Slightly graphic, perhaps, but I really skipped photographing most of the gore. Plus, I kept the photos small.
First, we packed 12 15-week-old Buff Orpington cockerels into cardboard boxes lined with newspaper in the van (3-5 per box, three boxes):
The first step was to hang them in these cones. The processor (our friend Brian) would then quickly slit their throats and break their necks, causing them to die very quickly. Hanging them upside-down allows the blood to empty into a tray below them. The killing cones help contain the bodies, which flap and flail around for minutes after their deaths (even though they are truly dead and not suffering):
Here there should be a picture of the chickens being scalded in a big tank of 145 degree water for 1-2 minutes until their feathers come off easily, but before the chicken is able to cook. I didn’t get a photo of this, unfortunately.
Here is Brian dunking the scalded chicken into the feather plucker (a fast spinning machine with rubber-like “fingers” that magically removes all the feathers in seconds!):
Brian holding three freshly plucked chickens:
The processing table (stainless steel for easy cleaning):
Removing the heads (gotta love that face):
Brian and Jason working on the chickens (removing feet and heads, insides, saving giblets and some organs for eating); you can see most everything used to process the chickens in this picture, except the scalding tank (there’s even a box of live chickens in the lower right hand corner):
Still working on those chickens. I was chasing children for most of this part, so I don’t have many details on how the cleaning out of the body went. Jason will have to write that up for me, so we can remember: 
And here’s how they looked, all done and bagged up:
We put a bag of ice into each cooler and let the coolers sit on the north side of our house for a day. Letting the chickens cool in a refrigerator or cooler for a day allows the body to relax and makes for better tasting chicken. We were blessed that it was one of the coolest July days on record (barely mid-sixties!), and we live in the woods, so the coolers with ice in them were nice and cool:
The chickens were processed on Friday, and we put 11 in the freezer Saturday evening, saving one out for Sunday’s dinner. As I just blogged, it was delicious. Seriously life-changing chicken.
Very interesting….I prefer to not think about how my chicken gets on the table though.
Were the kids sad about it?
I’m curious if you’ve calculated the cost of the chickens in the end? Just wondering!
hey, if you’re gonna eat them, you should know what kind of life and death they had, eh?
they weren’t sad. they even asked to watch the processing and didn’t express any horror or sadness. i think taking care of and processing your own chickens is a very natural thing to do, and for young children, it doesn’t seem odd at all. maya did say (later on) that she was sad to see the chickens go, but that she was happy to eat them and understood why we did it. it helped that we told them from the day we brought the chicks home that we would be eating half of them this year and the rest in years to come; they knew it was food and not pets.
and the cost – that’s a good question. i just calculated it, and based on feed only, it cost $4.99/chicken to raise them to 15 weeks. the costs go up if you factor in equipment/housing (which can be used for many batches of chickens to come) and processing (which we blessedly did not have to pay for this round). so $4.99/bird for pastured, healthy chickens is a super deal.
Interesting! My husband processed chickens with his family a number of years ago before I was in the picture…he’s a farm boy, I grilled him the other day about the process as we’d love to get chickens someday. But this was a lot more detailed than his account.
Here is what I remember about the butchering:
-Pull the chicken from the defeathering machine.
-Inspect the bird for remaining feathers and pull them out with fingers and/or pliers.
-Pull off the head and put it into the waste bucket.
-Cut off the feet at the joint using a knife; discard feet or (in our case) keep them for making chicken stock.
-With chicken belly down, cut off gland near the tail with a scooping motion toward the tail.
-With chicken belly down(?) swipe the knife at the base of the neck to cut through the skin only.
-Flip over the bird and carefully continue the cut to remove the skin from the entire neck, being careful not to cut into the esophagus or crop (where the food is stored).
-Pull off the neck skin.
-Grab the trachea and slowly pull it out until it comes free.
-Stick fingers between the muscle-and-vertebrae neck and the other stuff (like the crop and esophagus) and pull them free.
-Pull the crop up and sideways to free it from the inside walls of the bird so it can be pulled out from the bottom later.
-From time to time as we were cutting we sprayed the bird with water to prevent the skin from getting dry and discolored.
-Flip the bird onto its back with the neck away from you.
-Cut completely around the rear hole (cloaca?), going all the way through the skin and other membrane but being careful not to cut through the intestinal tract. Also avoid the pelvic bones to reduce knife dulling.
-Pull out the intestine.
-Scoop your hand inside the bird to free up the insides and pull out the rest of the intestine, heart, gizzard, liver, crop, et cetera.
-The lungs are so thin and tight to the rib cage, that I had to scoop hard with my fingertips to get them out.
-The gizzard can be pulled apart from the rest of the material. (How we cut the gizzard is written later)
-The liver can be separated by pulling as well, but the bile-filled bladder needs to be pinched off from the liver as you pull.
-The heart can also be pulled apart from the rest of the material.
-Note: The hearts, livers, feet, and gizzards were dropped in a bucket of clean water to keep them fresh. The intenstine, neck skin, heads, and all other waste was dropped in a waste bucket and later buried.
-Once the insides were completely removed, the inside was inspected for remaining debris and then sprayed out with clean water.
-Then the chicken was dropped into the large tank of cold, clean water.
-The gizzards still had partially digested food in them, so we gathered the gizzards and cut into them along the edge of their disk shape until we had gone at least 1/2 way through them and had exposed the inside wall. We flipped them open and rinsed out the food. Then we peeled out the thick yellow skins from their insides. Then we put them back into the bucket of water. There was another whitish soft membrane under the yellow layer, but we left that on (not sure if that is standard practice).
-Later the birds were pulled from the water, individually bagged, kept cool for 24 hours, and then frozen (except for the one we put in the fridge and ate on Sunday. Yum.
We also bagged up the hearts, feet, gizzards and livers.
I may have forgotten something, but this is the best I can remember. It was definitely not as easy as it looked.
I’m an expat American city boy who ended up living in rural New Zealand, and recently we got our first chickens – just for the eggs.
But recently a neighbor gave me and my partner our first lesson in chicken killing and cleaning. Ugh. I couldn’t do the deed. I just held the poor rooster’s feet while my partner brought the axe down. Horrible!
If I had to kill my own chickens, I might end up vegetarian. Let’s just say the headless bird did back flips. Two of then. ‘Nuff said.
we raised Cornish Rocks for our meat birds and just got them process( we sent them out, for 2.25 a bird, freezer ready, it was a no brainer), they were between 8 1/2 and 10 lbs a piece at 9 weeks old, we will eat our first one tonight, so we will see how they taste.