Decorative until Delicious

From Richard Johnson

... Richard pausing for a quick photo shoot ...

The story begins on Tuesday.

I was encouraging Miranda to make her plans for the transition of the chickens from our place up to Shauna and David Pilling’s Place.

The chickens free-range all day long and sleep in the coop at night.

And the chickens don’t come to me voluntarily as they do to her.

So my plan was to lock them in at night so they would be easily reachable from the side door of the coop in the morning.

David Wood dropped by to discuss
how Richard had done fibreglass repair on the deck.

The next morning, they all escaped to free range again.

At noon on Friday, Arta started pointing out that maybe the kids shouldn’t be out and about while I was performing the processing and eviscerating of 2 of the roosters whom the new owners of the chickens did not want, so Friday at 4 pm, Arta offered to take the kids to the basement for a couple of hours.

I went out to try to catch the 2 roosters that had been identified for extinction.

... four of the chickens marching to the compost ...
Welly and Perry were the chickens who died.

I used a long-handled rake to try to herd them up to their coop so I could lock them in and have access to them again, but one kept getting away.

I called five-year old Betty over to help me herd one towards the door while I kept the rest inside.

She got the chicken moved towards the door and to the inside. I don’t think she knew she was walking it to the slaughter.

I watched a lot of You Tube videos in advance, 2 hour’s worth, preparing for the dirty deed.

As Arta picks raspberries in the early morning,
the leaves are dappled with sunlight and,
the chickens come out of the coop,
getting all of the low berries
before she does.

I wish I hadn’t watched that last 5 minute video while the children were in the same room on Friday.

I didn’t need to.

But I was just like a Scout or a Venture, checking I had everything in my backpack.

At that point Michael said, “Dad could you please turn down the sound.”

It was the word ‘slit’ he heard on the video.

He went out on the porch to cry.

... grey rooster, beautiful and so camouflaged ...

From the video’s I learned there are 2 options: one is to hang the chicken by the feet; the second is to insert it into an upside-down traffic cone.

I have never lived on a farm and I didn’t know what I was doing.

As I was crawling into the chicken run with a knife in one hand and a rake in the other (me on my hands and on my knees in the chicken droppings), I closed the door behind me and decided that trying to drag a chicken while backing out from this position, would put me in more trouble than I wanted.

... the rooster who crows at 5 am, 7 am and 5 pm ...

I used a rake to scoop one of the roosters to me, got it on the ground with a gloved hand, the head into the ground and beside it I would just drive the knife into the dirt and that is how I would finish the job.

I am left-handed.

It worked splendidly, but with one hand still on the head, the other on the knife and no hand on the body, I experienced the rare experience of a chicken with its head cut off and that large gigantic body flipping and flopping towards me like a fireman’s hose out of control.

Frustrated, but with one rooster to go, I couldn’t get any dirtier.

I raked another rooster towards me and made sure to hold the body afterwards on the second rooster.

I threw the heads out of the run and the bodies out and crawled backwards out of the fecal matter, into standing position only to see a mother and 10 children right on the road beside the chicken coop.

... black rooster ...

Shame?

Afraid?

I was not sure how to respond to killing two roosters and being seen by a Sunday School class or maybe they were just a little pile of second-cousins-to-my-kids that walked by.

I yelled out to Michelle Wood, their guardian for the afternoon, “I got one,” and turned to carry my chickens back to the house.

I had protected by own kids by having them downstairs, and I had terrorized the children of other families.

I took my 2 chickens to the lake side of Arta’s house and started dipping them in boiling water to defeather them.

Not 5 minutes after I started the task, Uncle Dave Wood came around the corner.

... the results of the defeathering ...

Me, still in trauma from the Wood’s grandchildren walking by, I couldn’t even remember his name and called him Uncle Glen.

When I recovered from that, I asked him if Michelle had sent him over.

He said no, he hadn’t been debriefed about the children running into the slaughtering event and he stayed 45 minutes wanting to talk about the fiber glassing on the deck that I had just finished.

... gizzard? or did I still not get it ...

I was glad to talk to someone so that I didn’t have to think about what I was doing.

At one point he asked if I were going to take out the gizzard, pointing out that I hadn’t done one step in the process.

About 90% of the way through their defeathing and gutting Arta popped out of the kitchen door and said, “The kids are coming up for snacks. Hide the chickens.”

If only she had done that for the Wood grandchildren.

We decided not to cook them Friday night but put them into the fridge for a Saturday crock pot.

As I am writing this, Nora (7), Evangeline (7) and Sidney Wood (10) just popped by to ask where the chicken coop was and if I were the person who had killed them, to which I replied, “Two are in the crock pot and the rest of the chickens moved up to Dave and Shauna’s place.”

And I sent the children off to play.

Richard Johnson

P.S. Next year, Hei-hei, Shy, Coco, and Heart-Heart will be laying eggs at Shauna and Dave Pilling’s place.

Authors Note: Only 2 of the 6 chickens in this story were injured.