CAGJ joined the farmers of Island Meadow Farm – Chandler Briggs, Caitlin Henry and Roby – in an awesome heart wrenching, gut wrenching chicken slaughter during the September Teach out to Vashon Island.\u00a0 Here is a juicy snapshot of our journey.<\/p>\n
By CAGJ Intern, Valentina de la Fuente<\/em><\/p>\n Something I learned about chickens today is that they live in the present moment.\u00a0 They show no fear or dread as their sisters and friends are snatched by the feet and vanish from their chicken tractor home.\u00a0 They continue naively clucking and scratching and preening themselves until their moment of fate also comes.\u00a0 Perhaps they unconsciously understand their fate. The variety of chicken that Chandler, Caitlin and Roby choose are bread specifically as meat birds.\u00a0 Instead of maturing in several months, they mature in several weeks, and their breasts are significantly larger and juicier, though they\u2019re significantly more lethargic and sedentary.\u00a0 They choose this chicken for several reasons.\u00a0 Because the farm is on an island, the price of imported inputs such as grains is significantly higher.\u00a0 Though the wild, \u201cchicken-like\u201d quality of the bird is sacrificed, killing the birds in a few weeks rather than a few months cuts down significantly on its cost per pound.\u00a0 It\u2019s a decision that is challenging to make.<\/p>\n The killing process is a fascinating, emotional, gruesome spiritual experience.\u00a0 Chandler grabs two birds by their gangly feet as they frantically thrash about, and puts them upside down in a traffic cone like structure nestled in the crotch of a tree.\u00a0 He pulls the head taut through the cone so the neck and jugular are exposed.\u00a0 In a humble act of gratitude, he ceremonially thanks the bird for giving life and nourishment. With a sharp metal blade, he slits the jugular.\u00a0 Bright, neon red blood pulses into white waiting buckets.\u00a0 It bleeds for a minute, then with a sharper and bigger knife, he saws off the head and drops it in the bucket.\u00a0 The bird is dead, but it thrashes violently in the cone, its muscles and nerves continuing to shoot adrenaline through its rigid body. About 15 birds are killed this way.\u00a0 We watch like children, as if seeing death for the first time.\u00a0 People hold each others hands, squeezing harder at the moment of death and violence.\u00a0 Eyes close, blink, and tears work their ways down cold cheeks. Our minds our blank, dull, and numb.\u00a0 All we can do is stare, and feel a little more grown up with each moment, with each death. There is a sense of awe and silence.<\/p>\n The dead body is extracted, instantly dipped into scalding water to loosen the feathers, and then put into a machine that de-feather\u2019s the bird by bouncing it around with rubber suckers.\u00a0 It is hard to imagine that a few moments earlier, this pale yellow piece of meat was a living, feeling, clucking, scratching being. What the machine does not take off, an eager team of volunteers plucks by hand.\u00a0 At a nearby table people stand with sharp knifes extracting livers, gizzards, hearts, and kidneys, for soups and stalks.<\/p>\n The experience of the chicken deaths lives imprinted on my mind for the rest of day, and the weeks following.\u00a0 I feel I have earned my right to eat this meat.\u00a0 This meat holds no lies.\u00a0 Its life and death is not a hidden secret that lies buried, invisible in dark cramped warehouses of shit and stink.\u00a0\u00a0 It lived fully until its moment of death, offering its metabolism to produce nitrate rich compost, its body to nourish, its death to educate, and its revenue to help sustain the farm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CAGJ joined the farmers of Island Meadow Farm – Chandler Briggs, Caitlin Henry and Roby – in an awesome heart wrenching, gut wrenching chicken slaughter during the September Teach out to Vashon Island.\u00a0 Here is a juicy snapshot of our journey. By CAGJ Intern, Valentina de la Fuente Something I learned about chickens today is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}