By Hardscrabble Farmer - September 28, 2023

I spent three days slaughtering, plucking, eviscerating and processing meat birds for the family. I let them go longer than usual this year, the biggest weighed almost 18 pounds and the boned breasts were averaging about four and half pounds each once I’d trimmed them out.

It’s a dirty job, you can’t slaughter anything without getting bloody and when it’s one after another for hours on end, you’re pretty well covered by the end of it. I crate the birds up right off the pasture in the morning, then place them, ten to a cage, and when I’m ready draw them out of their pen one at a time, carefully and calmly by their legs. I hang them from a length of baling twine suspended from a branch on the big maple in front of the house.

They will sometimes flap, but after a minute or two they stop moving and I put my hand on their breast and calm them with a few words of thanks. I do this with every bird, probably for myself as much as their sacrifice. I have a small, extremely sharp puuuko knife I got from a neighbor as a gift fifteen years ago, and after extending their neck to bare the skin beneath the feathers, I draw it across their bright red throat and remove the head in a single movement. There is always a short pause as the body of the bird tries to work out what has become of it and then the fight or flight movements kick in and birds will begin to flap their wings as if they were flying away. The movement makes the branch they are suspended from shake and dance in a weird rhythm in synch with the sound of the wings.

It takes everything about three minutes to leave this world, no matter how you dispatch them. It starts as a flurry and a rush, blood spraying from the arteries, feather flashing white and then red. The movements diminish, slowly, almost as if they were scripted, and then there is a renewed flurry until it drops off again, slower, fading, one wing after the other, left, right, left, right…left…right…

The dogs hung out nearby on the grass, aware of everything but feigning indifference to it all. Every so often one of them will look at me with baleful eyes and then quickly look away, hoping they hadn’t done whatever the chickens did. The weather was perfect; not too warm, yet not too cool and the skies were clear with only an occasional cloud. Every once in a while, the sheep would drift past nibbling at the lawn, and while I didn’t speak for most of that time, I listened to a podcast about the fall of Byzantium, then an Englishman reading John Cheever short stories, and later a mix of Pat Metheny then Kool and the Gang. At some point it just got quiet and I stayed in that place for so long I forgot the music had stopped.

A friend dropped by on the first day when I was doing the slaughter part and he . . .

[SNIP]