Processing Day Support Group ~ HELP us through the Emotions PLEASE!

[fisherlady]

Ok jumping on this thread because we harvested our first chicken today. I was worried more about my kids but they seem fine. My middle boy is a little off but the rest seem fine. We are about to have chicken pot pie for dinner and I still feel awful. This was a dual purpose bird that turned out to be a rooster. We knew the plan including eating any roosters. I know that it is good for my kids to know where their food comes from but I still feel terrible...

It is harder when someone bestows 'pet' characteristics on a bird. A bit of distance (in the form of waiting a couple of days for cooking) will help reduce the 'personal connection ' you or your kids may feel.
Butchering and use of the birds doesn't bother me, but as a new experience it can take some getting used to for you and your family.
I prefer to let a bird rest in the fridge for a couple of days before cooking it just to reduce some of the rigor, if your bird is tough this time just give it a couple days in the fridge next time or use a slow cook method to optimize moisture and tenderness.
It is a good experience for your kids to understand where their food comes from and to learn from not take anything for granted...the next experience will be simpler and soon will become a 'no drama' event, but it is a process when folks are not brought up around it.

 

[rebrascora]

Hi. I know how hard it is as an adult to do this but it actually helped me a little to have been involved in the process when I was a child. Looking back on that time it seemed like a perfectly acceptable thing to do and I can't remember being traumatised by it. These days most of the people I know are horrified that I process my own birds. I'm pretty much the softest person I know and it takes me a tremendous amount of courage to do the killing part, but after that, my experience as a child helps me process the birds.

Like you, I process excess cockerels and since I allow my hens to rear chicks, there are ten or so of them to process around this time of year. I do them two or 3 at a time and I find it is best to leave them for a few days before I slow cook them. That way, they are a little more tender and there is enough time lapsed since the slaughter for me to enjoy the meat without too much remorse.

Your cockerel had a much longer and better life than any chicken you buy, so if you have any bad feeling it should be for the hundreds of supermarket chickens which you have most likely consumer over your lifetime. It is too easy for people to forget that the chicken on their plate was a living breathing creature that someone else killed so that they could eat it with a clear conscience.

Well done to you and your family for achieving this milestone together.

Be sure to make time to talk to your middle son about his feelings and share yours with him,

Best wishes

Barbara

 

[lanaschix]

I definitely wanted to wait at least a day or two before eating it but my older kid was insistent on eating it today. We all ate it but I know we all felt a little weird. In fact, I noticed my oldest (the same one who really wanted to eat it) picking around his plate. He loves chicken pot pie and any other day would have scarfed it down.

 

[Beekissed]

Over the years I've noticed that kids usually take their cue from their parents on such things, so if their parents are acting like this is a traumatizing or unusual thing to be doing, the kids will do so also. They will be looking to you on how to process the things they've seen and have done in regards to their food supply. I'm thinking if you want them to process this in a healthy manner and to be able to rationalize that chicken is chicken, whether it comes from your yard or the store, you will have to set the right example on it. No grimacing or acting like it's unusual, no vocalizations of how it may be hurting the chicken or how sad it is that he is dying or dead, etc.

In the old days it was called keeping a stiff upper lip and it was a valuable tool for teaching youngsters how to do the same. There's nothing wrong in feeling sorrow for a life taken, but with that sorrow there needs to some common sense and viewing the event from a bigger perspective than how it makes you feel during the moment. It's a great teaching moment and can mean the world of difference for the child to see their parents being strong in the face of a difficult task.

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

...

Your cockerel had a much longer and better life than any chicken you buy, so if you have any bad feeling it should be for the hundreds of supermarket chickens which you have most likely consumer over your lifetime. It is too easy for people to forget that the chicken on their plate was a living breathing creature that someone else killed so that they could eat it with a clear conscience.
...

This was a huge part of me feeling ok about eating my birds. Indeed, it's the whole reason I started this endeavor in the first place. I can't really manage to eat chicken I didn't raise now, interestingly enough.

- Ant Farm

 

[LeafBlade12345]

Great post Beekissed. This is the case much of the time I have found. When my father was young in the nineteen hundreds, he spent a lot of time on his relatives' farms. Killing chickens, cattle, pigs, and such was very normal there. My father didn't spend long enough there to fully realize how killing the animal was so final. He took up squirrel hunting for target practice at the shooting range. As he grew old and more tender, he stopped hunting and completely lost the mindset that killing animals was a part of life. He would not raise chickens for food, nor cull cockerels or roos. Therefore, I also believe that it is important to continue the trend of culling as a child grows, so if they begin to have doubts, they quickly disappear and have no time to fester. It is very helpful to have a constant time, such as twice a year, to kill excess or dual purpose birds. With this time set, there is a new, no messing around finality to the whole ordeal. It also helps if you maintain a strong link to the culled bird and your dinner, telling the children things like, "Wow, this sure is yummy. Next year we may even have better chickens!" This will keep the experience positive for children.

 

[lanaschix]

Thanks for all of this. It helps a lot. I am, of course, keeping that stiff upper lip in front of my kids, explained that it was very important to be respectful and how this is the food they eat. I don't know why I personally feel so dang bad. I know it's stupid since I have eaten chicken all my life. My family is a hunting family and they will see deer shot and gutted, etc. They have eaten venison and wild turkey. They love to tell the story of how they once bit into shot while eating a turkey. I know this is good for them in the long run and LeafBlade, I've already said next time, we will do this or that and my middle boy looked at me and said "next time??"

 

[Beekissed]

Great post Beekissed. This is the case much of the time I have found. When my father was young in the nineteen hundreds, he spent a lot of time on his relatives' farms. Killing chickens, cattle, pigs, and such was very normal there. My father didn't spend long enough there to fully realize how killing the animal was so final. He took up squirrel hunting for target practice at the shooting range. As he grew old and more tender, he stopped hunting and completely lost the mindset that killing animals was a part of life. He would not raise chickens for food, nor cull cockerels or roos. Therefore, I also believe that it is important to continue the trend of culling as a child grows, so if they begin to have doubts, they quickly disappear and have no time to fester. It is very helpful to have a constant time, such as twice a year, to kill excess or dual purpose birds. With this time set, there is a new, no messing around finality to the whole ordeal. It also helps if you maintain a strong link to the culled bird and your dinner, telling the children things like, "Wow, this sure is yummy. Next year we may even have better chickens!" This will keep the experience positive for children.

I agree. If eating meat has always been a natural thing in the family, then an attitude of naturalness should be fostered around raising and killing that meat as well. That's where this current society has really messed up and they even promote bad feelings about killing the meat in a pure peer pressure way. I have siblings that grew up killing meat and eating it, still eat meat every day...but they call me a "murderer" when I kill my chickens. What in the world? How did that happen? Because they want the world to love them and think they are gentle and compassionate while they dip their chicken McNugget in BBQ sauce, that's how.

Why in the world should anyone feel bad about killing a chicken if they've been eating chicken all their lives? What sense does that even make, I ask you? A person needs to explore just why they have come to believe the lie that it's okay to eat meat, just not okay to raise up and kill the meat before eating of it. It's all a lie, built on lies.

The same goes for naming things. The world will tell you that, if you name something, you should not eat that thing with a name.

What kind of messed up thinking and logic is that? Cheese has a name...it's cheese. It can even be called Kraft cheese.

A name is just a word to denote an object and define it more clearly than a generic class of "chicken". Which chicken? Well, the black chicken. Oh...they are all black. Which black chicken? Lucy? Yeah...her! She's the one with the wonky tail feathers but it's just easier to call her Lucy than "that black chicken that stands out from the other black chickens because she has that wonky tail feather".

All the drama, all the weird or bad feelings? That's all triggered from peer pressure of the media, your co-workers, your family, your school mates, etc. If we are going to teach our children to stand up to peer pressure, it starts in something as basic as our food and how we produce or obtain the food the family eats. In a world that screams "tolerance' all the time like a battle cry, where is the tolerance for those wanting to be honest about what they are eating? I'm eating my chicken. The one I raised from a darling little chick, gave a name, cared for carefully in season and out of season until it was her time to die and be food for my family. That's as honest as it gets if you eat chicken in this life.

That's all it really takes, being honest to your children and teaching them to be honest with themselves and with others. There's an integrity about standing up and taking back the right to grow and kill your own meat that those people who eat meat that arrived under cellophane will never understand.... and what they don't understand, they revile. They are not strong, so they hate the strong. They do not have integrity, so they hate integrity. Let them hate and do it anyway, because you eat meat and shouldn't have to apologize to anyone for that, no more than they do when they eat meat.

That stiff upper lip? It sits on top of a smile.

That's why my granddaughter clapped her little hands and said, "YAY!" when I killed a rabbit in front of her this past fall. She had never seen an animal killed up until then and was probably too young to even know what was happening. How did she know to do that? Because it came natural to her and I gave her positive reinforcement for that very natural action.... taught her that this is a normal activity that Granny does to put meat in the jar and nothing to mourn or feel weird about.

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

I agree. If eating meat has always been a natural thing in the family, then an attitude of naturalness should be fostered around raising and killing that meat as well. That's where this current society has really messed up and they even promote bad feelings about killing the meat in a pure peer pressure way. I have siblings that grew up killing meat and eating it, still eat meat every day...but they call me a "murderer" when I kill my chickens. What in the world? How did that happen? Because they want the world to love them and think they are gentle and compassionate while they dip their chicken McNugget in BBQ sauce, that's how.

Why in the world should anyone feel bad about killing a chicken if they've been eating chicken all their lives? What sense does that even make, I ask you? A person needs to explore just why they have come to believe the lie that it's okay to eat meat, just not okay to raise up and kill the meat before eating of it. It's all a lie, built on lies.

The same goes for naming things. The world will tell you that, if you name something, you should not eat that thing with a name.

What kind of messed up thinking and logic is that? Cheese has a name...it's cheese. It can even be called Kraft cheese.

A name is just a word to denote an object and define it more clearly than a generic class of "chicken". Which chicken? Well, the black chicken. Oh...they are all black. Which black chicken? Lucy? Yeah...her! She's the one with the wonky tail feathers but it's just easier to call her Lucy than "that black chicken that stands out from the other black chickens because she has that wonky tail feather".

All the drama, all the weird or bad feelings? That's all triggered from peer pressure of the media, your co-workers, your family, your school mates, etc. If we are going to teach our children to stand up to peer pressure, it starts in something as basic as our food and how we produce or obtain the food the family eats. In a world that screams "tolerance' all the time like a battle cry, where is the tolerance for those wanting to be honest about what they are eating? I'm eating my chicken. The one I raised from a darling little chick, gave a name, cared for carefully in season and out of season until it was her time to die and be food for my family. That's as honest as it gets if you eat chicken in this life.

That's all it really takes, being honest to your children and teaching them to be honest with themselves and with others. There's an integrity about standing up and taking back the right to grow and kill your own meat that those people who eat meat that arrived under cellophane will never understand.... and what they don't understand, they revile. They are not strong, so they hate the strong. They do not have integrity, so they hate integrity. Let them hate and do it anyway, because you eat meat and shouldn't have to apologize to anyone for that, no more than they do when they eat meat.

That stiff upper lip? It sits on top of a smile.

That's why my granddaughter clapped her little hands and said, "YAY!" when I killed a rabbit in front of her this past fall. She had never seen an animal killed up until then and was probably too young to even know what was happening. How did she know to do that? Because it came natural to her and I gave her positive reinforcement for that very natural action.... taught her that this is a normal activity that Granny does to put meat in the jar and nothing to mourn or feel weird about.

My response to anyone who has expressed any disapproval of me culling and eating my chickens ends up eventually hearing the same two phrases as part of the discussion:

"If I'm going to eat meat, it is very important to me spiritually to be part of the process."

and

"Where do you think your chicken comes from?" (This one usually shuts them up.)

As for naming, having culled both named and unnamed birds during my first time, it was certainly harder to cull the named ones as a beginner. But they were part of a growout group that were being evaluated as potential breeders - I got to the point where I needed to name them (as you said). And I will probably always end up having some named birds in a given cull, so it's not really avoidable if you're hatching and then culling cockerels after a period of evaluation. That being said, I don't feel compelled to name birds that are highly likely be culled - but I use numbered zip tie leg bands, so I can always refer to "number 21" and "number 4" for the purposes of tracking them during raising...

I still think it's wise to suggest not naming future culls to anyone who is a beginner at this and still wrapping their emotional head around it. JMHO.

- Ant Farm

 

[lanaschix]

@Beekissed thank you! You, of course, are absolutely right. How did society get to this?? How did we so disconnect from our food?? Bottom line.. We are meat eaters. Pretending that our food comes in packages is insane. Before bed my oldest said he wanted to get some Cornish meat chickens. My middle kid said he was sad because he saw blood on a flower.

Yeesh. Seriously though what you said about media and peer pressure is beyond true. I tried googling something about 4H and teaching kids about slaughtering and good lord, those anti-farmers make you feel like you are a child abuser.