Editor’s note: This article originally appeared April 17, 2010. We are republishing this as part of The Drive AltDaily Drive.

Mark walks into the barn carrying the chicken by its feet.

Aleia scalding a chicken. She's holding it down with the paddle.

The head dangles. There’s not much blood—that was left beneath the cone—but it’s still a bit grisly. He hands the carcass to our middle daughter who drops it into a pot of water to scald. While she moves the bird up and down with a paddle, I count 90, 89, 88…

Today we processed our last 5 chickens. We ordered them as day-old chicks and raised them here. I feel very strongly that if we are going to eat meat, we should be able to deal with the realities of what has to happen to get it on our plates. “No children, meat does not come from a plastic tray, it comes from the dead body of an animal that was once a living, breathing being.”

The water in the scalding pot is kept to 145 degrees. Of course, the temp drops when we put a chicken in and the water must be brought back up to temp before the next carcass can go into it. Each chicken is scalded for 90 seconds by verbal count.

Travis takes the birds from the scalder directly to the borrowed electric plucking machine and gets the feathers off as quickly as possible. There’s not much point in scalding if you’re going to let the chicken lay around and cool off. The whole point is to open the pores so the feathers come out easily.

Our chickens eat grains, grass, bugs and alfalfa hay. They have fresh, clean water and access to a shit-free zone every morning when we move the tractors (which is the name for the wheeled cages they live in). When processing day arrives, they go straight from their tractor to the cone, which is about as low-stress as anyone can make the death of an animal.

This is the cone. You can buy stainless steel ones but this works fine for us. Really big chickens or turkeys would need a larger cone.

“The cone” on our Chesapeake farm is modeled from a trimmed down orange traffic cone. Mark places the chicken upside down in the cone so that it’s head dangles out the bottom and the body is held snugly in place. He talks softly to each animal, offers a quiet thank you and then, using a razor sharp knife he slices, quickly, severing the neck all the way to, but not through the spine.

I am not going to try and tell you the death of one of our chickens is a painless transition to the next world. Killing an animal sucks. It is not an enjoyable task. Obviously it is worse for the bird than for us.

Our youngest daughter, Martina, is with the neighbor’s two children, who are not allowed out of their own yard. They stand by the gate and watch, two first graders and a 4 year old. Occasionally Martina runs over, looks at a chicken in the cone or being held to the rubber fingers of the plucker and runs back to the gate to report the goings on. The looks on their faces are a mixture of awe and curiosity.

We do this because it is important to me that my children understand their connection to the food they eat and feel some responsibility for providing at least part of it. We garden, we gather, my husband and the children hunt and we raise livestock and chickens for eggs and meat. My husband and I also agree that knowing where, exactly, our food comes from is a very good thing.

Mark finish plucking.

Processing day is a lot of work, all at once. I’m a better hand at the long haul, day by day feeding, moving, and watering. It’s good to have the kids help for their energy as well as having them make a contribution to our family’s food store. Butchering is hot, hard, dirty and not at all sexy, despite my descriptives.

Raising chickens is not unlike growing a garden where the planting takes bone warping work but then there is a pause. We oversee while the growing happens but overseeing is easy. I feed, wash buckets, move tractors, chat to the birds as they cluck happily over a fresh patch of grass or a juicy bug. There is one marked difference between gardening and animal husbandry: animals bleed; peas do not.

Travis hands me a plucked bird, I rinse it off, put it on the counter and find the joints where I disconnect what we eat from what made it look like a living thing. My job is cutting off the feet and heads. I have poultry sheers and a sharp, heavy knife. Mark eviscerates. Together we remove the last of the pinfeathers, rinse the carcass and drop it into the icy water bath that chills the flesh until we finish all the birds, bag them and drop them into the chest freezer.

This is why you don't purchase chickens with black feathers...

At the end of the day it is satisfying to see that we have managed to enrich our coffers. This is satisfying in a way no paycheck can ever be; this is work translated directly into food, no middle man.

If eating is going to be about ethics, I’ll subscribe to my own standards and those involve admitting that I am an omnivore, complete with some pretty nifty canines, and will sometimes use them to tear into a piece of flesh. It is good to know that the animal breathed fresh air every day of its life and ate the bugs out of our pasture. Maybe it even had a name.

If you want more info on how to process your own chickens at home try here: http://tinaessert.blogspot.com/2008/08/chicken-processing-at-mtbar.html. For information on local farms that raise grass fed livestock, check out localharvest.org and eatwild.com.

Enjoy this article? Please donate $5 to keep AltDaily’s doors open:

click me!