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layers of mild pain

animal slaughter, farm life

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So yesterday was the final chicken processing day of the season. Yay! We were all excited to be done. The workload on the farm drops significantly once the meat chickens are all gone. And it usually coincides with other reductions in livestock, too. Most of the employees are only here April to October; we’ll lose two people at the end of the week. The only two who’ve really stuck around, alas. Including the one who lives in the cabin on the back of the property, so then that reduces traffic and crowdedness on the farm, and also reduces worry, though this year as there hasn’t been any snow or frost yet it hasn’t been so bad. (There comes a time when the road’s impassable to cars, so.)

cut for discussion of chicken processing, animal death etc, though nothing particularly gory I don’t think but just best to elide here

Unfortunately, we had one person out sick, one person out due to weather (couldn’t ride her bike in the rain), and one person out due to new mom problems (her infant didn’t sleep so neither did she). And we had a full slate of chickens– not just the normal complement of broilers, we also were culling the laying flock a little. Not actually hens– we used an incubator to hatch out a batch of laying hens and of course 50% of them were male, so we were culling those unneeded cockerels to reduce crowding over the winter. While we were at it, we thinned out the number of roosters in the main flock, as there are more than necessary in there and if there are too many they just fight each other. (You do need roosters– for one if you want to incubate any more those need to be fertile eggs, but for another, in a big pastured flock the roosters do important crowd control and predator deterrence– if they’re good roosters. Your backyard flock doesn’t need roosters but for our purposes they’re useful to have about.)

They were such a pain in the ass. The young cockerels were hard enough to deal with– they’re built so narrow and spare– but the mature roosters, crikey. They’re just. A meat chicken is a young bird bred for fast growth, and as such is just this pile of soft meat. A mature chicken from an egg-laying breed– I mean those guys have been out there for over a year now– anyway they’re put together pretty solidly. It is hard as heck to get their organs out of their bodies. Also chickens have internal testicles that in many cases are as large as, or larger than, their hearts, and they’re attached real firmly to the spine pretty directly, and it’s, well. a lot. (The meat chickens are so young at processing time their reproductive systems haven’t really developed so it’s not a big deal.)

So that got us off to a slow start in the evisceration room and we just spent the entire rest of the morning trying to catch up. We had a good enough time, but there was just– a lot of work to do.

And then yet one more person begged off for packaging; the assistant livestock manager has already gone very part-time, and he had started a new medication on top of that and had to go lie down. So I had to do two jobs at packaging, and Sister already does three or four jobs so she was just running around like a crazy person, and I had to do those two jobs plus locating and cleaning various equipment we needed (mostly tubs to transport quite a lot of the meat directly to a freezer storage facility tomorrow– the tubs are resting in the walk-in cooler right now but as we rarely use them I had to start off by locating matched sets of tubs and lids and anyway it was a lot.)

Also also my period had started at 3am the night before, with severe enough cramps to wake me from a sound sleep, so. I was already sore and today i’m like sore-on-sore and would like to lie down for a while.

We finished at like. 5:45. And I did a halfassed job cleaning the slaughterhouse floor but this morning it actually seemed pretty good so I’m wondering if the fairies helped me out, or if the rodents that sometimes steal cracked eggs did me a solid and picked up the organ bits there too, or if it just wasn’t as dirty as I remembered when I gave up and left it.

So…. it could be naptime, that’d be keen, but it’s not. At least I’m sitting right now, which I appreciate. Spent the early morning putting the kid onto the bus and then going and really tidying the slaughterhouse, putting the tools away for the season, refilling the soap and bleach sprayers. I might go out a bit later and actually put everything away for winter, as we won’t need it again until turkey processing time in late November and it’d be best to have it all buttoned up. But also I have to do lunch and I’m tired and I just want to sit here a minute.

I have to make lunch too, and it’s gotta be vegan, and I think it’s just going to be a whole pile of roasted vegetables since that’s what’s getting harvested today– the winter storage stuff. I have a huge rutabaga sitting here and I’m not sure how one actually prepares one but when in doubt cube it and put it in the oven for an hour. (Your picture was not posted)