Once you have successfully raised the chicks to adult birds, you come to a difficult decision. How many are you going to butcher? Here’s the point. Why have you raised these birds to begin with? Are they to be meat birds or egg layers? Some breeds are really meant to be meat birds, like Cornish crosses, some are meant to be layers, like leghorns, and some are dual purpose, that is, they lay well but also are large enough to be acceptable meat birds, which is true of many breeds. Even if you are raising egg layers, there will come a time when the girls are no longer productive, and you will then either have pets, or you will need to kill them for food and start over with new layers.
I raise dual purpose birds. Once the chicks have reached adult size, I butcher most of the males, since having too many roosters on hand will most likely mean bloody fights. The females are allowed to lay for two or three years until production slacks off drastically, when they are butchered for the meat, although at that point, they will be tough enough that they are good only for moist cooking, say for a stew.
I know thinking about killing an animal can be difficult, but the option is to become a vegetarian. If I can buy a package of chicken from the store, I can butcher it myself. Here are the tips I have found work well from more than thirty years of killing my own birds, including chickens, ducks, and turkeys.
Preparation
Preparation actually begins the night before. Withhold feed from the birds overnight so that there will be no waste matter in the intestines. On butchering day, have everything ready to go before you get the bird to be killed. Disinfect the surface you’ll be using to do the butchering by wiping it down with Lysol, sharpen the boning knife you’ll use, and move the hose near where the fire will be.
Then, get the water boiling. You need to dunk the dead bird in hot water to loosen the feathers so they will pull out more easily. The feathers can be dry plucked, but I think it’s harder. We used to use a galvanized metal garbage can purchased just for this purpose and is used for nothing else. The can stands on ten-inch cement blocks with a fire built underneath. Fill the can about halfway full. Once there’s steam rising off the surface of the water, test it by running the palm of your hand across the surface. If you can do it once but really, really don’t want to do it again, the water is ready.
The garbage can is still used for turkeys because of their size, but more recently, we’ve been using a turkey fryer that burns propane from a twenty-pound tank. Since much less water is used, it boils much more quickly. Using the fryer thermometer, bring the temperature to 180 degrees F.
When the water is close to being ready, get one of the birds. I leave them all in the henhouse while I catch the ones I want, one at a time. I grab a bird by the legs, tie the feet with a piece of bailing twine, and lay it on its belly on the ground. I use a pellet pistol to kill it by placing the muzzle at the base of the head and aiming toward the mouth, so the pellet passes through the length of the brain. We used to use a hatchet to chop the head off, but it began to feel undignified. Either way, be prepared for a LOT of flopping around.
Then, using the bailing twine, hang the bird from a nail you’ve pounded in a tree about shoulder height. Slit the throat to cut the jugular vein so that bird can bleed out. By now, the water should be ready. Using the bailing twine, dunk the bird in and out of the water for a count of thirty dunks when using the garbage can. In the fryer, the time is MUCH faster, like maybe five dunks. Don’t dunk too long, or the skin will begin to cook.
If you don’t have a mechanical plucker, which we didn’t for thirty-five years, tie the bird back to the nail in the tree and start pulling feathers. Pluck the largest ones first because as the skin cools, the pores will start to tighten, and the big feathers will become difficult to pull. So start with the tail feathers; then move to the wings and pluck the primary flight feathers first, and then do the rest of the wings. Next, pluck the back, the breast, and the legs. The order here isn’t critical.
If you have a mechanical plucker, be prepared: if you leave the bird in too long, you will not have good results. Our first try, the plucker pulled the wings, the legs, and half the skin off the first three birds. True story. We’ve found that putting two in at a time and shutting the plucker down the second the feathers are all off, like maybe after ten seconds, works well. We used the destroyed birds for soup that we canned.
Once the feathers are plucked, take the bird to the clean surface and begin the butchering. Using the poultry shears, I remove the head first. Have a large plastic bag handy for the parts you don’t want, like the head. Then with the boning knife, remove the feet and the oil gland on the base of the tail, and put them into the plastic bag. You will also want to remove the crop by opening the neck and cutting the esophagus down in the throat. Now comes the tricky part. With the bird on its back, carefully cut an opening from just above the vent to the breast bone. Pull the opening wider and cut a circle around the vent. Be VERY careful not to cut the intestines so there’s no fecal contamination. Reach your hand into the cavity and pull the organs out. Yes. You can do this. They’re pretty much all attached to each other. Put these into the plastic bag
Once the cavity is cleared out, rinse the bird inside and out with clean water (I use the hose), and then put the bird into a large bin of cold, clean water to start chilling while the rest of the birds are processed. Once all the birds are done, take them to the kitchen and rinse each one well with lots of cold running water. You’ll want to let them sit overnight in the fridge before freezing them. I put them into two gallon freezer bags for final storage.
