On harvesting chickens

Chickens are soft creatures with strangely fragile legs. You have to be quick but gentle to grab them. This is complicated by the fact that they make an unholy fuss when grabbed. They are a prey bird after all, evolved to squawk and flap so that… well, so that you’ll drop them and they can live another day. They do seem to calm down a bit once you’ve pinned their wings and are holding them tucked into your side like a fat, fluffy, football.

Before our chicken harvest day, I had never caught a chicken in my life. I remember once tentatively touching a chicken held by someone else and my general impression was that they were pretty intimidating for a bird not known for their intelligence.

I probably made the short trip from the truck to the killing cones over a hundred times on chicken harvest day. Each time went something like this. Spike of adrenaline at the cage—grab the chicken fast (but gently!) without letting any of the other chickens escape. Ignore the screeching and flapping! Phew, yes. Got one, tucked under the arm. Take a breath, try to slow my own heartbeat so that this specific chicken can maybe feel a little bit calmer before the end. Swing the chicken around my body so that its head is facing backward, gently grab around the knees to control the feet and then head first into the cone, belly to the wall. Once there, someone else did the jugular slitting.

Then a quick dip in hot water, into the mechanical plucker, on to the eviscerating table, eventually making its way to rinsed decapitated, de-footed, body cavity emptied, whole naked bird in shrink wrap.

I’m not particularly squeamish. The bucket of blood and guts was gross, but not disturbing exactly. I also think, if you plan to eat meat—and humans are mid-food chain really—then you should remember and maybe experience that meat comes from living beings. I cared about those chickens. Cared that we tried to limit suffering as much as possible, cared that for their thirteen short weeks of life they got to hunt and peck and scratch in the sunshine in plenty of open pasture.

We humans take so many lives. At least indirectly, we’re all implicated. Perhaps the world would be a kinder place if we all looked into the face of it once in a while instead of turning away.