Culling Out the Roosters

Warning! This blog post is not for the faint of heart as it contains gore and some adult content! Part of learning to be self-sustaining is getting back to the basics of raising animals for food and "processing" them yourself. Eggs are good, but A) we're an omnivorous family and B) we ended up with too many roosters (that's male chickens for you city folk). You see, the roosters aren't all that productive...it's the hens that are doing all the egg-laying while the males just strut around, lend an air of security to the flock, and rudely pluck feathers from the back of the females who are haplessly gang-banged chicken-style. They also get aggressive toward each other, and sometimes toward their keepers. Well, we'll have none of that on Blue Harvest Farm! Before culling out the roosters (not all of them), we did some online research on this site and this one. We tried two different methods of processing, the first of which was to tie the rooster upside-down by his feet to a horizontal bar, cut his head off with a knife, then skin him feathers and all by making strategic incisions and literally peeling everything off from feet to neck. This method avoids feather-plucking and the boiling method described later. As we thought this might be interesting to document, we took photos and some video as well. Well, let's just say that you need to make sure your knife is sharp. Dionne, bless her heart, volunteered to do the dirty deed but cutting through the neck bones proved more difficult than we anticipated. Dionne's mom (a slightly more experienced chicken-killer) had to finish the job for us while I recorded the incident on video. The evidence was subsequently erased when it was decided that our educational video was really more like a snuff film. Egads, it was an emotional trauma. The next attempt (for which I was not a witness) was more successful (and merciful) with the aid of a chopping block and sharp machete. This time, the headless chickens were boiled in a large pot for a few seconds which opens their pores enough to make plucking feathers a breeze. The skin remains on the chicken, but that doesn't bother us. After all the killing was done, three roosters remained: one for a partner of Daisy (Dionne's mom's pet hen), one to keep structure in the flock (his name is Fluffy Chick), and one who escaped detection by impersonating a hen (still not sure about its gender really).