respectful chicken harvest part 1 of 2 kill and pluck - how to

http://www.permies.com

Alexia Allen of Hawthorn Farm is a wilderness skills instructor who also has a small farm in Woodinville, Washington. I thought she did a really good job of demonstrating a respectful harvest of a chicken.

I thought about trying to squeeze everything into a five minute video and decided instead to edit out very little. So there are two parts. This part is ten minutes and focused on killing the chicken and plucking the feathers from the chicken. Part 2 will be about separating the tasty parts from the not so tasty parts: butchering. (twelve minutes)

Alexia has many approaches to her philosophies about harvesting animals:

"I usually like wearing pink when I do my butchering. It makes me the angel of death. I have come to this process of killing animals with this sense of being almost a midwife? Or at least when I teach people about butchering chickens I want to emphasize It's not about being brutal or macho, it's really about 'hey, you kill things and eat them.' That's part of how the world seems to work. I didn't make up how the world works. It just seems to be what needs to happen whether it is a chicken or a carrot. It's just a vertabrate bias that might make a chicken seem different than a carrot."

FAQ: Why not just take the head off right away? A: To better bleed out the chicken.

Relevant threads at permies:
http://www.permies.com/permaculture-f...
http://www.permies.com/permaculture-f...
http://www.permies.com/permaculture-f...
http://www.richsoil.com/raising-chick...

music by Jimmy Pardo

• Category

  Science & Technology

[RaspberryRampage]

Wouldn't be easier, faster an less painful to chop the head completely off with one swift motion?

[paulwheaton12]

Nope. Check the rest of the comments for why.

[limbodog]

When I get too old to be productive anymore I'd like this lady to show up in a pink fuzzy sweater.

[Brad Sullivan]

"respectful" HAHAHAHAH. bleeding a bird goes right out the window when you have to do 50 a day!!

[MoonOfPisces]

I think she's a nice lady doing a great service for the community.

It's much kinder to give them to "The Chicken Lady" than to just abandon the birds to slowly die of disease and predation in the wild - or, far worse, attempt to butcher your old chickens yourself when you don't know what you're doing.

[Timothy Eddy]

And what would you do with it after you shot it, Sherlock?

[justgonnastay]

Thank you for this video. I have hunted and fished my whole life, so I'm not unfamiliar with processing animals, but to have it in your hands and gently take it's life may be beyond me. Watching this is difficult, but her philosophy is beautiful and helps a lot.

[Cj blanchard]

Omg, I eat meat, I understand that we are on top of the food chain, this lady seems nice, however, I personally don't think I could do it. I will just go to the store or better yet, shoot it!

[cmdbb71]

hello. we did as you propose on this video, and it was easier to kill the ones who gave eggs and are always near us, weeding and hunting insects... we are permacultures, or triyng to be... and we thanks you for this, had inspired a lot and with that we started killing our old and wounded chickens.

[Derek Lowery]

i want to know if the chicken tastes differently if u kill and eat it the same day