Slaughtering My First Chicken This is a blog of happenings in my family, with my kids, and with the politics of the world. If you don't get satire you should probably stop reading right now. I tend to ramble on, and on, and on...

As you may have heard, we're raising chickens again this year back in Tennessee. Cara chose chickens that were good for egg laying, but I picked up a few meat hens and some straight runs, which might be pullets (future hens, good for egg laying) or cockerels (future roosters, good for eating). The two meat hens grew much faster than the other chicks and, because the kids knew they were destined to be killed, they took to calling them "the fat babies" rather than giving them specific names. Today when I asked Maxwell and Zara which of the two fat babies should be killed, they immediately knew which one. Alora and Brittan, however, wanted no part of it. Cara was worried about the whole affair - boys and killing and The Lord of the Flies. The fact that I joked about putting the dead chicken's head on a spike to deter the others from attacking my hop plant anymore probably didn't help either. I've eaten meat my whole life, but I've rarely killed for food and then only seafood. That is, I haven't really had a great deal of experience striking the balance between a reverence for life and the killing of life, but I have always felt that to eat meat I should be able to raise and slaughter it myself. Naturally, Maxwell and Zara saw killing as the ultimate cruelty that it is and took it upon themselves to enact lesser cruelties on the fat baby destined for death. Maxwell had bragged about the pending slaughter over the campfire last night to his friend Maxwell across the street, so as I prepared the water to scald off the feathers Maxwell went to fetch him. While the water heated up Zara hit the fat baby marked for death with a rock and Alora came up to tell me. I scolded Zara for bruising the meat. I could not logically draw a dichotomy between killing and cruelty. When the water was ready I came down to get the chicken and found the two Maxwells playing a game, marching toward the fat baby and singing about its execution. I thought this was a fun little game until the Maxwells reaching the chicken and my Maxwell kicked it. Again, I scolded about bruising the meat and went to fetch my ax, thinking about Ned Stark and how he believed that he who passed judgement should carry out the sentence. The fat baby felt heavy as I carried it to the stump - much heavier than the laying hens. There would be a lot of meat on this sucker! Plantlover that I am, I have never been able to draw the dichotomy between plants and animals than vegetarians draw. Life is life. If killing is wrong and I am to be a moral person, then santhara is the only logical course. But I choose to live, so I chose to kill. Nonviolence is still the best path though, so if I kill I try not to waste. Today I did not waste. It took several iterations to get the right orientation of the chicken on the stump, and fortunately fat babies do not move very much because they are so fat. I have heard chickens run around after you cut their heads off. I have even seen pictures of the chicken who lived after its head had been cut off because the brain stem was left behind. I was going to make a clean cut, to shear off the head with a single blow, to be that excellent executioner which medieval condemned always hoped for ... but I was afraid that she would move before I brought the ax back down and didn't lift it high enough. Immediately after my blow fell I realized that the stump was on a hill and that the chicken didn't flail in a circle as I'd imagined. As its partially severed head dangled it turned end over end down the hill and into the woods as the kids hooted and hollered in excitement. Now the woods is filled with poison ivy, so the three kids and I (two Maxes and Zara) headed around to the creek, hoping it had flailed all the way down there. It had not. And I am rather severely allergic to poison ivy although none of my kids are. We spotted the chicken up the hill in the woods and neighbor Maxwell, the only kid with shoes, went up to fetch it. He braved the briars and boldly brought the prize down to us where I took it and, handing Zara my ax, took it into the house. Later it occurred to me that giving a six-year-old an ax was not the wisest thing I've done, but she put it right back in its place in the garage. To remove the feathers, I held the legs and swished the chicken around in the scalding pot of water for roughly 30 seconds, until the wing feathers were easily removable. Then I took it to the table which I had previously covered with newspaper and began removing the feathers. They come out remarkably easily! I am not a pro though, so the whole ordeal took me half an hour. First you remove the wingtip feathers and then follow up the wings and then down the body to the legs. Admittedly, having the partially severed head there was somewhat disturbing and I cut it off before I was done plucking. Maxwell, whose earlier braggadocio had been tempered by the reality of death, walked around the kitchen complaining that, although he was hungry, there was nothing to eat because he could no longer eat chicken nuggets. Brittan came in and was surprisingly undisturbed. Alora would not. Zara complained about the feet which were still attached. Because I took more than 10 minutes to remove the feathers, I soaked it in a cold water bath along the way to avoid cooking the exterior too much. And, when I flipped the chicken over to remove its belly feathers, I pushed the last air out of its lungs resulting in an eerie cluck from beyond the grave. After the feathers had been removed, I cut off the feet and Cara came down to read me the instructions for pulling out the innards. It's kind of like that fetal pig I dissected in biology class. I failed to find the crop or the esophagus, but I think the ax may have punctured it. Cutting off the rest of the neck was not too hard, and neither was the tail, but cutting around the "vent" properly was quite difficult. Cara and I both laughed about how the chicken's anus was euphemistically called a vent as I tried to avoid rupturing any intestinal walls. Even though I pulled the colon and small intestine out successfully without ripping them open, I still had to step outside for a minute to escape the smell. Then came the liver with pancreas and gall bladder, and after that the stomach. At first I thought the stomach was the heart, because the muscle was so hard, but when I squeezed it inside the chicken partially-digested chicken feed came out of the neck. The actual heart was the last thing I was able to reach inside the chicken. My stupid hands are too big. Fortunately the chicken looked so much like a storebought one at this point that Cara was willing to jump in and get the lungs out and wash it down. Then we put it in an ice bath to cool for 30 minutes before wrapping it and putting it into the fridge to age until tomorrow. Tomorrow night my mother will be here and I will feed her from our yard: a salad of romaine, arugula, radicchio, and perhaps some other spices from my garden, a chicken we raised and killed ourselves and water treated and piped to our house from the creek downstream a few miles away. I am a locavore.