We are a blue house in a relative sea of red. We are urban professionals that commute to the country. We love animals, so we slaughter them.
We were recently at a large concert and among the “water pipes” and the cheap t-shirts due to externalized costs, were the pro-vege booths. They had a listing of local vegan/vegetarian restaurants that I was interested in because we strive to eat less meat*. On the front side of the sheet of paper was a brief argument for “Why Vegan?”. As I read their statements I was puzzled. The list was the same list of arguments for why we seek out humane, local, organic sources for meat… or raise our own.
* I think it’s inarguable that it’s very likely you/me/we should all be diversifying our protein sources and eating less meat for our health, the environment, and the animals.
I will segue here for a moment and acknowledge that I am well aware that these are not the only reasons some people chose a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle (and yes, I know the difference between the two). I found it fascinating though that these appear to be the most compelling. If you are vegan/vege because you feel eating animals is “wrong” or your preferred religion or deity decrees it so, then there is clearly no arguing your choice.
The sheet detailed the inhumane treatment of laying chickens, complete with details of battery cages, debeaking, force moulting, short-life spans, rampant antibiotic/medication use, and stress. It detailed unsuccessful slaughters of all kinds and the environmental impact of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feed Operations).
Yet to every point there is a meat-eating alternative. I was left with the impression that their underlying message was ‘it’s too hard to stop/change these things so let’s opt out’. Rather than opting out of the conversation, we chose to take control of it. Sure it requires more work and it’s not nearly as convenient, but it’s encouraging those farms/producers to continue doing what they are. Even better, you could consider raising your own. Slaughtering, plucking, eviscerating, and butchering 14 chickens by hand will seriously make you look at that chicken nugget differently. There is a lot of externalized work and guilt embodied in what’s on your plate, and having to do it yourself, at least once, will remind you why it shouldn’t be taken lightly, but that doesn’t mean chicken is off the menu.
You can argue that the vegan/vege is ‘voting with their dollars’ by boycotting meat or animal products, but I see it as negative versus positive reinforcement of desired behavior. You can just as easily ‘vote’ by giving your money to a farm that’s doing things “right”.
I think we need to unite the vegan and the farmer. In the argument on where our food comes from and how it is treated there is one answer, but many paths to get there.
It “…isn’t about being perfect or pure—it’s about reducing suffering.”
From: http://www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/
We have a chicken named Sassy, Sassy Red specifically. She’s a Rhode Island Red from last year’s flock.
We have a rooster named Boots. He’s a Brahma and therefore has feathered feet. He’s actually a very good rooster as far as rooster’s go. He’s relatively quiet and docile.
Sassy appears to be Boots’ favorite hen. This has it’s up sides and down sides. When Boots gets a tasty treat he shares with Sassy first. Sassy suffers from too much “love” from Boots though, so Sassy gets a saddle.
When roosters mate with a hen they step up on the hen’s back, dig in their talons, and often grab the hen’s comb or head feathers in their beak to hang on. The unfortunate effect of this, if the rooster-to-hen ratio is off or (as in Sassy’s case) he has a particular preference, is that the hen can suffer from missing feathers which can eventually lead to actual wounds. In order to prevent this, many chicken farmers leverage a “saddle”. They are reportedly easy to sew, but I suffer from occasional bouts of laziness. I ordered Sassy’s saddle from Hen Saver. (You know you talk chickens too much when the Gmail targeted advertising shows you things like this regularly.)
The saddle was simple enough to put on. When we closed the hens up that night we simply picked up Sassy and slipped her wings through the straps and set her back in the coop. She immediately became confused and proceeded to thrash around the coop trying to walk backwards to get the thing off. I became increasingly distressed during this behavior as I was trying to help her, not hurt or scare her. She settled down for the night and we turned off the coop light to ensure she got no undue attention from the other hens. The next morning she was much better adjusted and only had a couple moments of trying to walk backwards. Once she had a chance to stretch her wings a bit more the saddle seemed to settle and she seemed entirely unphased by it.
So far it appears to be having the desired effect and Sassy’s back is protected from the aggressive affection of Boots.
There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.
“Shall I have naught that is fair?” saith he;
“Have naught but the bearded grain?
Though the breath of these flowers is sweet to me,
I will give them all back again.”
He gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes,
He kissed their drooping leaves;
It was for the Lord of Paradise
He bound them in his sheaves.
I realized that when deciding to raise animals as food, death was inevitable. I had assumed that those deaths would be primarily the premeditated, planned, humane efforts of our own hands. Death can never be taken lightly, but the death that we do not understand or can not name is by far the most challenging to come to terms with.
When we lose an animal to a predator I’m able to reconcile my grief with thoughts of the greater circle of life. If it wasn’t my chicken it would be one of the pheasant escapees from the near by game preserve, or perhaps worse, someone’s companion pet. Either way those wild animals have just as much right to exist as we do, and my loss may be just what another needs to continue life.
As Bengt is in the process of detailing, when we choose to take a life it’s with every effort of compassion, sympathy, and consideration… and perhaps above all else, gratefulness and thanks.
But when we lose a life and feel we have no choice or control over the matter it is the hardest. It’s harder still when that life has barely just begun.
The first flock of chickens we purchased from the feed store, rather than direct from the hatchery. I watched over them fastidiously to ensure that I made no errors in my ignorance. We lost no chicks.
The second flock we purchased was directly from the hatchery. Of the 27 that arrived, one died in the first days. I had assumed I’d failed at my diligence to ensure they weren’t “pasting up”, even though once I cleaned her up she continued to decline. Not knowing what else to do, when we came to the determination that she was beyond recovery, we broke her neck to hasten the end in case she was suffering.
The third flock arrived this past weekend, direct from the hatchery. Of the 26 that arrived, three have died with in the first few days, the third dying Saturday night. One by one they’d become lethargic and less active. They could be roused occasionally but they would immediately sit down and drift back to what appeared sleep, as if they had no energy left. They would move less, and less and therefore stop drinking and eating. It all happens quite quickly, in less than 12 hours.
With the second chick we debated how to intervene, but when she started to droop it was nearly midnight and we have no medications on hand. We left her where she seemed to be happiest, snuggled in to the fluff of the other chicks, sleeping. By early morning she had passed sleeping among the flock.
The third we tried to coax in to drinking water by putting droplets on her beak or dipping her beak. She’d drink occasionally, but continuously tried to drift off. We decided to try separating her because the other chicks were active, awake, and kept climbing right over her. We put her in to a small box with water, under the warming light with openings she could see through. She laid down with her face towards one of the openings, occasionally crying to the rest of the flock. They would come over and peck like mad at the box, occasionally pecking at her, forcing her to move a little further away from the opening. Chickens can be cruel.
I checked on her every hour, trying to entice her to drink water until she couldn’t be roused at all. At this point we had a conversation about suffering and death. Was it better to let her drift off to sleep while her body slowly gave way and her breathing became more or more shallow while nestled among her flock sharing their warmth, or was it better to end her journey quickly and judiciously?
I questioned my role… Was I doing something wrong? Was I failing my little charges in some way? As I pondered the three flocks we’ve raised, I realized that when purchasing the chicks from the feed store I was essentially externalizing the mortality rate. I have no doubt, now, that it existed with those chicks as well, but it wasn’t under my watch.
We opted to leave her isolated for fear of being trampled, but where she could see and hear her flock and remain under the warming light. I continued to check on her regularly and her breath became fainter and harder to discern with each hour. She passed on in the night.
There is relatively clear guidance on humane slaughter, but not so much on humane death in general with livestock. It’s considered humane to slit the bird’s cardiac artery to render them unconscious while their heart pumps the remaining blood from their body in slaughter. It’s hard to understand how much they suffer during this procedure. A sharp knife and a skilled hand brings on a dark sleep quickly, but what about these little birds? The chick mortality rate is estimated at anywhere from 10-50% depending on the situation. Real world mortality rates for similar animals (ducks, geese) are more harsh, with disease, predators, or defects claiming a larger portion. A mother duck doesn’t spend much time on a sickly duckling. She can’t count to ensure that all of her babies are with her. If you don’t follow and fall behind, you don’t survive. It’s mother nature at work culling her creatures for the strongest and smartest.
Ultimately the crux remains… I feel helpless, and my guilt hinges on that. There is little I can do. There is little to even attempt to do. I’m left feeling like I failed this little life, being rendered helpless. There are all sorts of practical reasons for not nursing a weak chick, but “Failure to thrive” seems like such a cruel, yet indeterminate answer.
For now I think I’ve come to terms that they appear happier when allowed to come to their end naturally, with mother nature gathering them in her sweet embrace as she sees fit. We wouldn’t hesitate to end a creature’s suffering if appropriate, but it’s not clear to me that they are suffering.
“My Lord has need of these flowerets gay,”
The Reaper said, and smiled;
“Dear tokens of the earth are they,
Where he was once a child.”
“They shall all bloom in fields of light,
Transplanted by my care,
And saints, upon their garments white,
These sacred blossoms wear.”
And the mother gave, in tears and pain,
The flowers she most did love;
She knew she should find them all again
In the fields of light above.
O, not in cruelty, not in wrath,
The Reaper came that day;
‘T was an angel visited the green earth,
And took the flowers away.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
As I explained in my last post, last December, I decided to raise my own birds for meat. Having helped another family slaughter sixty chickens, when I was age 6 or 7, I was complacently comfortable with the idea. In the dark of winter, I didn’t figure out all the details. I’m prone to grandiose hand-waving accompanied by “It’ll be fine” or “We’ll figure it out, later.” The minutia that matters had been left as an exercise for the spring (with me as the “idea guy,” Kat frequently gets stuck with some of these details to “figure out”). In mid-February, Kat asked a question so simple it belies its complexity. “How many and what breed?” She was ordering our egg chicks from a mega-hatchery in the mid-west and needed to place the order. I still hadn’t done any research or prep work, knowing I’d figure it out when I needed to (insert hand waving here)… well, I needed to.
I spent a couple of hours digging into Wikipedia articles and documentation on breeds typically raised for meat and concluded that I’d go with the “most common, failsafe, typical” breed. Jumbo Cornish Cross is a breed that originated in the 30’s, selectively bred for large breasts and the speed of growth. When you buy chicken at the grocery store or in a restaurant, this is almost unvaryingly the breed you’re getting. I brushed aside a couple of alarmist comments on www.forums.so-you-wanna-raise-and-slaughter-chickens-huh.com or another backyard chicken chat site. People claimed that they were ‘unnatural freaks of nature’ and similar non-specific complaints. Yeah, yeah, ok. (Insert more grandiose hand-waving) I needed to tell Kat what to order and needed to do it now. “It’ll be fine. I’m sure they’re just reacting to factory farm conditions… the same thing we’d have concerns about. (more hand-waving).”
$1.25/chick
quantity 14 (“I dunno, whatta you think? How ‘bout a dozen?”)
add to cart
checkout
done (hand waving away the rest of the important details, “we’ve got months”)
5AM, our phone rings. We missed this call, but it woke us up enough to check our voicemail. The message said, “Your chickens are here. Please come pick them up.” Our post office is a small, single counter, rural post office and when I arrived, 20 minutes later, I could hear a cacophony of tiny baby bird cheeps from the lobby. After I rang the will-call bell, the top-half of the Dutch door opened to reveal two full-sized tables covered in little boxes of chicks; a heat lamp was somewhat precariously hung over each table. CHEEPCHEEPCHEEPCHEEP, the largest hatchery in the US only has a few delivery dates and our delivery was clearly only one of dozens in our part of rural Washington State, today. The Duvall post office clearly knows the drill and prepared appropriately. Our tiny box emitted a solid CHEEPCHEEPCHEEPCHEEP on the drive home and it continued as they were transferred into the makeshift brooder box fashioned out of Home Depot scrap lumber, last year (less than $7, including casters.)
They seemed innocent enough. They were exactly the same size as this spring’s “egg bird” chickens and their demeanor almost identical. They were adorable, as all baby chicks are. They were fluffy, white, and almost completely helpless. All the chicks pooled under the heat lamp and did their best “melting” routine. As they fall asleep, they allow all their tiny muscles to relax and as their little bodies slowly settle into the pine shavings, they leave the impression that they’re melting. “These aren’t freak of nature chicks. They’re just chicks.”
A few days later, it was clear that these birds were bred for meat. They packed on the pounds at an alarming rate. Clearly larger than the layer chicks, I was concerned about the equitable distribution of food and introduced a divider down the center of the box to separate them from the layer chicks. At two weeks, the Cornish Cross chicks were nearly twice the size of the breeds we’d purchased as layers. In addition to the “meat birds”, Kat had ordered some layer hen chicks to replace those eaten by predators, last year: Black Sex-Links, Arucanas, Barred Rocks, and were surprised with a Brahma or Cochin “Free Chick” rooster (“buy 25, get a free rare bird”). This year and last, I’d admired how the Sex-Links always aggressively pursued food. They seemed to have great survival instincts and were bold, outgoing, and curious… but they were amateurs compared with the Crosses. These girls wanted their meal and wanted it NOW! We took to calling the left-half of the box the “Fatty Chickens” or “The Fatties.” When we talked about them, Kat often referred to them as “your chickens,” reminding me that this motley bunch was my idea. Her not-so-subtle slips of language took the form of comments like, “Have you fed your chickens yet?” or “Man, your chickens are nasty.”
Each trip to the garage, just hours apart, I’d find that The Fatties had completely emptied their food. On the other side of the box, an equal number of “egg birds” (which we’d started calling, the “Little Girls”) had barely touched theirs. I augmented with a second feeder. They emptied both. Having read a lot more about this breed, I started regulating food. The most scathing commentary about the bird highlights that, given free access to food, their bodies grow out of proportion and their legs can’t support their rapidly growing bodies. I found some missives that described several families’ experiences. Most of them still seemed to think that it was acceptable to raise this breed, with a few caveats… including the rate that they’re allowed to consume feed.
At 4 weeks, they’d outgrown their half of the brooder box and were transferred outside. Some perspective is due here. All 25 chicks were shipped in a small vented cardboard box roughly 10 inches square and about 3 inches tall (remember that these hatched from eggs). It was a cozy fit, but they could still move around (they won’t ship fewer than 25, as they need to have contact with other chicks for warmth). Less than a month later, 14 of these chicks had outgrown their 4 foot by 3 foot section of the box. They’d grown from the point where I could hold 3 or 4 of them in one hand to each of them roughly the size and shape of a small cantaloupe, roughly the size of our one year old laying hens. Size wasn’t the only indicator that the Fatties had ‘turbo instructions’ in their genetic programing. They were fully feathered. The Little Girls more closely resembled a can of soda and had just started putting on feathers, giving them a loveable awkward gangly teenager look.
With the weather warming up, we assembled a roosting house out of 3/8ths inch plywood, tacked some poultry netting to t-posts and relocated The Fatties to their own front yard pasture. They adapted quickly and the Little Girls were happy to have the full brooder box to themselves. I continued to regulate The Fatties’ food and they took to foraging better than I expected. They’d occasionally find some unfortunate worms, slugs, bugs, or grubs. They scratched the lawn in their makeshift pasture and picked at the more tender grass. Chickens acting like chickens. All I could have hoped for.
I was, however, shocked at how quickly they grew. Their legs had grown in a wide stance like a linebacker with huge pectoral muscles filling everything between. The fat squat little birds waddled and flapped their wings when they ran. I’d never thought of a chicken as graceful, but started to regard our full-grown laying hens as ballerinas by contrast. We often joked that they looked like they had really bad boob jobs, as the size and angle of their breasts looked… well… fake.
By 5 weeks, The Fatties were the size and weight of a 5-lbs. bag of sugar. They were lazy and awkward. They largely sat alternately in the shade, and the sun, then back again. The foraging instinct had given way to the chicken equivalent of couch-potato-channel-surfing-pizza-delivery-ordering-sloth. They had started to eat while lying on their tremendous belly girth. Food, or the promise of food, was the only thing that could get them to move at a speed faster than a crawl. I continued to regulate feed and was horrified to see how they were plowing through ½ gallon of feed in under ½ hour. These were, by all measures, lazy, fat, American chickens.
A comparison between the size of the “egg birds” and “meat birds”, at 5 weeks. They share the same hatch-day; exactly the same age.
Curious Jumbo Cornish-X. Note the development of the breasts and width of the legs.
Another curious Jumbo Cornish-X.
Gabriella, a Buff Orpington from the previous year, circles the front-yard run, looking for errant scratch.
At 6 weeks, we moved the Little Girls out of the brooder box and into the fenced front-yard pasture with The Fatties. After a few turf wars and establishing pecking order (Fatties first, as they were over twice the size of the Little Girls), they settled in. We moved the roosting house every day or two and the entire fenced area was moved every week or so. The Fatties sat with no regard for hygiene, often not moving when they pooped, resulting in crusty chicken shit on their feathers. I hadn’t exactly thought about our laying hens as “clean,” but when presented with these foul eating-pooping-sitting-machines, I started to.
At 7 weeks, in a poorly planned and poorly executed attempt to weigh them, I drew the conclusion that the one I plucked out of the pen was “at least 7 pounds.” By this point, we were trying to decide which weekend to slaughter them. They didn’t seem unhappy, but we felt wrong about letting them continue. We were into the peak of summer and it was evident that the heat was too much for them. They sat on their huge chests, with one leg cocked out to the side and their wings hoisted off their bodies in an attempt to stay cool. The Little Girls were fine and actually seemed to enjoy the sun. We setup a misting system to provide some evaporative cooling for The Fatties, it seemed to help, but just highlighted that these are not “natural chickens” (natural = “of nature” and we had to give these birds A/C). The weather cooled for the next couple weeks, while they continued to eat and grow.
It was clear that these birds were going to be better off in our freezer than in our yard.
In the next post(s), I’ll share our second experience slaughtering chickens.
This last winter, I decided to raise “meat birds” alongside our flock of egg laying chickens. We’ve always been aware of our food sources and since we started raising chickens, I’ve become increasingly reluctant to purchase chicken from grocery stores. Even the ‘upper crust’ retailers including PCC Natural Markets and Whole Foods (affectionately and accurately called Whole Paycheck) who tend to carry products claiming to be natural, organic, free-range, pastured, massaged, and pampered couldn’t assuage my guilt. I knew how our “egg birds” were treated, with table scraps and forage, wandering wherever the bugs and slugs took them. I couldn’t convincingly conjure that image to match even the boutique brands of butcher-wrapped breasts or thighs. Sure, some are better than others… but they’re still raising thousands of birds. Scale and cost always have trade-offs.
It’s worth a brief aside on my perspective on raising animals, commercially, as pets, for byproducts, or for personal consumption. In the past few years, there have been vast numbers books written encouraging people to be more aware of what they eat. Several of them, including the works of poster boy Michael Pollan, talk about the buzzwords, laws, politics, marketing, and myths behind the meat we buy. Most of what I’ve read reinforces my motto. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but it works for me.
I strive to provide a situation where the animal can behave the way it wants to behave.
Rephrased, this aids in my decisions about what I eat: “was this animal allowed to behave the way it wants to behave? The way it would without people here?”
If you’re eating a chicken, did it freely roam and scratch the soil for bugs? If you’re going to spread chevre on a piece of toast, was it milked from a goat that wandered and grazed on a variety of foods? Was it allowed to climb on rocks or stumps?
This more than anything else cuts through much of the complexity of the decisions we have to make about animal treatment. This question, ultimately, is why our freezer if full of our chickens. Research into the producers whose chicken is available in retail around us left me uncomfortable with the answer to that question. In the best cases, the answer was inconclusive. In others, it was deceptive. Most labels follow the “letter of the law” and use phrases that conjure sunny grass filled pastures with animals frolicking free and grazing on dandelion greens and wildflowers. The “letter of the law” allows for some pretty loose interpretations of the words “free range” and allows for liberal use of unregulated words like “natural, pasture raised, and antibiotic free.” While the picturesque scenery and accompanying language on the label is nice, it probably bears little resemblance to the warehouse where that McChicken was raised.
So… we decided to raise chickens for food. In another post, I’ll delve into some of our experiences.
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