My first experience with butchery was a family affair. Until owning my own small backyard flock, I had never conceived of myself as somebody who could, or ever would, butcher an animal for food.
I wasn’t raised on a farm. The only chickens I knew came in packages; neatly dressed, plucked, drained of blood, and ready for the stewpot or skillet.
Like many of you, the concept of killing a chicken was an abstract notion to me. It was rendered in my mind as a cartoonish affair: a farmer in overalls, an axe, and a block of wood. Until my first real hands-on experience with butchery I never considered my personal ethical code regarding killing birds for meat. Nor did I ever think that I would become so good at the act that I would later teach people how, why, and in what way a chicken should be prepared for the table.
Prior to all of this, the cost of chicken meat was calculated purely in terms of cost per pound at the grocery store. The cost of meat had nothing to do with my own two hands, nor did it weigh on my psyche in terms of whether or not the act of killing was morally acceptable or repugnant. That, of course, all changed when we got chicks.
My wife and I had obtained a rag-tag flock of chicks that, of course, grew into chickens.
Big, beautiful, marvelously intelligent, and wonderfully amusing birds. Our first flock was heterogeneous in breed and mixed in sex. They lived in a converted shed behind our house, smack in the center of the city. Of our flock, most were buxom or bantam hens, roaming our little sward, plucking bugs from the dirt and bathing in dust.
While our hens were a peaceful bunch (for the most part), our boisterous rooster was decidedly unquiet. The rooster’s cacophonous dissention became problematic for us on a number of levels.
For instance, once matured into a cockerel, he proudly announced himself to the neighborhood. Before dawn, at dawn, and at five-minute intervals throughout the day until the sun sloped past the horizon—incessant was the crowing.
While he crowed, not only did he scrap amongst the hens for dominance, but he also adopted a behavior that can only be described as rapey.
I learned many lessons about the true nature of “the pecking order” at that time. At the same time, our inquiring neighbors had questions, which alongside the rising din of crows, became increasingly common. And not all were pleasantly curious.
After long deliberation, it was decided that we needed to cull.
It was my brother in law, along with his family, who taught me how to butcher a chicken. And while that sentence sounds wildly disturbing in any other context, in this one it is supremely bucolic. When I learned how to dispatch and butcher fowl, it was in the most pastoral and familial setting imaginable. On that day, four generations from three families assembled.
Those who were present ranged from toddlers to grandparents—and most participated in the slaughter in some way. Around the same time that my wife and I obtained our first flock, my in-laws also obtained flocks. While our flock was intended to be a backyard flock of egg-layers, they aimed for a fridge stocked with meat.
On the morning of the day I learned to butcher, my wife and I had managed to capture and separate the rooster, who was placed in a cat carrier, and withheld of food. As we drove down to the farm where processing day would occur, The Blonde Silkie—as our rooster was known—was uncharacteristically quiet.
The family who were processing “the meat birds” had already started their work before my wife and I arrived. Before we began, I was given a tour of the workflow and several established stations set up for specific tasks.
First, an enclosure sat which held the birds to be culled, all were provided with plenty of water but had food withheld.
Next, a series of “kill cones” were strung along a fence. The men handling this task also set up a small table with razors and sharp knives. Below the line of cones, bright arterial blood sat in thick clots on the soil.
A turkey-fryer and propane tank was next. The scalding tub was intended to loosen feathers.
In the air was a strangely familiar smell, that of poached chicken meat. Along a clothes-line strung between two trees, dead fowl were hung after the scald, steaming and waiting to be plucked. Fat wasps streaked through the air, slowing the process for the women tasked with that job.
On the next table were tubs of water, some iced, others held tools—knives of various shapes, for different tasks. A faint odor of bleach hung in the air. Finally, on the table that the grandparents manned, a vacuum sealing machine, spools of plastic bags, and an ice-chest sat.
The day was hot and the sun shone brightly. Everybody wore a bright smile. Literally everyone, from the engrossed children who ran about the yard, to the parents and grandparents wore smiles as bright as that sun, their eyes shining pleasantly.
While the aforementioned story of how I learned to butcher is wholly pleasant; in fact, one of my most cherished memories, it does not capture the range of emotions that one submits to when committing to killing a bird for meat.
Before I slaughtered my own bird for the first time I watched the process from start to finish, twice, in order to acclimate myself. The process, from holding-pen to chest freezer, from chipper chicken poking at the ground to the more familiar, sterile meat-in-a-hermetic-bag, only took about ten minutes.
What surprised me the most about that day was not the killing process, although unnerving at first, but instead the sunny attitudes and comradery of all involved.
Although the central process of that day was wholesale death, the day’s ethos emanated pure life. It was truly a family affair. The aim was the provision of food.
The method was procedural, methodical, and instructive. Watching the process gave me the courage to do it myself. Later, I took that experiential knowledge and passed it on—teaching my own friends, guiding them through the process.
When I tell people about butchery, the reaction that I get is largely one of shock, revulsion, and sometimes, fear.
While it is perfectly normal for somebody to eat meat, increasingly those same meat-eaters are the ones who are most apprehensive about how meat actually comes to exist. It’s not unusual to make meat with your own two hands.
In fact, in strictly historical terms, not making your own meat is unusual.
Taking a life, in this sense, is a way to sustain life—as counterintuitive as that seems. Animal husbandry is the most natural human practice in the world, perhaps only second to agricultural management.
Besides the actual end product of making meat, raising animals for meat sustains the social connections that bind families. From choosing day-old chicks at the farm or feed store, to the grisly process of evisceration and portioning, raising birds for meat (or for eggs) is a community activity—a family affair.
What was once was a mainstay of everyday life has become a curiosity. And I think the reverse should be true.
Now here’s the point: What we gain from learning and teaching one another, these storied practices also sustain one of the most basic of human desires—that of community.
Of sustaining life, itself.