Chicken Reformating.

We had too many cocks so some of them had to go. They'd started trying to crow and I shall miss the sound of their strangled bleatings as I pick the paddock. That said, fourteen crowing cocks and a hangover is not a pleasant thought.




Poultry processing is, I suppose, a messy and smelly business. Appropriately the poultry processor was way out in the bush.

A digression. Toronto consists of a central city area which is pretty much typical of North American cities, postcards of Toronto are hard to distinguish from postcards of Pittsburgh, and then a band of older leafy suburbs much of which is being inbuilt with McMansions. Beyond that is awful sprawling exurbia, mile upon mile of housing estates consisting of identical houses with no pubs, churches or other landmarks. I used to hate taking the children to birthday parties north of the QEW in Mississauga as it always meant a frustrating half hour trying to find the way out of legoland and then another trying to rid myself of an earworm of the Talking Head's Big Country.

The exurbs extend along the major roads, between them are areas like Caledon where there are large houses and well tended horse farms. Some of this country is despoiled and polluted by golf courses but it mainly looks affluent, even groomed. Above highway 9 the horse farms continue but now they're either very big and very very well tended or a bit scruffy and may house horses of undistinguished breeding, donkeys or those freaky animals we know as ponies but which the owners are at pains to point out are miniature horses. There are now cows and crops in evidence. Above highway 89 the farms grow food; potatoes and other crops, cows, sheep. Recreational animals are in the minority and tend to be llamas or alpacas. The main businesses north of the 89 are gravel extraction and wind farming. The wind farms are controversial, some people think them ugly and untraditional but we don't mind them. Windmills don't add to the neighbour's property values though so when the poultry processing lady said to turn at the windmills I knew we were not going anywhere prestigious.

Rural Ontario isn't conspicuously poor like rural Texas or an Indian reserve but still the theme from Deliverance sprang into my head as we drove into the mist, the windmill blades coming and going as they passed through the clouds. We drove for several miles on roads like this



the houses we passed each had a field of ruined agricultural equipment and an unchained dog that may have been part mastiff. The road naming convention is very confusing, the same few names repeat with a compass point appended, 2nd line NE, 2nd line SW, some direction in which the road does not point. I'm often lost but even if I was less constrained by machismo I wouldn't be stopping at any of those places and asking for directions. Just before the point of domestic tension we found the poultry plant and, as directed, pulled behind to get some crates. At this point a man who couldn't have been a hillbilly because it's flat around there drove up and said Diane had seen us coming and we weren't to take the yellow crates. I wondered if "Diane" lived close by, perhaps in a tree or a culvert, or if there was a webcam somewhere. Either way, watching the yard seemed a curious and slightly creepy way to spend the evenings.

We took multi-coloured crates and headed home. Then all that needed doing was to grab the chickens with manly bits



and place them in the crates



the first one went well. As suggested by Beebop, I crept up and grabbed the legs. Easy. The second one looked at bit nervous but came quietly. Of course, with each one they got more noisy and flappy and harder to catch and there was more space for them to run into. Soon all sense of style and panache was lost.



Still, we got the chickens in the crates and the crates in the Element



we left them there overnight. I suppose the car has now absorbed the smell of chickens diluting the previous odour and making a lie of the bumper sticker "That horse smell is my aromatherapy".

So there we have it, from this



to this




all that remains is to taste one.