Putting Meat in the Freezer

So we harvested a batch of meat chickens on Sunday morning. An (extremely) rare sunny day and cool temps along with great friends made it a rather pleasant morning. The lure of pancakes and free chickens coupled with poor college student hunger helped draw out the volunteers.

The chickens were placed upside down in killing cones. Being upside down and being confined in the cones keeps the birds very calm. A quick cut on the side of the neck severs the jugular. The birds don't get very alarmed, looking around clueless until they start nodding off. Then theres a few seconds of spasming as the blood runs out and the heart starts pumping air. It's about as humane as killing animals can be.


The only disappointment of the day was that the motor crapped out on the automatic chicken plucker, so we had to hand pluck the birds. Here's a picture of a Canadian plucking his first hen.

After plucking, it's time to remove the feet, head, neck & innards (in that order). As you can tell from Jeremy's face, it's better than Six Flags.

Then off to the kitchen for some good eatin!

We ate off these birds for over a week!