Dispatching Birds - How do you handle it?

[Vampiric_Conure]

Just a general question - How do you tolerate dispatching/cleaning birds? I have enough problems killing mice with mouse traps. How do you handle the gore of cleaning them? Is it something you gradually learn to live with? I'd love to raise my own birds for meat, but I admit, dispatching is a huuuuuge roadblock for me.

 

[STACEYH]

Personally, I grew up watching and by 8 years old helping with killing and cleaning many types of animals. It is part of nature. I see it as food and what I need to do to eat.

 

[Silexian]

My wife and I have this same problem. I grew up on a working farm. We raised and preserved most of our own food. Processing animals was viewed as no different than harvesting from the garden and orchard or foraging for berries and nuts in the wild. It is just a part of getting food stored for the upcoming year. My wife has never been apart of anything like that. She has a very hard time understanding how to raise an animal to be processed for food. Just as I have a hard time understanding how it is any different than harvesting a plant. Both are renewable links in the food chain. That propel the cycle of life. In our case, the kids and I take care of processing animals. Admittedly we have passed some of the garden chores that we don’t like doing onto her in exchange.

 

[Aunt Angus]

I don't handle it - haha! If I need a bird euthanized, I get someone else to do it. And as a vegetarian, it isn't an issue for me. My birds are for eggs. They get to live out their natural lives after they stop laying because it seems only fair. No disrespect to my meat-eating friends. It makes sense for folks to raise meat birds than rely on store-bought.

 

[Ursuline Chick]

I grew up in the city. My Daddy hunted and we ate what he killed. At 12 I begged to learn to hunt, was given and old .410 and Daddy, Uncle Paul (and his rabbit dogs) and I went on my first rabbit hunt. I have been hunting ever since. Even as city kids we were brought up to understand that there was a food hierarchy that God provided for man to be able to eat. We were never allowed to kill anything we were not going to eat and eating meat we had killed was no different than eating a fresh ear of corn.

 

[Vampiric_Conure]

I guess I'm a softie. My dad fished and hunted a lot when I was little and he would let us watch him clean the fish. I guess logically I understand that dispatching animals is necessary before we eat them (The circle of life, etc) but emotionally I'm too invested in keeping an animal as a 'pet', LOL . I'll get over it, I'm sure

 

[Naisha]

I don't handle it - haha! If I need a bird euthanized, I get someone else to do it. And as a vegetarian, it isn't an issue for me. My birds are for eggs. They get to live out their natural lives after they stop laying because it seems only fair. No disrespect to my meat-eating friends. It makes sense for folks to raise meat birds than rely on store-bought.

Same here. I’m not a vegetarian but I try to lean towards it as much as I can.

I honestly think if you can’t handle killing and cleaning it’s better just not do it, I personally would have a very very bad time and wouldn’t really want to get used to it.
Having chickens for meat sounds like a good idea, you know what you feed them, you know the life you provided them and you know that the quality of that meat will be way better than what you can find at the supermarket, but to me all that is not worth it if I can’t do the “dirty job” without having a really bad time and having nightmares or similar.

 

[Ursuline Chick]

I guess I'm a softie. My dad fished and hunted a lot when I was little and he would let us watch him clean the fish. I guess logically I understand that dispatching animals is necessary before we eat them (The circle of life, etc) but emotionally I'm too invested in keeping an animal as a 'pet', LOL . I'll get over it, I'm sure

We were taught to catch and clean the fish and game, just like we were taught to grow food and herbs for flavoring. And we don't cull hens because they stop laying. But we can't keep roosters, so those will have to be culled and cooked, unless they are ill. Otherwise it is a waste, because they have to go and I think this is the most humane way. Just letting them go free in a park or the wild I believe is cruel.

 

[ihatedarkroast]

Ehhh...I'm a bit squeamish too. We processed our turkeys for the first time this week and both my husband and I struggled emotionally with it. We hunt deer too, but it's easier to shoot a large animal from a distance than to dispatch an animal with your hands up close. Also, the turkeys were so sweet and calm and trusting up to the very end. That made it harder. I knew they were looking at me like, "Mom?"
From an objective viewpoint though, things went very smoothly. There was no struggling or squawking. They were gone within moments, less than a minute. That was the hard part. The actual dipping, plucking, and cleaning was emotionally easier as it was a mechanical task keeping one's hands busy while trying not to freeze to death out in the cold.
Mentally, I reminded myself that these turkeys tried to murder one of my favorite chicken hens, relentlessly squashing her and attempting to peck the back of her head off. And they would have gotten her if I hadn't intervened. Birds are just not as smart or emotional as we delicate humans project onto them. I try to think of them as tiny dinosaurs, meat eaters themselves.

 

[theoldchick]

I send them to the local processor down the road who will cull and process them for me. He gets to keep half of what I bring.