What color should a freshly butchered chicken be?

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There has been some debate on the Predators and Pest section about possums and rabies and if they can carry them, or if you could get rabies from your cooked chicken. Not going to argue any of those points. I just wanted to say that any possum-attacked chicken here would not get eaten, either. From what I've read, those things can have a pretty disgusting diet - the idea of the bacteria that they must carry grosses me out! And they look like giant rats - yuck!
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chooks4life said:
Grass has a lot to do with 'coloring' chickens, yes. It makes a visual difference in skin, crest/wattles etc, flesh, yolks, organs, everything.

The only real issue is in the animal having suffered for a long time.

Asides from the ethics issue, the biological/physiological reason is that any suffering, whether from oxygen deprivation or any other issue, causes lactic acid buildup in the flesh, which severely degrades it, and releases stress hormones which cause toxins to be released into the flesh from fats, organs etc over time, as well as a host of other health problems.

As with stressed/suffering humans, the longer they suffer, the worse their health gets. Things break down more and more and more the longer they're left in that state. Every process, even and one might say especially the immune system, is affected by suffering. Even after death the 'product' is unequal, as the mitochondria are exhausted; animals that suffered badly enough for long enough often do not even experience rigor mortis, and they rot in record time compared to an animal that suffered for a short time or not at all. They were already breaking down while alive.

That's why an animal having suffered prolonged stress will be higher acid and worse quality than one that didn't suffer long or at all, and thereby worse for your health. This is one reason bruised animals' meat is sold much cheaper or even rejected outright by butchers etc.

The emphasis is on 'prolonged' suffering --- if it only suffered a short time it's not going to degrade the whole body the way prolonged suffering does. It's not as great as a bird that didn't suffer but not as bad as one that suffered for a long time. Degrees of difference.

As I said before, it's unlikely to make you sick, but if you made a habit of eating animals that suffered for prolonged periods before being culled, it would gradually impact on your health too.

As you get more experienced with the differences in outcomes of good versus bad culls, you will be able to discern the taste in the ones that did not die well, and that's even in birds that only suffered for a short time. Growing and processing from home certainly educates the palate!

Best wishes.
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Thank you for such an informative post!
 
fishermans wife said:
Thank you for such an informative post!
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You're welcome. It's pretty basic but if you search for information on what stress, damage, illness, injury, etc do to a living organism and also to a corpse's quality, you will find much more information, and more exact than what I gave, but anyway, that's the gist of it.

I've eaten animals that suffered before death (we all do when buying from supermarkets, generally speaking) and once you've tasted animals that didn't suffer nor stress before death, the taste difference is amazing. You really can taste their distress in the flesh. Emotional/psychological stress becomes measurable physical stress.

In taste tests we conducted, people could discern the difference in taste between animals raised the same of which some suffered and some didn't; the stress was only experienced for a very short time. There was no visual way to pick which one suffered, it was all taste-test derived information. (It was an accidental infliction of suffering, culls gone wrong, not some cruel premeditated experiment, but we did seize the opportunity to learn from it and find out how rapid-onset and strong the effect was). They even cook differently which is probably due to the lactic acid breaking down tissues.

Can never enjoy storebought like I used to, now I've had homegrown, lol! Of course, some don't seem to taste the difference and some can but don't mind that rank taste, everyone's different.

Best wishes.
 
I've had yellow skinned chickens and almost didn't eat them because it was so odd to me. Didn't realize they came in such a range of colors. I have just started skinning mine because we are not skin people and it is way less smelly
 
blucoondawg said:
I would say it is more likely from their differing feed than the suns rays
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Yep, a lot if not most of the color is food related... You want to know why a lot of the name brand poultry in the store had that yellow colored skin, while the generic has a pasty white? Answer: The name brand companies supplement their feed with yellow dandelion flowers, carrots and other orange/red colored ingredients... Same way you can alter the yolk color with different feeds, they are what we eat after all... Feed also alters the taste of the meat itself, I have hunted rabbits that fed on swamp grass and those that fed on clover fields, there is no comparison between the two...
 

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