Part 3 of Chicken tales

“Some are born great, some achieve great, and some have butchering chickens thrust upon them.”

If you recongnize that ripped off quote, i give you permission to feel superior. Everytime someone comes over the chickens are a source of small talk. (Or everytime we force chickens into any conversation with anyone from the outside world.) I am convinced that people want to know about chickens. There is a wave of chicken owners sweeping through the neighborhood. We are on the crest of an urban trend. Brief rabbit trail: We are the pioneers in something that people with bigger backyards (also called farms) have been doing for hundreds of years! And this makes us, the Pitts, special. Score for us. Back to chicken conversation. Urban people hold the act of growing things, animals or plants very highly, especially if you are one of those urban people. if you are not then you are a legit farmer and what you do is expected. You can’t know what the inside of a mall and a chicken looks like but if you have this diverse skill set you can become quite popular. However if you live on a farm and know this, too bad, you are still a hick. This is how I will win fame and fortune -- knowing the inside of a mall AND a chicken.

Back to the initial subject. Butchering chickens. This is the questions people always want to know. “So you’re going to eat the broilers…how are you going to kill them?” I found us a butcher! An old babysitting client of mine grew up on a poultry farm. His wife volunteered him to pop their necks. Apparently chicken butchering must be done a certain careful way or the hormones released during the dying process ruins the meat. However he didn’t want anything to do with the plucking, skinning, or other chicken butchering tasks. That means a no go. We cannot have carcasses cluttering up our backyard.

While I am fully confident that with the aide of a few books and the internet I could figure out how to do all of that, I’d rather not be holding a book in one hand and a knife in the other. It makes for messy books. So there is a chicken processing facility that we could go to and learn how to do it. Or there is a mobile butcher that comes around and does it. I’m thinking I could save myself 3 bucks a head if I just learn to do it myself and then can save money in the longer term if we ever do broilers again. However I’m not sure I want to add chicken butcher to my diverse skill set. It’s a little more scary for the urban dweller than pruning your own trees and driving a riding lawnmower and convincing people it’s a tractor. Emily Pitts: Chicken Butcher. It doesn’t really have the right ring to it. Yet at the same time…it will save me three bucks a head. it is a peculiar delema.