By All Means, Don’t Puncture the Gallbladder
Before we begin, let me just say that if you do not want to hear about the killing of animals on our farm, please do not read on. This is your invitation to read on if you’re curious about the threads of life and death and also, if you want to hear about how big a chicken’s stomach is and what you might find inside of it. This blog is a little longer than usual because the ritual of killing and processing my first round of meat chickens is having a significant impact on my life and when this happens, I want to write.
As I type this, I can still smell the boiled feathers on my hands. I am not sure if I will ever not smell this smell. In fact, I cannot remember a time when I did not smell this way. Before writing this, I scrubbed my hands in the shower with an orange peel essential oil salt scrub and it was a delightful contrast to boiled chicken feathers, even though I still have blood caked underneath my fingernails despite vigorous scrubbing.
It was never our intention to personally have to kill our meat chickens. I imagined shipping them off to someone and receiving them back in nice, airtight packages with their organs neatly labeled and separated. I thought we would be far removed from the killing process but then, like I told you last week, our meat chickens started to die — they started to have heart attacks. Let me tell you once again that if you do not kill meat chickens within 6-7 weeks around here, they start to die on you and they also start to lose their ability to walk. This is true for all meat chickens because they are bred to grow fast and carry a lot of meat on their bodies meaning, they become so heavy that their legs begin to give out. I know, I thought this was awful when I first learned about it too. I mean, what are we eating here? Are we breeding alien chickens? This is not a natural source of food that occurs in the wild. That’s right, meat chickens are specifically bred for us to eat them. They do not serve another function or purpose. If we ate a laying hen, it would be very lean and unsatisfying and so us humans have created another kind of chicken in order to satisfy our cravings for a meaty drumstick. Enter, the great and bizarre meat chicken.
All of this to say, that we could not find anyone to kill our chickens for us. Our butcher friend who promised to help us with the processing, quickly ghosted me after I told him we had 40 birds to kill. Our farmer friends in Colorado said that transporting the birds to them would ultimately be too stressful on our birds who were already prone to heart attacks. We ran out of time to order any proper equipment for the birds because our butcher friend was supposedly going to let us borrow his and then did not follow through with his offer. And so, this left us completely to the mercy of Youtube and our own creativity. We quickly watched dozens of videos on how to correctly cut a chicken’s carotid artery so they die effortlessly and easily. We even made a kill cone for the chickens out of an old bucket and some zip ties. A kill cone is something you use so your chickens can hang upside down while you kill them and not flap around and bruise their bodies. A lot of chicken farmers say that your chickens will pass out when you put them upside down in the kill cone, but we unfortunately did not find this to be the case.
This left Heathar, Andrea (our friend visiting us from Mexico) and myself to kill the chickens. We make all our friends who come to the farm participate in projects around the property and Andrea got lucky enough to come during chicken processing week. Remember, I grew up in the inner city of Phoenix, Arizona. I have never seen a chicken be killed, I have never heard anyone talk about killing a chicken and until two days ago, I had never watched a Youtube about anyone showing me how to kill a chicken. I am whatever becomes before a novice and somehow, also surrounded by other people who have never killed a chicken. Farming at nearly 40 is a steep learning curve my dear friends.
After watching enough YouTube videos, we promptly set up five stations to process our meat chickens:
The chopping block (which proved more successful than the kill cones) with a bucket to catch the blood placed underneath
A pot of boiling water to dip the chickens in
The de-feathering station (easier than you would think)
The surgical table where we removed all their internal organs and their feet (and of course saved the feet to put into our bone broth)
A pot to boil their feet and then peel the nails and skin off their feet
Are you impressed yet?
Scroll on brave reader…
Yesterday, we were able to kill and process six birds. We tried killing them both by using an axe and also by placing them in the kill cone. The axe proved to be much more efficient and less emotionally taxing on us as well as the birds. As you can imagine, Heathar was in charge of wielding the axe since she has by far the most farm experience, even if through osmosis from her parents who have a small farm in upstate New York. The first time we tried using the kill cone, I volunteered to kill the chicken with a very sharp boning knife as I felt confident from watching the YouTubers who had swiftly shown me how it was done. After I completed my task, I immediately burst into tears. It was the combination of having to cut through the chicken’s vertebrae and also looking into its eyes as I killed it. My body had a physical reaction, a strong release that I could not control. Killing an animal for the first time was an incredibly intense experience for me and also one I have wanted to participate in for a long time. I cried in the sun while my friends watched and the dead bird lay still at our sides. They let me cry and did not rush me into shaking it off, letting the initiation take its course.
I can handle birth, I can handle reaching inside of bodies and feeling a cervix and the top of a baby’s head — that is a celebration, a welcoming of life and one I’m very familiar with. But taking a life, is a whole other feeling. Moving through the motions of our chicken processing stations, we felt bipolar. In one moment, we were nervously awaiting the next chicken to be killed, somber and silent. The next moment, we were praising the chicken and celebrating the meat it had given us once it had died. Not only were we physically exhausted after a day of learning how to kill our meat chickens, but we were left emotionally raw — moving from grief to joy to love and back to grief again.
As most of us know, we are entirely removed from the process of killing our own meat in our western culture. While I can understand the aversion to it, I cannot understand the process of eating meat and yet not wanting to be involved in some way with the processing of that meat. At the very least, lending an understanding to the process and condoning the raising and humane killing of the animals we eat and enjoy. So many people I talk to about this process, react with a sense of judgment, disgust and repulsion, only to drive home to their kitchen and put a chicken in the oven to roast. Let us remember that someone, somewhere had to use an axe on a living, breathing bird in order for you to enjoy your dinner. Let us remember that death is a part of so many meals that we eat.
I don’t enjoy the reality of actually chopping a chicken’s head off, it does not fit into my idyllic fantasy of farm life. I mean, after our first day of processing our chickens, it looked like someone had taken a red paint brush to my legs. I had my hands deeply inside a chicken’s piping hot body cavity in order to remove it’s stomach, liver, heart, intestines, lungs and gallbladder. Oh, and by the way — you cannot puncture the gallbladder lest it spill it’s poisonous green juices all over the chicken you just raised for 7 weeks and killed with your bare hands — and I do mean bare hands. By all means, do not puncture the gallbladder.
I am hesitant to write about this process of killing our chickens because I know for some, they will not understand it. They will think we are savage and beastly. They will shake their heads and say, “Those poor chickens.” But I am going to take this one step deeper — if we shield ourselves from the reality of death, if we pretend that the ghastly and the grotesque does not exist, then I do believe that we are at risk for forgetting our own humanness. When we live closely with death, when we look into a chicken’s eyes and watch it die, we also know the joy of what it means to eat that chicken and feel it nourish our bodies. In the tears and the emotional shock that I felt in killing my first animal, we also looked around at one another and said, “This is really living.” How can that be — that more death would equate to a feeling of living more fully and more intensely?
If we hide from death, if we shelter ourselves from it, we do not get to feel the preciousness of life. When the chicken is walking around one minute pecking grass and in the following three minutes, I have its warm stomach in my hands and can see that grass inside of its stomach, the preciousness of life comes into clear focus. Death is ever present and life is fragile. All of us on this farm, and I believe the people who are called to come here, believe in some way that to live close to death and life and animal feces and feet that get infected and hands that crack from working too hard, is to live life in a full way. If we miss these processes, if we reject the reality of the human body, I believe that in some ways we feel (even if perhaps unconsciously) that we are evading life, skipping life, tricking life into orderliness and cleanliness. Life is there waiting for us when we are ready and life is full of bodily fluids.
Our chickens took about one minute to fully let go and die. Meaning, their bodies truly do flap around and twitch as the life exits them. When they finally let go, you can feel the final release as their bodies relax. It brings tears to my eyes again right now to write about it and to now carry this sensation in my hands.
I noticed that the farm became a little more silent with the passing of 14 of our meat chickens. I felt the volume of the life turn down a few notches. Immediately, in the wake of their death I felt the impulse to add more life to the farm. This time, perhaps we could add sheep to milk or a cow, donkeys just for fun or 16 cats to hunt our rats. That’s the thing about death — as soon as it happens, life wants to rush back in and begin again.
The very first chicken we killed was a female. After we killed her and de-feathered her, we cut into her body to remove her internal organs. As we cut, we noticed a bright yellow substance running out of her body. We smelled it — no odor. As we looked through her body more, we came to the conclusion that this chicken was in the process of creating an egg — it was not yet in egg form but it was an egg membrane. When we called one of our chicken breeder friends, she said she had never seen this in a chicken before. Then today, our very first chicken that we processed was again, indeed carrying an egg. On both days, the symbol of the egg came to us as we began our killing process.
Take it as you will but I am taking it as an omen of life — a chicken blessing of the highest sorts.
Some people will say they are proud of us and others don’t say much at all. I guess the feeling I am walking away with is the feeling of living into truth, perhaps even integrity. I feel that I took a step more deeply into the vision of my life today which includes doing hard things and sometimes things that are very bloody. I took a step more deeply into a kind of life I have been envisioning for decades, a kind of life that takes time, money and energy to create now in a world that has long forgotten these ways.
Our neighbor stopped by in the middle of our chicken process today. I warned him before he came over, “Chris, there is a lot of blood here.” He smiled at me and said, “Not to worry. You should have seen it when we slaughtered our pigs.” I knew Chris would understand. Chris told us that decades ago, in the 70’s when he moved up here, everyone had animals and was raising livestock. Now, hardly anyone in our valley is raising animals. I get it. I don’t hate convenience. I love electricity and automatic vehicles. But there is something in me that wants to turn back the wheel of time and bring back cassette tapes, handwritten card catalogues at the library, landlines, blogs and people who know how to raise their own animals. I want to bring it all back — well, I draw the line at washing my clothes by hand. I love a washing machine and a dryer — but I want to bring back most of the ways that invite us to participate more closely with life.
There are more chickens to go, 26 to be exact. It will take us at least three more days to kill and process these birds. In total, it will take us about 25 hours to process and kill all of our 40 meat chickens and that meat will last us for a couple of months. Probably less than that because we will give some away and send some to our families packed with ice and prayers. I still don’t really feel like a farmer. Maybe it is like living in New York City — you have to have lived there a decade before you can call yourself a New Yorker. I am farming but don’t yet feel like a farmer — I have’t lived on the island long enough. But this week, I think we all took a deep step towards initiating ourselves into the craft.
