The Business of Eating Chicken
Processing chickens is best in the company of similarly committed and caring people.
January/February 2010
Oscar H. Will III
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Raising chickens at home offers many rewards, in the barnyard and on the dinner table.
iStockphoto.com/Joerg Reimann
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Our 2009 Community Chicken project came to a close last October when eight people gathered at my Osage County, Kansas, farm to kill and clean around 30 commercial-type broilers raised on range for nearly 12 weeks. The event brought together a most unlikely group of editors, spouses, advertising sales people, teacher, librarian and medical intern. Most of these folks had never taken a warm-blooded animal’s life with their bare hands. Most had never been that up close and personal with the animals whose lives help sustain us.
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MOTHER EARTH NEWS Senior Associate Editor Troy Griepentrog and I raised the birds and supplemented their diet of bugs and clover with a natural grower ration. We kept the birds enclosed and safe from predators with electric net fences and portable fence chargers. While it’s true that the commercial broilers have had much of the normal chicken behavior bred out of them, they were more mobile than experts said and were able to do a little scratching and jumping for seed to boot. They also grew quickly, but our chickens didn’t die of heart attacks or exhibit any tendon or joint problems as is often reported. Our losses were zero percent.
Killing a chicken with your bare hands is never easy – at least when you don’t do it every day. When I demonstrated a humane way to nick a bird’s jugular, using killing cones to restrain the bird, there was a notable hush among the group as folks reflected on what it means to take a life and accept the animal’s gift of sustenance. When the blood flowed freely, some people turned away. My daughter, Alaina, told me later she thought she was going to cry. To paraphrase Joel Salatin, it isn’t good to kill chickens too often, because you run the risk of becoming desensitized and of taking their lives for granted. That definitely was not the situation at the farm on that Sunday.