Heads up: pictures at the end of the post, but only slightly more gory than a grocery store chicken.

Shortly after I got ten pullets to start my chicken project, I went back to the feed store and picked up eight Rhode Island Red rooster chicks for eating. I figured that I was going through the hassle of raising chickens anyway, so I might as well just do it all at once. I chose Rhode Islands over the Cornish crosses at the feed store because I’ve heard that Cornish crosses have a hard time living. They grow so fast and have so many genetic defects that I just didn’t want to mess with them. I’ve since learned that there are other meat breeds with fewer problems, and I’ll try some of those next year.

The Rhode Islands were supposed to be a dual-purpose breed, at least according to my chicken books. Not only do they lay nice eggs, but they’re not too scrawny to be worth eating. Worth a shot, I figured.

So I raised these eight roosters, as well as two of my straight-run batch that turned out to be cockerels, one of the Buff Orpingtons and that nasty Lakenvelder. Once they hit puberty, the Lakenvelder turned mean. He was decent at protecting his flock, but he’d come after us with spurs flying, and life’s just too short to put up with rotten roosters. He was very pretty, so it took me a while to make that decision. The Rhode Islands were very people-friendly, but they were so hard on my hens and the younger chicks.

The Buff Orpington turned out to have neither of those faults, so he gets to be the rooster that lived, even though he’s got a slightly crooked beak. I’ve got four  more cockerels coming up the pike; one Mottled Houdan and three crosses between Silver Laced and Blue Laced Red Wyandottes. I plan to keep two of them too, for a total of three roosters for my flock of twelve hens. It might be too many, but I’ll have to see how they all get along.

I set up the processing station on Friday night. I’d borrowed a stand of lights so we could work both when it was cooler and when it was easier to catch the chickens. Chasing them through the chicken pen didn’t appeal to any of us, and would probably make the meat taste bad. Scooping them off the perches after they’d gone to sleep would be easier on all of us, and less traumatic to the rest of the flock.

Junior and I no longer have any weekend nights off together and I knew this would take me a while, so I was on my own.  I’ve never bird hunted, and only messed with one or two quail that he’s killed, so I was going into this completely cold.

The boys were home, and they helped. I had to give John the camera to get any useful work out of him at all, but Seamus was awesome. He helped pluck, he did most of the chicken-catching, and he did all of the gopher work. I was a little afraid that he’d be put off by it, but while he didn’t want to kill any himself, he decided at the end of the project that he’s definitely going to take poultry in 4-H next year. He says he’s going to raise hens though.

So the process itself was both messier and easier than I thought it would be. We’d catch a rooster and hang it head-down in a modified traffic cone in a sawhorse. This was to contain things like wings and blood flying. I remember my dad cutting the head off a rooster when I was a kid, and that was just sort of traumatic for everyone. Keeping it contained was a much easier death both for the bird and for us.

Next, I’d slit the throat right behind the jaw. I’ve cut myself with that particular knife and it’s so sharp that you barely feel it, and that seemed to hold true for the roosters. They hardly moved, just bled out and expired quietly. The death throes came after they were dead, but being contained like that, they were over quickly.

I’d set up our turkey fryer and a pot of water with a touch of soap in it to scald them. I tried to keep it at 140 degrees, but I did screw up on the fifth one and let it get too hot. That made it clear that we were tired, so we called it a night and did the rest on Saturday night so as not to waste any more. But swishing them around in that water for a minute or a minute and a half made those feathers come right out. I’d never plucked anything but eyebrows before, so I had no idea how difficult it would be. It was easier to get the feathers off than I’d thought but also took longer to do a whole chicken than I’d expected. It was taking us about half an hour per bird, most of that in plucking. There are plans for homemade chicken pluckers floating around the internet, and I’m going to ask Junior to build me one before we do this next year.

But finally, it was time to clean them. Most of it was fairly basic. I’ve gutted and cleaned a lot of animals in my day, so I know how. I’d forgotten to account for the teeny size of these things though, compared to, say, a bear, and I had problems in puncturing the bowels and in getting my huge man-hands up inside the bird’s cavity to clean out the guts.

I tried to save the gizzards for my father-in-law, but for the life of me, I couldn’t get them cleaned right. And I kept ripping the livers as I was gutting the birds, but I don’t know anyone who likes chicken livers anyway. But I saved the necks and the feet for stock.

Once these birds were all plucked and cleaned and ready to be cooled, it was obvious that my idea of dual-purpose birds might be based on a really old-fashioned standard of chicken. They’re pretty scrawny. But I’ll give roasting them a shot anyway and if nothing else, they’ll make outstanding stock. I do make and can a ton of chicken stock every year and I just might do a batch tonight.

For those interesting in seeing the whole set of the process, here’s a Guest Pass to the photoset on Flickr, which includes these. I kept them as family-only to keep them from popping up in my unsuspecting friends’ feeds. Let me know if it doesn’t work; it’s got the standard unprotected livestock photos in it too.