Kat Dancing

We've got a deal going these days with one of my mom's employees regarding meat chickens. Essentially, we buy the chicks, provide the feed, and help with the kill, and he provides the labor. He doesn't have to lay out a bunch of money, we don't have to waste time on the revolting little sods, we both get chicken that isn't the revolting industrial imitation, everybody's happy.

Today, however, was the day of reckoning in chicken-land. Sixty-five chickens to get from squawking bundles of feathers to neatly packaged freezer food. I'm fucking exhausted, and I didn't even have the hardest job - in spite of my years on the farm, I'm still a bit of a wimp about actually killing things, so I typically get put on gut duty, for which I am better mentally and physically suited (without getting into the gristly details, this is one time when having small hands and long fingernails really comes in handy.) But I spent four hours standing on hard concrete and cutting up dead meat, and that takes its toll.

At about this point most people would be asking me, with varying degrees of horror, how I could stand to kill and eat an animal that I've raised.

My answer varies, depending on what particular species we're talking about, but with chickens it's easy. I can quite happily help kill and eat a chicken because, having raised them, I know what foul and revolting beasts they are.

Disney movies have unintentionally done a real disservice to the human race, I think, because of the way they typically portray animals. At this stage, when I say "chicken", most people are thinking of cute brown hens scratching for corn in the barnyard and looking motherly and so on. And it's perfectly true that chickens will scratch in a barnyard, and that they eat corn. They also eat worms, flies, maggots, rotten flesh, and each other. When we raise baby chicks we have to use a heat lamp that gives off red light and will therefore conceal it if one of the chicks is bleeding, because the instinct of a chicken is to attack and peck whenever they see blood. Any chicken that is not actually the mother of a chick (and from time to time, even those that are) will go out of its way to catch, peck to death, and eat any young chicks that are around, and I can't tell you the number of times I've seen chickens attacking one of their number that was weak, old, or sick, pecking it to death, and eating the corpse. In addition the roosters are really vicious bastards who will fly at you the minute your back is turned, or even fly in your face and try to claw out your eyes if they think they can get away with it.

Add to this that these particular chickens were meat birds. Now, your average chicken is not exactly Einstein to begin with, and in fact generally falls into that rarified category of stupidity more often seen in creatures like sheep and George Bush. And chickens aren't generally the cleanest and pleasantest of beasts either - well below hogs, which are actually quite fastidious if given the choice, and certainly not something you'd care to be far downwind of. But meat birds, thanks to the brilliant breeding program of us humans, outdo even their own species in these areas. They're so stupid that they have to be taught to eat and drink, and taught repeatedly, as they often forget; so stupid that a full-grown bird can drown itself in half an inch of water; so stupid that an unexpected phenomena, such as, say, sunrise, will often send them into such a desperate panic that they will crush and kill each other in their frantic rush to get away from it. They can't be trained to not to sleep in their own shit, which means that by the time they're full-grown, even when you're moving the pen twice a day, the ammonia stench is still enough to knock you over at ten feet. They can't seem to learn not to shit in their own food, nor not to eat the food afterwards, which means that they're buggers for catching various diseases. Their sole purpose in life, from the time they're born, is to eat, shit, and die.

Overall I fail to feel any guilt in helping them with the last.

Hum, that turned into quite a rant - perhaps people have asked me that question once too often?

In the meantime, I have parts of the chicken I'd really rather not know existed under my fingernails and a clinging smell of burnt feather and warm meat surrounding me. I think it's past time for the bro to give me a turn in the shower.