About backyard butchery

I'm glad we killed and prepared the chickens ourselves. One should know where food comes from and what's involved in getting it to the table but to do so again would make no sense. We have no compelling religious or dietetic need to rear and prepare for table chickens at home. It took us four hours to process the five chickens, even at minimum wage we could have worked and purchased five chickens in the same amount of time. Of course, we'd get better, Tammy the farrier and her mother processed 250 chickens over a weekend, but even so paying to have them slaughtered and prepared is a better deal. If you pay for the processing, the cost of home meat birds on the table is about the same as buying them at the supermarket so the case for backyard eating chickens rests on knowing what they ate. Since we let them freerange, we don't know what they ate. I suppose one could say that they lived more happily than battery hens but that argument falls, I think, on consideration of our having chopped their heads off shortly before their genetically modified internal organs failed.

Keeping chickens at home for the eggs clearly makes sense, the eggs are emphatically better than store bought eggs, but unless these meat birds taste like heaven or have some hallucinogenic quality, I think this should be it for domestic chicken butchery.