the neck usually bends up (when the chicken is alive and holding up his head)... it still arches that way when you are processing. I remove the head, and hold the end of the neck in my left hand and bend it sharply downward, holding it firmly to cause tension on the spine. With a large, thick bladed knife I slice through the neck (about 1/3 the thickness of the neck) near where it joins into the body, this cuts through the soft tissue to the spinal process. Sometimes I am lucky enough to open it up right where two vertebrae meet, if so you can cut the ligaments which hold them together and then through the other side of the soft tissue. If you open it up to a solid vertebrae you can angle the blade slightly toward the body of the bird and should get between 2 vertebrae within a 1/4 inch or so (the vertebrae on chickens aren't very big)
The vertebrae are very irregular in shape, so it isn't quite as simple as cutting through the leg joint to remove the feet, but it is a very similar process. And even though I have done plenty of them I still have some which cause me fits... at which time I prefer Tomtommom's method... I twist the heck out of it till it gives!
little guy/gal is like a football player next to the other one, a leghorn/marans cross I hatched of the same age. If it ends up being a hen and surviving long enough to lay eggs, I might try to cross my thai or marans rooster over it to make more meaties. If it's a rooster, no big loss, it'll still be tasty, that's what I got it for! TSC had two bins, one with these and one with older actual white rock chicks. They were telling people that these were also white rocks, but you could tell the difference just by leg size, the day old cornish cross had thicker legs and were beefier than the week old rocks!
