to be put to sleep? The only logical choice is for you to do it yourself. So, if you want to get chickens, goats, sheep, alpacas, etc, please find a farm that will let you experience the slaughter process from start to finish. You have to be able to handle the blood, the bone cracking, the feather ripping, reaching your hand into the animal and pulling the guts out, the smell. The smell will get a lot of people. It smells like death I think, but I am used to it as I have harvested numerous deer over the years and I'm good at not breathing through my nose.

 HA Okay, onto business!! We had a chicken get beat up and torn up. She had a lot of feathers ripped from her back, which was bleeding. She had a broken leg, I'm guessing a rooster maybe got at her and since she was small she wasn't able to hold up his weight. Nonetheless, she was not long for this world as the other ladies were attacking her when Becca got home and pulled her out. She was placed into the penalty box so she would not be harassed any more. She needed to be put down because I don't think there was any coming back from this. First since Kal was working our friend DJ was out to do a little hunting so Becca put him to work before he headed out to the woods. First order of business was cleaning the blood from the previous nights deer out of the truck. Fella's, FYI, your ladies do not like to open the tailgate to put in groceries and find blood all over the truck where she wants to put bread. She even called and said some not so lady like things to Kal and when DJ arrived, made sure to repeat them!

He then went on to build the "chicken cone" which we would use to hold the chickens while the deed was done.

After the cone is finished and hung up somewhere, we decided to hang it where all the other animal business happens, the "Quad-pod". Hold the chicken by the legs and place them upside down into the cone. Once you get the chickens head out of the cone you can take a knife and make a cut in the neck. This will allow the heart to continue to pump, removing most of the blood for you. For this part, please make sure you have a sharp knife, you will need to get the knife between the feathers and down to the skin. Quills are very strong, and even a sharp knife can have trouble getting through them.

While you are doing the above part, you will want to have a pot of hot water ready. Temps vary depending on what you read, but we did it at about 165*-170*

When the chicken is about done, it may spasm a little bit. Once the blood has stopped draining you can remove the lady from the cone and dip her in your hot water to loosen the feathers. It took only 20-30 seconds I think. Kind of dunk her in and out, you need the water to get under the feathers and down to the skin. I tested a spot on the leg and when the feathers came right of I figured she was ready.

Start pulling feathers. And pull some more feathers. Then, pull a couple more. Then pull the rest.

The next part you have to get your hand dirty, so to speak. Next you need to remove the guts. Now, we have never been one to eat necks, gizzards, livers, etc. So, Kal was not too careful about saving the organ meats. This was his first one, so it was a bit of a learning experience for Kal. Next ones should be much easier though since he figured out what was connected to where and by what.

Now that those parts are out of the way, get up in there and make sure it's cleaned out LOL

We then took it next door for the neighbor to check over, Thanks Kandi. She thought Kal did a pretty good job. Then we took it home and put it in some cold water. Rinsed it off well and pulled out a lot of pin feathers that were left. After letting it sit in the water and cool for a bit we put it in a bag and into the freezer for later.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to make comments on any of our posts. We can see the number of views go up and get the comments on Facebook but we still feel like it would be super cool to have some comments here!

And since there isn't much to smile about in this post, here's a picture of Kal getting ready to cut up a deer. HA