Last night, we got the call from our nearish neighbor, who has the specially modified nail gun that shoots blunt force trauma at 80 psi.
It was late afternoon -- "how about tonight?" she said.
We were planning an ethical multiple murder, and suddenly it was happening all too fast.
The seventeen hens were a joined flock that hadn't bonded together well: we made the mistake of inserting eight full-grown layers (from a nearby farm going out of the chicken biz) into our existing flock of nine happy layers, who had been free-ranging on our small farm for a couple of years.
Dumb.
Not only did we have serious inter-hen conflict (pecking, plucking bums to nakedness, and unhappy layers) but also were sorry to see disease brought to the older flock.
So after several months of hoping it'd work out, we finally decided that all of them -- these layers who were providing us with about a dozen eggs a day -- had to be put down. We have new chicks under the heat lamp, and didn't want bad habits and bad diseases passed to them when we brought them to the coop.
Killing chickens may sound like a simple decision, but like so much else, it's not.
We're living on a sort of "Green Acres" farm (for those of you who remember Eddie Arnold and Zsa Zsa). We are mostly-urban folks who three years ago shifted to a rural smallholding as our home. None of us grew up on a farm, didn't grow up with chickens, or pigs, or even garlic scapes -- but we're learning as we go, making mistakes as well as making satisfaction.
I usually write about the converging emergencies of environmental collapse, and our small farm is part of that thread -- de-carboning, trying to shift to a nontoxic, sustainable life, adapting our rhythms to the more intrinsic ones as much as we can.
But this diary entry isn't about ocean acidification or species collapse, not about the rise of radioactive boar in Germany or about the widespread permafrost meltdown releasing potent greenhouse gases, nor even about changing our habits.
This is about the small, local experience of choosing how to kill our hens the most ethically and thoughtfully, and about the nature of living with nature.
The neighbor who was soon to arrive teaches (among other things) agricultural ethics at a nearby ag college; she is extremely alert to evolutionary drivers in animals; finds Temple Grandin's work both compelling and pragmatic; and practices what she preaches on her own farm.
Traditionally, when you kill a chicken, you chase it down in the daylight, grab it by its legs and hold it upside down. The chicken then goes passive. You then put its head between two nails, pull back, and chop off its head, with a very sharp knife or a hatchet. Quick. That's the way all our great-grandparents did it. The chicken then kicks and flaps its muscular contractions away, bleeding and shitting all the while. When that subsides, you disembowel it (being careful not to slice open the gizzard), then scald and pluck it.
Our neighbor, who has had chickens for thirty plus years, has been rethinking this: no chicken or animal (besides the sloth and young children) likes being upside down. Chickens, in their deep evolutionary memory, freeze when fearful, hoping to be ignored. They are diurnal -- most active during the day -- and again, for survival reasons, are very quiet and still at night.
Holding a hen upside down puts her into panic, causing that seeming passivity. Slaughtering during the day is when they're most alert, most easily panicked. The head is alive for some number of seconds, that consciousness freaking out at the experience. Our great-grandparents' approach is likely not the kindest approach.
If you raise animals -- whether chickens, pigs, cows, dogs, or whatever -- you make a sort of pact with them: I'll treat you right, and you'll treat me right. Finding a way to make their last minutes the least horrible is part of treating them right.
We had a relationship with those layers beyond just eggs they laid. We weren't buddies, nor did we name them, nor commune with them.
This isn't about a mystical, Avatar-theme laden philosophy (though it can go there) -- it's just an acknowledgment that nature (or even human-bred animals) simply doesn't belong to us, to treat as we like with impunity. The results of that style of thinking are all around us: the Gulf gusher, the 30% rise in CO2, the heavy-metal-laden rivers, the mountaintop removal.
Rather, nature is what we are a part of.
There are responsibilities that ensue.
So when our neighbor called, we covered the coop windows with tarpaper, and ran the extension cord for the air compressor. We got the equivalent of a chopping block, and some nails, and some deep buckets. We dug an eight-foot trench, off in the field.
As dusk settled, the chickens did as they always do: moved slowly and quietly into the coop for the night.
Our neighbor drove in, machinery in hand. She demonstrated the stun device -- a sort of airgun that thrusts out a hard blunt white plastic cylinder a quarter of an inch beyond its sleeve. Held against a chicken's head, it knocks them immediately unconscious, and crushes their skull.
We kept the coop nearly dark, with only a bit of light coming into where the block and the knives and the buckets were waiting.
Our adult daughter, who has had the most hands-on experience with the chickens, and with whom the chickens were most comfortable, took the lead. She gently gathered each hen, holding it closely and safely to her chest, and brought her to the block.
Yes, her head was put between the nails, but gently, and right-side-up; then the stunner/crusher was applied three times in quick succession.
Only then was the neck stretched out, and her head cut off and put in the head bucket. The hen's body then went into the autonomic muscular contractions inevitable when the spine is cut, flapping and spewing.
After the first few were put down, our neighbor brought out the heads into the light, to be sure that the skulls were being crushed correctly. "Here, feel this? That's the broken skull," she said to me -- and how was I to refuse to put my thumb on the disembodied hen head, feeling the shattered bone?
We went through all 17, putting the carcasses into the wheelbarrow.
When we were done, we washed, and made tea, and talked about animal welfare, and about the responsibilities of responsible farming. About farming being all about reasonable compromises between hours in the day, standards you uphold, goals you try to achieve, and the responsibilities of life and death.
The hens had had a true free-range life ("free range" can mean, according to most regulations, that the chickens can see an opening -- they don't require that the chicken can actually get out there). Our chickens came out every day, happily hunting for grubs and bugs, drinking from the stream nearby, laying eggs in hard-to-find places, as well as the nests in the coop. They'd had a good life.
They had given us much, and we tried to do the right thing by them.
After tea and conversation, our neighbor drove away into the dark. Standing in our long driveway, the stars were out in astonishing glory. We walked back over the bridge to the coop, flashlights leading the way, and wheelbarrowed the carcasses to the trench. Their bodies, even after a couple of hours of stiffening, were still warm.
We covered them up -- to keep coyotes from thinking "yum, I'll remember this place!" after a feast -- and then came back to our nearly-midnight house.
Today is a day of mourning, and for my 22-year-old daughter, of some horror. She woke up thinking "whoops, need to go let out the chickens" and then began to weep. She takes some comfort in the lengths we went to to try to make the deaths less horrible -- but killing animals is hard.
It should be hard.
Chicken doesn't "come from the store." About 99.9% of the chicken you buy have been kept in conditions of squalor and misery, meat engines grown to be killed. The same is true for most beef and pork.
Please, if you can, find people to buy chicken, beef, and pork from, who think hard about these questions of animal welfare, ethics, and actions. Pay what you need to for organic, truly free range eggs and meat (food shouldn't be cheap, and when it is, something suffers for it).
And support policies and local regulations that allow smallholders to practice ethical farming, and that encourage urban and suburban chicken coops. The family farm is an extreme rarity that we need to cherish -- and more of us should be raising chickens in our backyards.
For our part, we've got 45 chicks we will be moving out to the coop, after it's been cleaned and nearly sterilized. These are heritage chicks -- an array of slower-maturing, less inbred, probably more hardy creatures, who may have more personality than the ones we've had.
And we'll try to give them the best life we can give them, and eventually enjoy their eggs, and eventually, enjoy their meat.
Compromises. Balancing acts. Striving to do the right thing. Giving back to the earth.
They take more time, but it's what we have to do.