A couple of times each year the husband and I gather up our butchering supplies and thin the flock (usually just roosters). Today was one of those days.
Usually I hatch my own chicks from eggs laid by our flocks. We raise them up until 4 or 5 months old, and then the pullets get either added to our flocks or sold. The roosters, however, head to the freezer. For the first time I bought a large group of pullets from Mt. Healthy Hatchery and received 25 additional free roosters that we intended to butcher. Unfortunately we lost the whole group at 6 weeks old to a weasel, and I had to start over. Since our spring was so busy with home renovations, I ended up getting some month old rooster chicks from a local man for just the cost of feed. They didn't grow as well as my usual birds and had to be raised up longer, but in the end they did just fine.
Although I'm not going to show you pictures of the actual process, I warn you that if you are uncomfortable with the idea of killing your own food you may want to avoid the rest of this post. The pictures below are of our setup.
We start the process the morning before when I take all the food out of the pen. Of course, I leave them plenty of water.
The day of the big event, we get up and feed and water all the other critters, since we are usually exhausted by the end of the day.
Butchering and processing happen on the concreted area of our driveway. This makes it easy to clean up and is far enough away from the rest of the flock to prevent stressing them.
This first photo shows stations #1 and #2. We bring a cage of five birds down and set them beside the table. Each bird is taken out, the legs are tied together and then a noose is placed on the birds neck. At the other end of the noose is a loop that is placed on a nail on the table. Holding the bird by the legs it is then stretched out and the head is removed by a very sharp cleaver. The headless bird is then placed into the bucket, carried over to the rack at station #2, and hung to bleed out. Heads are discarded into the white bucket.
After five birds have been done, the first killed birds are taken to station #3, which is a pot of water filled 2/3 of the way full and heated to 180 degrees. The birds are dunked and swished for 15 seconds, pulled out, and dunked again. At that time they go to station #4.
Station #4 is where all the rest of the process happens. Birds are plucked, gutted and rinsed before going inside for a final rinse and refrigeration.
You may notice that we do not have a mechanical plucker. There are three reasons for this. One is that we never do so many birds at one time that we can't handle the plucking ourselves. The other reasons are that we don't want to have to store a big drum plucker, and the small drill run pluckers are extremely messy. Really, once you get good at it, hand plucking only takes a few minutes per bird.
This morning we got started setting up about 8am. By 9am we were ready to start our first set. It always takes us much longer to get set up than it does to tear down, mostly because we have to remember where we put everything from last time!
Each set took just over an hour from catching to refrigerating. We took a small break between each set, and still managed to process 17 birds and clean up by 2:30pm. And that's even with the 15 or so minutes it took us to catch the rooster that got out of the pen and hid in the grass!
There are several good sites that show the actual butchering process in detail. I'd be happy to share the two that I learned from if anyone is interested.
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