Post by Mitra on Jan 28, 2007 21:09:22 GMT -5
You folks who do your own butchering are like superheroes to me! I'm just not there yet I've had the luxury of being able to take chickens to a place that's 5 miles from here where they have a very slick operation. For $2.75 a chicken, they butcher, dress and package chickens. Unfortunately for me they don't operate during the winter. Well thank goodness my superhero DH is home for a few days from GA. He has all of four days home before he has to go back to GA and he did me the HUGE favor of whacking SIX roosters tonight. He's gutting them right now.
The head rooster, Dandy, can only protect so many hens at once. These young cockerels kept him running constantly saving one forlorn hen after another from their advances. Once one cockerel had a hen the others would get in line. It was awful. I was forever running out there myself to save the hens from these brutes. The last few days I've been standing guard at the chicken coop, after kicking out all the roosters, so that the hens could come down from the roosts and eat and drink. Several of the oldest hens are wasting away from lack of food and water. The last straw was today when I picked up one of the hens from the roost and she was light as a feather. I set her down by the water and she gulped beak-fulls of water. It made me want to cry.
I can say that my contribution to the "whacking" was pretty minor. After dark, I grabbed them off their roost, two at a time, and handed them to Max out the chicken coop door. He chopped their heads off about 100yds from the coop and then came back for two more. He scalded them and then tied each one and hung it by it's legs from a rafter. Then we (DH, myself and two daughters) each worked on plucking the chickens. Fortunately it was 10 degrees out or else I would have been too affected by the smell. Such a wuss!
Now they are all packaged and in the freezer. It should be a nice day tomorrow.
The head rooster, Dandy, can only protect so many hens at once. These young cockerels kept him running constantly saving one forlorn hen after another from their advances. Once one cockerel had a hen the others would get in line. It was awful. I was forever running out there myself to save the hens from these brutes. The last few days I've been standing guard at the chicken coop, after kicking out all the roosters, so that the hens could come down from the roosts and eat and drink. Several of the oldest hens are wasting away from lack of food and water. The last straw was today when I picked up one of the hens from the roost and she was light as a feather. I set her down by the water and she gulped beak-fulls of water. It made me want to cry.
I can say that my contribution to the "whacking" was pretty minor. After dark, I grabbed them off their roost, two at a time, and handed them to Max out the chicken coop door. He chopped their heads off about 100yds from the coop and then came back for two more. He scalded them and then tied each one and hung it by it's legs from a rafter. Then we (DH, myself and two daughters) each worked on plucking the chickens. Fortunately it was 10 degrees out or else I would have been too affected by the smell. Such a wuss!
Now they are all packaged and in the freezer. It should be a nice day tomorrow.