A question regarding killing your birds...

[dancingbear]

STEAL road cones?! Not a good idea. You can buy them at Home Depot or Lowe's, and probably other places as well. You can also find them on ebay. Even if you don't care that stealing is wrong, who wants to go to jail for stealing a road cone?

You can also make a cone for free, from an empty milk jug or other plastic gallon jugs, like vinegar or other substances come in. Just use something that contained a non-toxic substance.

 

[Bassleg]

Do they make a chicken call that you could use in your blind
or do you plan on doing a little jump shooting?

 

[jaku]

I was against the .22 until I tried it. There's positives and negatives. It's hard to get your aim right on a moving bird without hitting the side of your tractor, but it's much nicer than throat slitting. The best option I found was to get the bird in the killing cone first and blast it with the .22 at short range. It's the best of both worlds.

 

[burntumber]

Hang the bird upside down- tie it at the feet with a soft rope and hang from a tree branch.

Using a good quality, very sharp knife ( I like a deboning knife like above) sever the jugular.
To find the jugular gently feel around the right side of the neck about an inch back from the head. You'll feel a thin "tube" just under the skin that you can roll between your thumb and fore finger. That's the jugular. (If it's a wide tube that runs along the underside of the neck that's the trachea- don't sever this!) Put the tip of your knife so it aims to poke under and behind the jugular vein, the with blade facing out, pull blade through, severing it.

You'll know you've gotten it if a strong stream of dark blood comes out in a continuaous steady flow. No stream of blood, you missed.

After a few tries, you'll be able to do this in one quick, clean stroke. My birds almost never react. A sharp knife ensures it won't hurt. A dull knife will hurt.

They die quietly this way, usually just looking around like nothing is wrong at all. They don't have a nervous system reaction (flapping wings) until after they're unconscious.
The heart pumps all of the blood out of the meat.

Chopping the head off will cause adrenaline to course through the meat. Plus it's just a disturbing scene, IMO.

 

[mlheran]

Quote:
That's what I do, except I lay it on a board that has a little noose to hold the head still (and the board is on a trashcan). One of us holds the bird with the neck gently but securely stretched and the other fires the snot with our .22 -then we quickly hang it by the leg ties on a hook inside the trashcan. It's hard to miss (we never have) when you do it like that.

 

[clutterbegone]

Shooting them is the only way that my husband kills our roosters. He normally gets them on the first shot. He figures if he can shoot wild turkeys he can shoot a chicken in the head.

 

[Ugly Cowboy]

LOL Well, one time I misplaced my hatchet, so I used a pellet gun and it worked alright. Also used a .22, that works better.

 

[ThePamperedPullet]

Cutting the head off allows the bird to bleed out quickly so that the blood does not taint the meat. A bird that is not bled out quickly will taste different than a bird that still has most of the blood in it while it is being cleaned
They make what i refer to as a killing cone that the bird slips into to hold it fairly still while you cut off its head. I take an old long sleeved sweatshirt and cut the arms off at about the shoulder. I slip this over the birds head and pull it down over the body so that just his head is sticking out of the cuff. This allows you to hold them still after cutting off the head so he doesn't go running all over the place. After it bleeds out you just slip the sleeve back off and butcher away. You can either wash it for next time or just throw it away. I use a Miracle Blade II cleaver to do the job. Its razor sharp and it only takes one slice.

 

[burntumber]

What taints the meat also is adrenaline hormones coursing through the muscles. When you shoot a bird in the head or chop off the head (also if you chase it around for 10 minutes to catch it) and it does that thrashing about, adrenaline courses through the meat fibers, as the bird is in "Eeek!!! Run AWAY!" mode (even without it's brain telling it to.) It's an automatic survival response. The meat isn't bad, but it can make it a bit "stringy" and tough- esp. the legs.

If you keep the birds calm before killing, and only sever the jugular (NOT the trachea), the bird will not have the physiological adrenaline response. It will just hang out and quietly bleed to death. It will have a CNS repsonse at the very end- might beat it's wings a few times- but that's it.

I've seen a slaughter house that stuns birds with electricity so they bleed out and die very, very quickly, and this also results in more tender meat.

One in 10 birds will be upset no matter what- some birds are just scared of being handled.

 

[Beekissed]

If you keep the birds calm before killing, and only sever the jugular (NOT the trachea), the bird will not have the physiological adrenaline response. It will just hang out and quietly bleed to death. It will have a CNS repsonse at the very end- might beat it's wings a few times- but that's it.

I would have to disagree with this theory a bit....

Sorry!

When a creature bleeds extensively, its body goes into a "fight or flight" response immediately and the adrenal glands signal the heart to beat harder to fill the vessels, while it also signals the vessels to constrict to conserve volume. The adrenal glands get this signal from the hypothalamus and pituitary gland located at the base of the brainstem.

If a chicken no longer possesses a brainstem...or a head, for that matter, this signal cannot be sent.

I would say that a chicken who is bleeding profusely would have a large amount of adrenalin in the tissues, especially the smaller, more exterior vessels, even while "remaining calm". This calm state you are witnessing is called "shock".

Just a little tid bit of info...