Tree Pruners of Doom!

DISCLAIMER: This entry is NOT for the faint of heart. If you're squeamish, skip it, and go here instead.

If anyone ever asked, I'd have to agree with them that I'm a "city" person. I grew up near Norfolk and Virginia Beach, VA. I get uncomfortable in cities smaller than 100,000 people (except the five years I spent at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but you can't count college towns). When I was younger, I used to go fishing and hunt deer with my dad, but it's been years since I cleaned my shotgun, much less used it. That's why no one really knew what to expect from me when my inlaws invited Carrie and I up to Frankfort, OH for a chicken butchering. I think several of them - my wife included - thought I'd get freaked out by the experience.

First off, you have to understand my inlaws. Robin and Roy are what I'd call survivalists or hoarders (sp?). Roy has always vowed to be prepared for any type of catastrophe - war, weather, or economic in nature. Mom's music room is divided between her organ and several racks of canned vegetables and dry goods. Their garage is the same way - bottled water, sodas, canned and dry goods from the store, canned home-grown vegetables, several freezers of meat and frozen fruit, and bushels of produce. Roy looks for sales at the local grocery stores and then stocks up on whatever's on sale. He frequents local farmer's markets and auctions where he buys corn and squash in ten-bushel lots. He's always told us and the rest of his kids that he'll help us keep stocked up with food for our own houses in case of emergency. Frankly, after Katrina and the mess on the Gulf Coast, I'm starting to come around to where I think he's got the right idea. So when Robin and Roy told us they were going to buy a truckload of chickens and butcher them to put them away for the winter, Carrie and I figured it was a good idea. When my local Kroger has cut-up chicken on sale for $0.99/pound and we could get chickens for $0.75 each, you're talking about a savings of a couple of dollars per chicken. Add in the value of the time spent with family (and I've always said I could have done a hell of a lot worse when it came to inlaws), and it makes for a profitable opportunity.

My dad laughed at me when I told him what we were doing, and told me stories of how they used to catch a chicken, hold him down under a board, and pull his head off (I told you this entry wasn't for the squeamish). Then he told me how much it sucked to have to pluck feathers for hours to get them clean. That got me to wondering just how do you kill and clean a chicken? I got my answer at 10am on Saturday when they handed me the Tree Pruners of DOOM! That's right. Of all of the jobs they could have given me that involved working with dead chickens, I got to be the one do the killing. With tubs and sharp knives at the ready behind us, my wife's brother pulled the first chicken out of the back of his truck shell by its ankles, grabbed it by the neck to stretch it out, and held it there for me to cut its head off.

I'm sure you've all been told at one time or another that you were "running around like a chicken with its head cut off". I now know just how true that phrase is. After cutting the head off and dropping it in a trash can, Mike would throw the body 10, sometimes 15 feet away to let it bleed out before cleaning and dressing. Can I just tell you that those suckers hopped 3-4 feet in the air, and came bouncing right back at us most of the time? One chased my nephew across the campsite as if he were still alive. Pretty funny stuff if you don't stop to think about it too hard. In the end, I was the executioner (one of my brothers suggested I needed a black hood) for 48 poor chickens. My mom jokingly threatened to call PETA when she heard the story, but I'd say the tree pruner method got the job over quick. I won't venture to say it was painless, but it should have been quick. Once I'd cut the heads off, my brothers went to pulling the skin - feathers and all - off each one, and then handing them to Roy and the women to clean, dress, and cut each one in a process that probably would have rivaled Perdue for efficiency.

In the end, we came home with twelve chickens (48, split 4 ways; there were supposed to be more, but I think we're going to do another batch at Halloween). We also ended up with a carload of produce - 8 whole pineapples, another 5-6 cut-up pineapples in containers, squash, zucchini, a ten-pound box of bananas, bell peppers, hot peppers, banana peppers, home-grown tomatoes, a box of apples, and probably some other stuff I'm missing. I don't think we'll go hungry any time soon, and we'll get more servings of fruits and vegetable than we've had all summer. We've also decided to split a hog with one of Carrie's sisters (netting us something like 200 pounds of cured ham, sausage, bacon, and ham steaks), and we're talking about splitting a beef four ways.

It's a good thing we bought a new freezer...