How I botched my first attempt at killing a chicken~~hoping that others will learn from my mistakes

I mentioned in another thread that I had botched my first chicken killing. Someone asked if I would describe what happened and I'm hoping that others, who haven't killed their first chicken yet, will be able to learn from my mistakes and have a better experience.

A couple of years ago I hatched 4 incubators full of eggs, and ended up with 35 cockerels!! I knew that eventually I would have to deal with the issue of what to do with all of them so I studied everything I could find on the internet. Since I didn't have a killing cone, yet, I tried a method that I had read about using a grocery bag (with a hole for the head to hang out of) tied to a tree. I also didn't have a slicing knife to cut the jugular vein so used a box cutter (with new blade)--a method which I also had seen on the internet.

Well, I had put things off for so long that I had 35+ roosters crowing all day and night so I had to finally pick my first guinea pig. The poor fella just happened to be unfortunate enough to be the one standing next to me that day. I picked him up, somehow got him in the bag, wrapped a piece of twine around his feet and hung it from the nail in the tree. He was very uncooperative during this whole process. (The other piece of poor advice that I found on the internet was that you could kill a chicken right in front of the other chickens because they aren't smart enough to know what is happening ).

Well, the bag kept slipping off so that wasn't working. By this time the cockerel was squawking up a storm...frightening all of the other chickens so now they were squawking, too.

I had read that somewhere on the side of their neck was a vein that needed to be sliced. I sliced with the box cutter but didn't realize just how tough chicken skin is......so all it did was to cut the poor thing just a little bit but no big pouring of blood like it's supposed to be. I cut a few more times but obviously was not getting the right spot. It was taking longer than I had wanted so I decided to hurry and try another method that I had read about--the broomstick method.

I didn't have a broomstick with me so I just used my foot (also read this on the internet) placing it on his neck close to the head and gave a sharp yank on the feet. All that happened was the neck got skinned but the neck was not dislocated. By now I was in a panic (I have never, EVER killed an animal before) so I grabbed him up, brought him into the barn (away from all the other panicked chickens), stepped on his neck again but pressing a bit harder to prevent the head from slipping under my foot. I must have been stepping hard enough but my yank was too hard, this time, because his head came right off!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh My Gosh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The rest of the day I was just sort of sick to my stomach over the whole thing. Needless to say, it took me awhile before I was ready to try it again but by then I had gotten the proper equipment. I bought a couple of killing cones (from someone on this forum), prepared a sharp knife, investigated on the location of the jugular vein, and set up a "killing station" AWAY from the other chickens.

It took me awhile to do them all but 1-1/2 yrs later I have a very calm and efficient method of killing a chicken. It only takes a matter of minutes from picking it up to it's actual demise. I really love my chickens and the one thing I didn't want was to cause one of them unnecessary fear and pain.

I hope others will share their learning experiences, also.