Slaughtering meat chickens ???

[Rebecka]

So.. back in April we got 125 of the world cutest chicks. About 75 were intended to be kept for eggs and breeding. The rest were to meat chickens. Since , we have acquired a whole lot more. We now have a total of about 170 birds. I have been reading up on BYC and think I have a good handle on it. We have LOTs of roosters reaching sexual maturity. They are MEAN! not just a little.. but mean for the sake o being mean. So much so our egg production has dropped of considerably. So.. heres the plan. I am going to spend the day in the chicken yard. When someone is mean, they get separated off. Where my sweet husband will then take them out of sight of the chicken yard and deal with them. Anyone see any flaws in that plan ? This is my first time doing this and I would rather not muck it up.

 

[Wildsky]

It might be easier to decide which ones you'd do better without and grab them when they're on th roost at night, keep them without food till the following day and then dispatch them.

Thats if you have a place you can keep them overnight.

 

[Rebecka]

They are pretty easy to handle. Most all of them are used to me picking them up. Umm.. keep them without food? That seems kind of mean. Is there a reason for it that I am missing?

 

[me&thegals]

I'm just guessing here, but I don't think any living creature is hurt too much by going w/o food for a day. The reason is that they don't have any poop, which really messes up the butchering operation...

Your plan sounds good, but so does the other plan If you have a way of taking mental note of the meanies and then pulling them off the roost at night. Otherwise, during the day we find a nice long fishing net works well for us!

 

[Shiloh Acres]

LOL you have WAY more roosters than me but I've been going through quite a few weeding out the mean ones. I have done mostly one by one (sometimes a few) but that's slow even with my numbers and wouldn't work for you.

I do cull first on behavior, because mine were attacking pullets, being rough with them, and just generally disrupting the chicken yard. I usually pull mine and put them in a separate cage. I do withold food before slaughtering, usually, in order to have the bird empty and clean when processing.

Sometimes if I don't want to slaughter immediately I will grab one and trim it's wings or tailfeathers in order to know later which one was acting up. I don't know if that can help you at all?

Make sure you have boiling water if you're going to do many at once. Makes plucking WAY easier.

 

[Rebecka]

Okay great! Revised plan. My sweet husband is going to cage off a corner of the chicken yard. Meanness goes in the cage. The next day, we empty the cage. I can give them water , just no feed , right?

Also, I had a thought.. what to do with the leftover.. bits? I hate to waste anything and if there is something useful I can do with them....

 

[patandchickens]

Whoa nelly that is a lot of chickens!

You do not have to withhold feed before slaughter, IME. Actually if you are new to slaughtering chickens it is helpful to have some food in the crop so you can FIND it (an empty crop can be darn near invisible, thus hard to remove). The only possible downside of not withholding food is that the intestines will have a bit more poo in them and thus a bit easier to acidentally nick and make a mess when you are cleaning the chicken... but honestly that has yet to happen to me (I think I'm up to having done maybe 40 chickens/turkeys total, by now) despite having NEVER withheld food. So I would not stress on it, if it isn't convenient.

The main difficulty I see with your plan is that it seems to involve only one person doing the processing (your husband). This will be super super slow (ask me, I know, it's how I have to do all my birds!). SInglehanded, without a mechanical plucker, I can do maybe 3-4 birds an hour if all the stars are in the right alignment and they are in exactly the right stage of feather (no pinfeathers) and I am in a coordinated mood and so forth. Or less if those things are not all the case -- particularly if they are pinfeathery, as yours most likely are since they are youngish. (If you are very experienced at skinning game you might be able to do them faster that way, but personally despite some degree of practice I find that it takes as long or longer to skin as to pluck, for me.)

So what might work a lot better is to separate out a day's worth of ones you are going to process -- maybe just start with 10 the first time to do a short little run and work the bugs out, and then you will know how many you feel up to doing the next time -- and pen them separately, then you and your husband set up assembly-line style to dispatch, pluck and clean them. If you can get someone else to help that would be even better, especially if you want to do a large number of them at once. Maybe it is just me but I find that 3 hrs is about the longest stretch of time I can realistically spend processing -- my hands and back get way too sore and tired and I start getting very slow and uncoordinated, not to mention miserable.

The other thing is, make sure you have worked out IN ADVANCE exactly how you are going to cool, age and freeze that many birds (unless you are going to can them, in which case I suppose freezing is not an issue -- ageing might still be wise but honestly I have never tried pressure-cooking an un-aged chciken so maybe you don't have to do that either, esp. if you don't mind "very firm" meat). I use several old picnic coolers full of very cold water, but that's for only like 10 birds at a time... if you were planning on doing a run of like 20 or 50 or something, you would have to figure out an alternative. They do need to be cooled quickly, and you will be amazed at how much heat a bunch of newly-killed chicken carcasses is holding!

Good luck, have fun, bon appetit,

Pat

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

wowza that IS a lot of chickens... oh the wonderful things you can do... noodles, chicken pot pie, chicken tacos.... oh man!

the first time butchering might take a while.... so you might want to trim their feathers like Shiloh said - or band them with zip ties.

we take the slow approach and dont like to hurry thru the butchering... so giving yourself a couple days may be the way to go.

and you might want to give yourself the opportunity to find out what you can do - and help. to a person everyone has said "its not what i thought it would be"... even the most tender hearted person. you may surprise yourself.

i love this site for an explanation of the process:
http://themodernhomestead.us/

Harvey takes the sting of the description - remember that the words used to describe butchering are by themselves inflammatory. it usually sounds worse than it is.

it helps to have a sense of humor, pray for courage, trust the way of things, and be exceedingly thankful for the harvest. all of these things will help you focus on the task and not get caught up in the emotion of the task. aside from the first day i stood at Bourbon Red's elbow - tight lipped and racing heart - watching him dress a turkey... i've never had a problem and i'm one of those people who said they could NEVER do that. now i look forward to it b/c its so satisfying to be part of the process.

as far as the bits - for anything truly unusable we make a big ol burn pile. its a pain to dig a deep enough hole.. and we cant compost b/c of our over-interested dogs and my belief that leaving the bits out just announces to every predator in the tri-county area that you have a chicken feast for them.

i cook down the carcasses and the organs for stock, pick out the best bits for us (and can them), then use the rest for cat food.

i'm not sure how much there will be to muck up... if anything you might want to choose the best rooster or two - band him and the rest are re-named "Stew."

good luck!

 

[Rebecka]

Wow! You guys rock so much! I thought I had thought of nearly everything. So, my FIL says we should just skin them and not concern ourselves with plucking.. thoughts on that ?

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

we usually skin b/c we are Worst Pluckers EVER. seriously. we are a disaster.

you might try both and see what is easier for you. for us, especially as we go along and get more tired, the worse we are at plucking. so we do that first and end the day skinning.

you'll do great!