We are now "babysitting" five chicks and a gosling in our kitchen, we have and incubator full of turkey eggs, and a brooder full of older chicks in the chicken house. This is stepping back in time to when we had kids at home and raised a lot of our own meat. These all belong to one of our sons' families who are down on the Kenai Peninsula on and annual spring fishing trip and camp out. Never thought we would be using these facilities again, but family loyalties come first.
Being in a rural area, I'm around that kind for stuff for the first time in my life. There are lots of folks who raise their own meat and layers. My friend who owns his greenhouse always has roosters, ducks, guinea, and other fowl at various stages of development. Some he keeps and others he sells. For some reason there's a market for roosters (to eat) in the Hispanic community here. I guess it works out well for everyone, since too many roosters are persona non grata. Might just be a cheap meal for them.
Our neighbor lady revises chickens and sells the extra roosters, too, @John Brunner . They are Hispanic. She said that they get around $20 per chicken, so a lot more expensive that the ones from the store, and hers are just skinny chickens that run around their yard ( and ours) and eat whatever they find. I think they are part bandies, because they are certainly not the big fat laying hen types of chicken. They said the meat tastes better than from the store.
Does she butcher the chickens or do the buyers? There's a small farm across the street, and I know the rules for processing beef for sale are different than the rules for processing chickens and other critters. Beef requires a USDA-approved facility, and there is always a backlog. For some reason you can process chickens on-site.
Meanwhile, back on the farm ......... Mama used to take an ax, put the chicken on the chopping block, and chop its head off. The chicken would flop around for several minutes. Hench, the saying, "Running around like a chicken with its head chopped off." Farm life can sometimes be unpleasant.
We used to raise a lot of poultry--chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks, etc. The water fowl were a pain to pluck, so we dropped those quickly. Besides, the eagles ate most of the ducks. On butchering day, we hung the chickens by the feet and sliced them with a sharp knife. Having them tied prevented them from flopping around and spraying blood everywhere. Besides, they bled out better when they were hanging. We got tat trick from an Iowa farm girl who lived next to the in-laws. MIL was out killing a chicken for Sunday dinner one day, and the chicken flopped under her skirt and raised a ruckus spraying blood everywhere. A solution was needed, and the neighbor provided it. We raised goats but never ate our own, but we did eat other people's goats. We did, however, sell goats for meat and provided a space for them to be killed as the Filipinos and Arabs who usually bought our goats lived in Anchorage and didn't have any place to "do the deed". We did eat our own sheep though. I just never expected to be doing this at our stage of life, but at least it is only for a week, We do now have a rooster that we got for free. I promised I wouldn't kill him for a year. He keeps crowing "Shoot the Rooster" though, so unless we find a new home for him, I may violate my promise and throw him into the pot.
Did somebody "gift" you their problem? Regarding selling goats to Arabs...does Halal involve diet and how they're raised, or just how they're slaughtered?
I never went onto details with the customers, as it wasn't my business unless they killed the animals in some cruel way on my property. Yeah, we got the "gift" rooster from one of my son's in-laws because I wanted a rooster to fertilize my hens, as a couple of them go broody and would hatch their eggs if they were fertile. I only needed him for a month, but since he had been a pet of sorts, although a very mean one, I told them I wouldn't butcher him within the year. Another in-law of a different son lost her rooster to a fox a while back, so she needs a new male. He was supposed to be passed on to his new home last weekend but that didn't happen. I am hoping to move him this weekend. At his new home-to-be, they never butcher anything.
It makes sense to have a few chickens for anyone who doesn't travel regularly or has someone who can help out during absences. A few chickens can keep a couple of people in eggs, with meat available in the future, if they can stomach everything involved in that part of it. The cost of feeding a few chickens is far less than the price of eggs, and chicken waste makes for good compost.
My dad used to grab a chicken around the neck, spin it a couple of times and snap it like a bull whip leaving the head in his hand and the chicken doing the flopping thing. On the other hand, my son’s mother would sit out among the chickens and feed them. Eventually she’d pick up a calm chicken, stroke its head for a second or two and CRACK, neck broken, chicken died happy.
Plus chickens can almost feed themselves in warm weather. With the bugs, food scraps, and weeds and grass, the feed bill drops to almost nothing. They will even catch and eat the occasional mouse. Chickens ARE NOT herbivores/vegetarians like many believe.
I just like chickens. I feed them treats from home after I park at the barn so they come a-runnin' when they see me pull into the drive. Makes me laugh almost every time, their little legs a goin'. I had a chicken tractor built at relatively great expense with a roosting bar and nest boxes. They haven't used it passed about the first month they were released from it. I have an Easter egg hunt every day. I am like that nutty lady on youtube from chickenlandia. I don't eat them often and mostly I skin them because plucking is not worth it to me. Store bought chicken does not have the same flavor and consistency of free range because of what they eat and how much they use their muscles. And sometimes we let the grow too old. Haven't had much predation lately which can add a lot to the price of eggs.
My dad had some chickens when I was very little. I have a vague memory of him tying their feet to a rope stretched between two trees and chopping their heads off to let them drain. They flopped around a lot and I was very upset. Grandpa had rabbits he raised for meat. I watched him butcher a couple once and that upset me, too. My worst experience with dead chickens was when we were living in Turkey and one of our serviceman friends had married a Turkish girl. She had just gotten pregnant and in thanks to Allah, she vowed to give chickens to the poor. I assumed she meant either live chickens or prepared chickens, but no. She asked me to go to the bazaar with her to get them. When we got there, she picked out a dozen chickens and the seller promptly chopped their heads off, tied their legs together in bundles of three chickens each and we had to walk back from town each carrying two bundles of twitching chickens. I was splattered with blood from hips to feet by the time we got to her apartment.