At what age do you allow your children to process meat birds?

[rancher hicks]

At 13? Good garden o' peas!

Listen my mother wouldn't let me have a jack knife at 16! I've hated her for it ever since. Not really but you get the idea.

I say heck yeah, let 'em do it. 13 is plenty old enough. Kids today can't do squat for themselves. Why the heck do you think they have such emotional crap going on. They don't have the strength.

Now I don't expect I'd let the little ones play with the guts, but heck some parents let their kids do worse.

Maybe if my mother let me have that jack knife I'd be able to gut a chicken myself.

As long as he understands the why fors of doing it. I say let 'em.


Rancher

 

[D3invertebrates]

I killed my first deer at 7 but I was cleaning and quartering the deer when I was maybe 5, my dad and his friends would give me five dollars a deer which was enough to get me excited about it.

I think its gonna depend mostly on the kid, some kids just cant handle stuff like that adults either for that matter. It is a great experience for a child to learn what in the past would have been essential skills needed to survive, as you get older it can be harder to learn these skills or get anyone to teach you. A child that cant bait a hook is adorable an adult that cant bait a hook is pathetic.

 

[galanie]

I'm a city kid but I watched my dad dispatch three roosters when I was about 7. I was so grossed out by watching them flop around the yard headless that I didn't stick around for the rest of it. Same when I was around 15. Now I wish I had. Anyway that's probably why I use kill cones today. No way am I watching that part again. And once they're dead and still, it's just meat. If I had the opportunity to show my own kids when they were little, I would have. But I didn't and now my son, who hunts, is up for it. But my daughter.. NEVER.

 

[aoxa]

I think kids can handle death much better than adults who have never been exposed to it before (like me).

 

[Pineywoods Peepers]

When we processed our meaties in May of this year my 9 year old and 6 year old nieces both helped - and LOVED it! I was very up front with the girls and told her that we would be eating the chicks we got in March. Every time they interacted with them, I told them we would be killing them. On processing day they were a huge help. They caught chickens, hung them up to bleed out after we chopped their heads, dropped them in the plucker, carried them from the plucker to the processing tables, and then helped cut them up. They were very excited about helping, and as you can tell were involved in every facet other than the actual head chopping.

 

[3goodeggs]

I was cleaning fish when I would have thought I was too young to hold a knife.
I did what I was told. It wasn't until I was older that I started thinking about the animal.
If it does not bother your child, what's the problem?
Busybody neighbors can decide for their own family.

 

[Tracydr]

I normally think its great for kids to be exposed to this stuff in controlled situations, with the right mind frames. I have a couple of caveats, though.
I have a grandson who I seriously worry about, he's not right. He gets in trouble at school for fighting, he lies and we've caught him stoning bunnies, trying to throw rocks at the neighborhood feral bunnies, just to hurt them. I would NOT invite him to help me process the chickens, despite the fact that he's in 9th grade. I really wonder if he'll end up being cruel to animals and not have the right attitude towards killing chickens, no matter how I introduce him to it. I think he would like the killing far too much and not understand the seriousness of it. I see signs of sociopathic personality disorder in him, as much as I hate to see it. His father is a convicted felon and has his own issues so it was probably hereditary. This is me talking as a physician, not as the grandmother.
Next caveat, I had a teenager with his parents and he was doing very well with everything. Dad, not so well, very nervous, first time processing. I made the mistake of agreeing to allow the son to dispatch the next chicken with the killing cone because my hands were full eviscerating, although I was watching.
He didn't give a good enough slit, didn't hold the head firmly enough and the chicken got its head loose. Pulled itself back into the cone and came upright, looking out the top and quite distressed. I thought Dad was going to pass out right then and there.
That was my mistake. I should have been at his side, helping as needed.
Anyway, those are my two inputs. The only other thing is to make sure parent s are ok with it and preferably have parents there or at least written permission. Parents can be very weird sometimes. Even my step kids get strange about the simplest things, like when I take my granddaughter to horse events, I'm questioned about how much she's supervised, what she ate ( usually so healthy that she gets a tummy ache from fiber that she doesn't eat at home).

 

[BairleaFarm]

Any age thats good for them. My daughter is 3 and my son is 5. They both help. (when they are hear) usually the go back to VA and inform all city slickers and fellow students of how to slaughter properly lol. Its important to me for them to know where there food comes from. I think children are sheltered no adays. Mine help with the whole process of animals from birth/hatch to raising to culling to process. They have even been around when Ive had to put down a calf/cow.