I admit, I kind of wanted to kill a chicken. Last spring, when I bought a dozen hatchlings, the cashier at the feed store told me that one of them might "accidentally" grow up to be a rooster. Because roosters are illegal in my Northern California suburb, I would have to get rid of it. To say that I hoped one of the fluffy chicks was male would be overstating the case, but it would be fair to say I was at peace with the prospect. Though I've never intentionally killed anything more evolved than a crab, I was pretty sure I could cull a rooster. But you never really know.
Slaughtering one's own meat has become a rite of passage for Americans who are serious about food, almost an imperative. All the cool kids are doing it, and there's something boastful in their accounts. "You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened, or you can look it in the eye and know it," writes Barbara Kingsolver before dispatching turkeys (“heritage,” of course) in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. And then there's Michael Pollan. "The more I'd learned about the food chain, the more obligated I felt to take a good, hard look at all of its parts," Pollan writes in The Omnivore's Dilemma, as he prepares to annihilate some poultry: "It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, which I was then and still am, that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends."
No, it's not too much to ask. I entirely agree. But what exactly is one supposed to glean from the experience? A biology lesson? A deeper reverence for the animals that die for our dining pleasure? A decision to give up eating flesh altogether?
I should have known that Arlene—big, rude, handsome Arlene—was a boy. Even as a downy chick huddled under a light bulb, Arlene was more butch, brawny, and aggressive than the others. One morning in August, she proclaimed her manhood. The crowing of a rooster is a sound my neighborhood has not heard for decades, and there was no question from whose Clampett-like yard it emanated.
It was suggested that I give Arlene to someone who lives in the country, that I free him in the woods (to be humanely dismembered by raccoons?), or that I return him to the feed store. I knew exactly what I was going to do. "I could never butcher one of my pets," a friend reproached, which pissed me off. Neither could I. But semiferal Arlene, who swaggered around the yard snarfing up centipedes and bullying the hens? Not a pet.
Launch a photo gallery of the grisly death of Arlene.
My father, who put himself through college working at a slaughterhouse, came over to help with the job. None of us had laid hands on Arlene in weeks. At the sight of us, the chicken raced around the yard, squawking furiously, until, after a flying tackle, he was landed. A worthy foe, that bird. I let my father do the hard part. I held Arlene down on a stump and watched my father cut off his head with a pair of gardening shears. Arlene thrashed for a bit and went still. My hands were covered with blood.
We took Arlene back to the house, and I dunked him in scalding water, holding him by his chalk-green feet. When I pulled him out, he smelled like wet cat. Plucking isn't much harder than shucking corn, and the feathers came off in sticky fistfuls. After slicing open the body and scooping out the innards, I possessed a fowl that (sort of) resembled the pale birds at the supermarket.
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Comments
Killing chickens...or not
By: alexlewin | Wed, 11/25/2009 - 13:30
Jennifer, thanks for the article.
My experience trying to kill chickens, and failing:
http://feedmelikeyoumeanit.blogspot.com/2009/11/killing-chickens.html
Listen, we can be omnivores.
By: 2Sassy | Mon, 09/21/2009 - 14:52
Listen, we can be omnivores. But frankly we don't need to be, especially in today's land of plenty. Human beings can exist without meat and animal products--quite well in fact. We eat meat because it tastes good. We don't need it. We shouldn't compare ourselves to carnivorous predators, because we're not. In order to kill animals we need tools. A lion does not. We *always* choose to eat meat, so let's jettison the notion that it's some kind of primal hard-wired urge. It's just an excuse.
Killing animals sucks, it's gross, it's messy and it's a pain in the ass. And as you mentioned, chickens eat centipedes, ew! Animals are actually gross creatures. They smell, they urinate, have bowel movements and eat yucky things. It's very unpleasant. So is killing them and scooping out their guts.
If you don't care about animal suffering, fine. But at the very least you should have to do the work yourself because killing shouldn't be easy. Factory farms, slaughterhouses and supermarkets have stepped in to allow us to eat meat all the time, because they take care of the dirty work. It makes it easier on us, mentally and physically.
As nice as that is, large scale, mechanized killing--whether its chickens, cows or pussy cats (or human beings) is a problem. It's not gratefulness or appreciation we need establish (though that would be nice), it's not about you and your feelings, and what helps you sleep at night. It's about being responsible for the lives you take and admitting that your killing an animal, not because you're starving and there's nothing else to eat but to fulfill some frivolous desire to eat chicken soup. I suppose people have killed for much less...
In any case, someone has to be responsible for extinguishing life off the face of the earth, whether we enjoy the responsibility or not.
"not too much to ask of a meat-eater"
By: vim876 | Mon, 09/21/2009 - 12:34
Great Post. I eat meat, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't kill a chicken unless I were actually starving. On the other hand, I have surgery when my insides are messed up, and I can't stand hearing about what they're going to do. (I think I actually dread my bunion surgery consult more than the surgery itself, or the pain.) I'm an omnivore, and I'm comfortable with that because it's part of nature. Bears eat meat and plants, and so do people. I think that I'm more aware of where my food comes from than most. I can't eat meat off the bone, because I think about dying animals while I eat. My dad used to kill and clean catfish we caught in the backyard. I will not eat meat from a feedlot; at some point I realized that to be comfortable being responsible for the death of another creature, I had to know that it had lived a real life, with fields and sky. But I also don't have any illusions about animal purity. Growing up, my best friend had chickens, and I learned that if you break an egg on the ground in front of them, they'll eat it. Nature is not gentle, and as a part of nature, neither are we. We won't stop killing. We're predators. But what out brain capacity allows us to do is to reflect on and understand the sacredness of the life that comes before.
nice share dude
By: affek | Sun, 09/20/2009 - 18:02
nice share dude
Next time, I would recommend
By: griffinkittycat | Sat, 09/19/2009 - 01:13
Next time, I would recommend taking the feet off your bird before cooking, unless you really like lots of tiny bones in a cartilaginous mass.
So you didn't actually kill the bird.
By: tom99 | Fri, 09/18/2009 - 16:34
Kind of defeats the purpose of your experiment if you don't actually do it. Go out and shoot, butcher, and eat a deer - a cute, furry, cuddly deer - and then come back and write this article. Then it will actually be meaningful.
um
By: ddh8x | Fri, 09/18/2009 - 10:27
I don't want to be picky, but since you weren't the one to "do the hard part," and kill the chicken yourself, maybe that's part of the reason you didn't feel anything. It's hard to make a claim about something you mostly were just a witness to.
chicken
By: boredwell | Fri, 09/18/2009 - 08:12
well, your description of Arlene's dispatch was certainly more humane than those PETA vids documenting farmed birds'final moments. Raised on small farm, I fed the chickens and gathered their eggs and although my grandfather scoffed I could never wield the nerve to serve as executioner.
I occasionally hear the
By: you know it is | Thu, 09/17/2009 - 20:26
I occasionally hear the notion that people who want to eat meat should be willing to kill the animals they eat. I think people who propose it think that it would make people feel guilty about eating meat. I personally suspect that the result would be to make people more blase about killing animals and desensitized to it.
nitpick
By: closetpuritan | Thu, 09/17/2009 - 16:58
"It was suggested that I give Arlene to someone who lives in the country, that I free him in the woods (to be humanely dismembered by raccoons?)"
I loved this line. Some people are pretty clueless, and don't seem to be able to combine logic with their emotions when thinking about morality.
"I've never intentionally killed anything more evolved than a crab"
I have to nitpick here, because this type of thing really bugs me. You seem to be using "more evolved" to mean "more sentient" or "more like us". All it means is that there's been more changes since its ancestral form (which, admittedly, is probably technically correct in the case of crabs vs. chickens). See, for example,
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/18544/
http://karmatics.com/docs/evolution-still-there-are-monkeys.html
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Why-Males-Are-More-Evolved-than-Females-7...