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Nope, its a pretty quiet operation. Prior to processing mine, I spent quite a few weeks reading up on the meatie forum and also looking at videos of various methods on YouTube. I decided that the method that would work best for us involved a "killing cone" which is a cone you install somewhere (we screwed ours to a fence post), put the bird in so the head is coming out the bottom and the body is contained in the cone. This eliminates his ability to flap around and there is no "running around like a chook with its head cut off". I tried to keep them very calm beforehand, covering their heads with a dark pillow case while carrying them to the cone. Once in the cone, we moved quick and with a sharp knife cut into the neck, cutting across both the carotid and the jugular. This means they bleed out twice as fast as if you only do one, so they lose consciousness before they even have time to register the pain of the cut (if you think about cutting your finger with a knife while cutting vegies, you see the cut and see the blood before you actually feel it). There is really no sound.
As for nosy neighbors.....the recommendation is to do this after they have fasted, so they don't have a crop full of food and a gut full of food in various stages of digestion. For us what worked best was to do them first thing in the morning. Our birds don't have food in the coop at night so we nabbed them first thing as we were letting them out of the coop and did it then - probably well before the neighbors were up. As soon as they had finished bleeding out (only takes minutes), we lifted them out of the cone and carried them inside and did the rest in the kitchen, so no one was any the wiser.
