That made me laugh.
Oh, Raz, if you thought the Rasputin crack was funny, sometime when you have half a day I'll tell you the whole story of this blasted roo. Stewie. He was dancing on the edge of culling since the day he was hatched. In fact, he came from an ugly egg. (People say, "What? How can an egg be ugly?" Well, he was an Easter Egger. So really their number one reason to exist is pretty eggs. And the egg he hatched from was an ugly dull grayish tannish green).
So let's count all the charges against him. (Which I freely admit are just evidence of how willfully slow I was about the culling--I knew what I should do, I just put off doing it):
1) poopy butt since the day he hatched in May of last year--not diarrhea, stool that hit the ground was normal, just a LOT of it stayed in his feathers, got worse as he got older; 2) managed to get pooped on by another chicken and develop maggots, I spent hours one night cleaning him up, then six weeks with him healing up in our guest bathroom (right next to our bedroom) just as he began crowing; 3) "Ninja Rapist" (to borrow a phrase from NovaAman)--terrorized two of my Sebright hens to the point they would not even leave the coop and one of them was not just bald but quite bloody on her back--at this point (instead of culling!!) I isolated him in a small coop/run. I meant to cull him. And then I meant to process him and stew his bony little self. But somehow day by day I just kept feeding and watering him an cleaning his coop and occasionally cleaning his poopy behind. And then in the winter I ran an extension cord out so he could have a heated waterer.
Yeah, and don't get the idea we were bonding over any of this, either. Cleaning the maggots out, and the butt baths I've given him, did not make Stewie love me (not that I can blame him for that...) Living inside for six weeks and getting handled daily didn't either. I even went in and sat with him every day for awhile, brought something to read, and let him run around the bathroom out of the cage. Can't say it made us any fonder of each other. Only chicken I've had that I had no liking for. I have two other roosters, same hatch date, that are great.
Anyway, we come to strike four. A week ago last Monday, Stewie got maggots again, this time from his own poop. Yeah, not like I have anyone but myself to blame, for putting it off so long. And I was neither going to make him a house chicken nor give him a butt bath every day, just so he could continue to live in solitary confinement. So that's why I had to do it that day, and quickly. I always kept a close eye on him and his unfortunate nether regions, so I know the maggots had not been there the day before, but maggot are no joke and if I wasn't going to treat them then I wasn't going to let him suffer. And I'd been planning to cull him for months. I'd done all kinds of reading, on BYC and elsewhere.
Yeah. About that. I think I won't go into detail. (Anyone who would like graphic details for educational purposes or to write a scholarly paper invoking comparisons with Rasputin can PM me), Shall we say that theory is good, and reading is wonderul, and it's great to know five different ways (on paper) to kill a chicken? And then can we perhaps agree that it would be preferable to know as a hands-on skill just a single way to do it competently?
I eat meat. I eat the chickens from the factory farms that led short horrible miserable lives. I think if I'm going to eat chicken, it would be so much better to raise my own, give them a good life, and they'd have only that one bad day. I always thought that if I did try raising meat chickens, I would also want to do my own processing because I would want to know it was done in the most humane way. I can't say I came anywhere close to that ideal with Stewie.
