Rick and I were both wearing clothes we wouldn’t mind getting blood on as we drove up Aussie Bronwyn’s driveway in our little city boy Nissan Pulsar.
Axe - photo by milan6
When Aussie Bronwyn came to the door – the High Priestess of Chicken Wisdom herself – Rick called out ‘Your loyal chicken killers are here!” My stomach turned.
Was I really going to do this?
At a dinner party a few months before, Rick had said to Aussie Bronwyn, “If you ever need help killing chickens, let me know.”
In some circles this might be considered an odd thing to say at a dinner party. Not here.
I suppose you could say that Rick has a complicated relationship with chickens. He’s a lover of a good omelet and can cook a mean roast chicken, but ever since we started caring for our own laying hens he’s become a little grossed out at the thought that eggs actually come out of chickens’ bums. (Apparently nobody ever told him.) On the other hand, he’s more than happy to chop a chicken’s head off. Go figure.
The fact is that Aussie Bronwyn needs no help killing chickens. She grew up watching her mother do it, and learned from her. I once heard her say, “I can’t remember not killing chickens.”
But when Rick offered to help, she was gracious. She took a sip of Pinot Noir from a vineyard down the road and said, “That would be lovely. Thank you.”
No doubt she saw Rick’s offer as an opportunity to teach some fool-headed city boys how to become more self-sufficient.
Animal territory
Aussie Bronwyn's fish pond
When you step through the gate beyond Aussie Bronwyn’s fish pond, you enter animal territory. Grey and reddish-brown chickens peck the ground. Bright white ducks with yellow beaks waddle by. Petal the dairy cow looks at you over a fence.
On the day Rick and I showed up to kill chickens, only the pig pen was empty, since they’d recently been turned into pork chops.
Methusela – Aussie Bronwyn’s geriatric rooster and cousin to our Old Man Henry – hid behind the tractor when he saw us. Clearly he recognized the steely determination in his owner’s small frame as something dangerous. You don’t get to be Methusela’s age without a highly developed sense of self preservation.
We planned to kill two roosters that day. Rick was going to do one, and I was going to do the other.
Our hostess wasted no time. She went to the shed and got the axe and set it down on an old stump. Then she picked up her chicken net and stepped into the chicken run.
There was a wild flurry of clucks and squawks before Aussie Bronwyn walked out victoriously, carrying a beautiful black and white speckled rooster that was nearly as big as she was. She held him by his feet. His head hung down as he twisted and tried to get free.
She explained that he was a 7 month old Barred Rock. “This one and his brother are flighty and keep getting over into my garden.” She looked at the rooster. “I told you. One foot in my garden and it’s curtains.”
I laughed nervously and made a mental note to be careful where I walked.
The first rooster goes
Barred Rock - image from Wikipedia
She reached out and handed the rooster to Rick. At that point Rick had already ‘helped’ her once before – a few weeks earlier when she needed to cull a sick chicken. So he understood what to do. Aussie Bronwyn knows a natural born chicken killer when she sees one.
We gathered around the wooden stump quickly, shifting positions several times. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I ended up standing there, holding the legs of a rooster that was going to become headless in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t ready. I panicked.
Rick raised the axe into the air.
“Wait! What do I do when it’s chopped?!” I yelled.
Bronwyn hollered back. “Drop it and run!”
Down came the axe.
I did not feel life leaving the chicken’s body as its head fell to the ground and the blood began to flow. Instead, the two legs began jerking and squirming even more. I did as I was told. I dropped the bird and ran.
I nearly ran all the way home.
What happened next was horrifying, but not in the way I expected. You always hear that headless chickens go running around. Maybe it depends on the chicken. This one didn’t run. It did back flips. Two of them. Four feet into the air. Arcs of blood flew out everywhere.
Meanwhile its head, lying over on the wooden stump, went into a series of bizarre, twitching spasms.
It wasn’t pretty.
When everything finally stopped moving, Rick and I stood in silence looking at the blood and feathers. Aussie Bronwyn was already in the shed, putting newspapers out on a table to prepare for the plucking and gutting. She is an immensely practical woman.
When she came out, she said, “It’s never pleasant. But it’s like the housework. It has to be done.”
Second rooster
Aussie Bronwyn’s chickens
She picked up her chicken net and went back into the run. This time she came out carrying a bird that was slightly smaller, another Barred Rock. He was squirming even more than the first one.
It was my turn.
For a few years when I was a university student, I gave up red meat on the grounds that I didn’t think I was capable of ever killing a cow. I felt I should only eat what I could – at least theoretically – kill myself. Otherwise it seemed hypocritical. I thought then that if push came to shove I could kill a fish, a pig, or a chicken. But not a cow. (They’re too big, and have those big brown eyes.)
Now, twenty years on, push had finally come to shove. A kind, retired woman was holding out a rooster for me to kill. Not in theory, but in reality.
I looked at the axe, then at the rooster. I literally backed away.
“You do it,” I said to Rick.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes.”
We did the same as before. I held its feet. Rick swung the axe. Unfortunately, this time the head didn’t come off on the first try. The bird made a strange, painful noise – half squawk, half gurgle. Rick chopped it again, and its head finally fell off.
This rooster spared us the backflip show. It just fell over and twitched for a while. Then it stopped moving. But thirty seconds later it got up again and stumbled across the grass. Then it collapsed once and for all.
It was like somebody dying in a melodramatic opera.
Plucking, gutting, and cleaning up
Our lesson wasn’t over. Aussie Bronwyn showed us how to put the carcasses into scalding water for a few seconds to make them easy to pluck. She pulled the feathers off one bird while Rick and I did the other.
Actually, Rick did most of ours. I was a little grossed out.
Then out came the extra sharp kitchen knife. If I was squeamish at the plucking, I was positively ill at the gutting. Rick was fine. It seems it’s only the egg-out-of-the-bum thing that bothers him. Blood and guts? Not a problem.
Aussie Bronwyn cut a circle around the anus, made a long slit at the base of the neck, and pulled out the innards. The intestines came out in long strands.
“You have to be careful not to cut into the bowels,” she said. “It makes a mess. And if you cut into the gall bladder, it makes the meat bitter.”
She showed us the crop, cut it down the middle and showed us the chicken feed inside. I turned pale and wobbled.
NOT Aussie Bronwyn's chicken
Eventually the two chickens in front of us looked almost like the ones you buy in the grocery store. I felt a strange compulsion to place them in styrofoam trays and seal them in shrink wrap, just to finish the job.
“You can’t cook them right away, or they’re really tough,” she said. “Rigor mortis. You have to wait a couple days.”
Rick and I dug a hole and buried the innards, the heads, the feet, and the very bloody newspapers. Aussie Bronwyn said that her husband John could bury them when he got home, but we figured we should. After all, who wants to leave that kind of mess behind at your neighbor’s house?
By then ancient Methusla had come out of his hiding place behind the tractor, and he’d started crowing. He was screaming, “I’m alive! I’m alive!”
When the last shovel of dirt was on top of the hole, and Aussie Bronwyn had placed a tire over it to stop the dog from digging it up, Rick and I joined the High Priestess of Chicken Wisdom inside for a nice cup of tea. What else do you do after a bloody mess like that?
What about you? Have you ever killed a chicken? If you haven’t, do you think you could?
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Read the next post: When farm animals escape
Or read other posts on chickens.
As usual, you made me laugh! Rick scares me!
I work on the same idea… i only eat what I would be prepared to kill.
We always find it much easier once the first few feathers are off, and then it starts to look less like a dead hen and more like an oven ready chicken.
Being a “city gal” myself, this had too much information for me. However, I did chuckle from time to time. And… Rick scares me too!
This tale brings back bad memories for me. I grew up on a farm and, as a child, watched my mother kill chickens for our meals (although she would hold the chicken between her arm and her hip and cut its neck with a knife). I also witnessed the killing and butchering of pigs. However, I was mild mannered and squeamish, and after getting married, and in my 20′s, with 3 small children, we purchased a riverside country home that came with a garden, chicken coop, fruit trees, and had Eden-like qualities. One problem…the chicken coop contained six live chickens and all of them were very sick…with gross tumor-like protrusions on their bodies. The previous owner had moved away, so I was left to deal with the sick chickens. I had to dispose of them and had no one to help me. I wanted to ask a neighbor with a rifle to take care of them, but decided that I was a big boy now, and the responsible one in the family (and had seen my mother kill chickens). So I forced myself to do what had to be done. I remember struggling in mind, forcing myself to do it. I completed the task, killed and buried all of the chickens on our property. But to this day, I can still feel in my body the churning, the anguish, and the emotion of that day when I had to do that dastardly deed. Your narrative brought back vividly that experience in my life.
Peter – that sounds like an absolute nightmare. I don’t think I could have done it.
It’s hard to say whether or not I could actually do it until I came face to face with the raw task. It has certainly made me think more about what I eat. If I was living off the land, with no alternative, then I think I could find the resolve to be practical and do it, but I would be happier to have someone like Rick around to take charge!
Like you and Rick, I am starting with my first “flock” of chickens this year. Most of the spring chicks came from Tractor Supply. I wanted chickens primarily for the eggs, to supplement the diets of my family and also my several Staffordshire Bull Terriers (dogs that I raise). I had asked various people whether or not I should have a rooster. I don’t remember anyone saying that I should have a rooster, but, being stubborn, I thought I should have one anyway. It didn’t make sense to me that hens should be kept for egg-laying purposes without a rooster on the premises. It’s not natural. Well, as luck would have it, Tractor Supply had messed up on the sorting when the chicks came in and I wound up with two roosters, one is large, probably mixed breed, and the other is a bantam, which I later learned, is what is commonly known as a “game cock” in these parts.
I have known and loved animals all of my life, but I must say that these roosters are the most obnoxious and foul creatures I have ever come across in my 52 years on this planet. I am literally scared to death of them (remember I’m not a wimp. I raise dogs with a penchant for scuffling). I let the chickens out every evening to graze, and I can not cross the yard without a rake or some other weapon in my hand when these fellows are about or they will try to attack me. Interestingly, the boys do not seem to be the least bit inclined to fight each other.
Anyway, in spite of my fear and general dislike of them, and in spite of the fact that I have threatened many times to turn them into fricasee or serve them up with dumplings, I do not believe I have in me what it takes to actually kill them. Perhaps I will turn them over to someone else to do the dirty job for me. For now, I’m still hoping that perhaps they will change their ways and settle down into the more peaceful creatures I had envisioned for the patriarchs of my flock.
P.S. Like Rick, I find I am not able to eat the eggs that come from my hens, though this has never been a problem with the ones that come from the grocery store. I really must get past this or my whole chicken enterprise is in vain.
Good luck with the Evil Roosters, Robin. Actually, another reason Aussie Bronwyn choose to kill these two roosters was that they were getting too aggressive as well. I hope yours calm down! Keep us posted.
Ha ha, great story, Jared. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would be proud. I was a chicken-killing attendant when I was about 8 and I have distinct memories of our beheaded chicken doing a couple of laps around the lawn – but I probably embellished my memory! I do know that I took the chicken parts in to give to the science teacher, who had a collection of formeldehyde jars (I remember a fetus in there, but that’s definitely not true!) but then I was too embarrassed to hand them over, and left them rotting in an ice cream tub in my locker.
Hilarious! I do have to check out the River Cottage series. I’ve never seen them.
How Awful!
I’m a hypocrite, I suppose. I love meat, but I could never dispatch the critters, or be around for the… ahem, offing.
I’m a hypocrite too. In spite of not being able to do the deed that day, I’m still eating chicken.
I make out I’m a tough country gal that can do it.
when it was time to kill the duck, i went thru days of disccussions with the children ..giving them the option of watching or not..when it came right down to it ..i tried to hide it from them
..my little boys thought it was fantastic as did my oldest..one daughter decided she wanted to become a vegetarian, one son ran and hide(least he be next i guess ?)the other daughter was like big deal can i get a snack.. i dreamt about it for a week and wasn’t sure I could continue this farm life.. but we are still here and still eating chook and duck meat
Mashelly – Good on you for persevering. I love the different reactions from your kids!
This made me laugh and gag and cover my eyes and marvel at the great writing, all at once. I am a constantly guilty hypocrite – a huge guts for meat of all kinds, and always cringing about the horribleness of killing animals. I would never have the guts to do what you guys did, and think you are very cool for doing it – even if you keep eating meat, at least you have put your axe where your mouth is, at least once. I very much like the sound of Aussie Bronwyn too – she sounds great.
I’d experiment on grass soup and a few other things I could pull by the roots, but if I had to….
I’m cackling hysterically here. No, I’ve never killed one. Give me a couple of years and that will change, but I’m not looking forward to it.
Our chooks are pets, we adore them and thank them for their eggs. No roosters here.
I’ve always read that you hold the bodies over a drum to catch the blood. Then put all the innards, heads etc into the drum, fill with water, put the lid on and leave it for several months. When it’s eventually opened, everything has rotted down and it makes good fertiliser.
As I said, I haven’t tried it… yet…
That is hysterical and disturbing.
Usually I’ll just take the drumsticks from a meal at KFC and wave them around during my writing rituals. Never really killed one in person. Your depiction has cemented that practice, for me.
If I were you, I’d keep a close eye on Rick. Just sayin’.
No, I haven’t killed my first chicken…yet.
Our hens are only 5 months old (still waiting for the Sacred First Egg), but our farm supply did right by us: all 12 of our girls are really female, and not a rooster in the bunch. Perhaps it helped that Jim would say to them each evening at feeding time: “cockadoodledoo gets cooked inside a stew!”
*HE* wants to raise chickens for meat.
*I* am much wimpier and the egg-from-the-bum thing is just fine with me!
Congrats on getting all girls. That first egg is special indeed. I wrote about our over on ‘Strange morning at the chicken run.’ Good luck with your hens!
laughing hysterically … and no, haven’t killed a chook (yet).
This blog is addictive — not good, I have Things To Do!!