first time process

I think many folks experience this.  There is an innate attachment to something that you have nurtured from such a small, helpless creature to what it has now become.  You just need to keep in mind why you raised it in the first place.  Their role was to provide food for you.  There will be more but the first ones are always special.  I have killed many farm animals (chickens, rabbits, hogs, sheep, goats, cattle).  I still feel an attachment to the animals I raise.  At this stage I do not experience the guilt.  This is just a natural cycle.  It does get better.  Best of luck to you.

I think this is completely normal. You've cared for the bird, fed it watched it grow.  Letting it take its final place and fulfill its mission of feeding you can be an awkward jump the first few times. 

It took me a few days to recover from the first time I killed a chicken. It was very hard....

this is the GIANT hurdle looming in front of me.  hubby isn't interested at all, so i can't pawn it off on him.  it's a few months yet for me.  i need to get a cone. i read on another thread where the chicken fell out of the cone.  i DO NOT want any mishaps that bring more trauma to the chicken or me.  i'm pretty confident i can work my way through the following steps.  especially after getting such great details from this site.

I use a cone and have never had one "fall out" but have had them almost turn themselves around...top to bottom...because they were able to get a grip on the sides with their feet. So now, when I place them into the cone, I keep a firm hold on the feet until I get the head out the other end. Once the head is out the I get a good hold on that so that I can get the neck in the proper position. Once I make the cut I again get a firm hold on the feet because when the nerves cause them to convulse I don't want it to accidently pop out of the cone.

It's a normal reaction if it's not a process you're used to or raised with - after all, most folks don't have livestock that they eat. They get it from a store or someone else. Most people are used to the concept that killing something is a very bad thing. It's hard to "rewire" that thinking to one that it's normal to kill an animal to make food out of it - most especially an animal you raise. Deer are tasty critters, but usually one doesn't know it closely and raise it from birth and then shoot it - it's not really the same process as raising livestock for food.

There's a lot of care that goes into raising healthy, humanely treated livestock, and once you get over that hardest hump, you've got it made for having the best, freshest, most humane meat possible for food :)