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My dude and I intermittently subscribe to Blue Apron, which is a we-mail-you-food-and-you-cook-it kinda dealie. In our relationship, Dude and I have always traded off cooking– I grew up cooking, and he taught himself, and we’re both decent at it. I used to do a lot of our meal planning, but over the years various mental illnesses and scheduling hassles made that pretty wretched, and Dude was just never as comfortable making food decisions for the household. So last year or the year before he just signed us up for this, and it’s okay, the food is great, but I cannot follow the recipes. I just– photos, and then blocks of text, and sometimes they’re way too detailed, and sometimes they’re not detailed enough, and I get lost and confused and can’t follow them.
Anyway. This week they sent us a Cornish game hen. And I thought, you know, I have of late become somewhat experienced in the poultry-as-food market, why don’t I know anything about them? Wait, I do know something, the chickens my sister raises that I help process are Cornish Cross chickens, which means they are hybridized with Cornish game hens, and if those are very small birds how the heck are these meat chickens so big?
So I Googled it. And my friends. Oh. My friends. I found out.
Cornish game hens are not game or hens, they’re just chickens. They’re very large chickens. But wait, you say. I’ve had a Cornish game hen. It’s tiny.
Yes. They’re slaughtered at 3.5-4 weeks of age.
Which is the age my sister’s chickens are when they are first allowed to go outside instead of staying in the brooder. They have just gotten their feathers and are able to reliably keep their body temperature steady.
“Cornish game hens” are meat-chicken chicks.
My sister’s Cornish Cross chickens, when they meet their destiny, are usually around four months old. They are not quite sexually mature. I really pissed-off my tries-not-to-be-soft-hearted brother-in-law one time when I pointed out that in distress, they don’t cackle like full-grown chickens, but often still peep like chicks. As the man who has to administer the killing blow, he does not like to contemplate the fact that they’re basically still babies.
They are four times the age of Cornish “game hens”.
I mean, they’re all just meat blobs. Is it better to prolong their lives and let them see the sky? They’re really stupid, they’ve got very little capacity to appreciate much besides grass and feed. But I just, wow.
The best part of this was inspecting the actual package, which proclaimed “Free range” on it. This animal would not have been old enough to survive outdoors. To earn that label, how many days of an animal’s life must be spent outdoors? My sister answered: generally, commercial “free-range” animals are kept in a football-field-sized room with one chicken-sized door to the outdoors, which is never shown to them. If even one of them notices the door, let alone goes through it, that’s an unusual occurrence. She does not let her Cornish cross chickens free-range because they are too stupid to dodge hawks; instead they are raised on pasture, which means they’re put into a bottomless cage with a half-mesh, half-solid top (so they can escape rain), which is then moved daily to fresh grass. Free range, she says, these chickens will sit down, eat all the grass they can reach, and then starve. So they have to be prodded onto fresh grass daily.
(I also inspected the carcass and was not impressed with the finish plucking job. I could do better. It makes me feel quite good about my efforts.)
As a more uplifting side note, some of Ann’s egg chickens have promoted themselves to free-range. (They are also raised “on pasture” but they don’t need a roofed pen because they’re smart enough to hide from hawks, so they have a coop to sleep in and shelter under, and a fence.) They can fly, briefly, and so some of the more agile and ambitious ones routinely escape over the electric fence– which is more a deterrent to predators than the birds– and while this goes on all year, during the winter the hens are kept down near the barn, so instead of roaming the woods and fields, they roam the driveway and barn and porch. During turkey slaughter, one of these hens let herself out and came in to check out the barn, and had to be driven out. (We were like dude, you don’t want to see this. Their pen, which is a greenhouse, overlooks the whole turkey processing area; during setup, they were all plastered against the mesh watching us work. On the actual day, Ann left the night cover down so they couldn’t watch the turkeys die. Some of them wriggled free and did anyway. Who knows what they understood of it. None of them seemed upset.) The egg chickens are a different breed, and are so gregarious, so curious, so funny, they’re really a joy to be around. (She mostly has a commercial egg breed, the Red Isa / Red Sex-Link, and it breaks my heart to think of these creatures de-beaked and stuck in cages because they’re so nosy, just so so so nosy, they want to see everything and be everywhere and even though she doesn’t hand-raise them so they aren’t tame, they want to look over your shoulder at everything you do, they just won’t let you touch them.)
I pulled up in my car and opened the door and a hen poked her head in to see what was up. When I came back out to get something out of my trunk, she tried to jump in.
In early spring I think I am going to set up a chick brooder on my back porch, and get a batch of a couple of dozen heritage egg breeds with pretty feathers, and hand-raise them. Hand-raised egg chickens will come when called, will sit on your lap, will let you catch and pet them. I think the light and the peeping would benefit me in the dark late winter, and I think the pretty chicken feathers would benefit the flower arrangements Ann wants to do, and I think having tame chickens like when we were kids would be pretty great.
It doesn’t matter what the local ordinance is out here on chickens, because I’m not going to keep them once they’re old enough to be out of the brooder. Though I’m not sure how I’m going to transport them across the state at an age where they have feathers… We’ll find out when I get that far.
My dude and I intermittently subscribe to Blue Apron, which is a we-mail-you-food-and-you-cook-it kinda dealie. In our relationship, Dude and I have always traded off cooking– I grew up cooking, and he taught himself, and we’re both decent at it. I used to do a lot of our meal planning, but over the years various mental illnesses and scheduling hassles made that pretty wretched, and Dude was just never as comfortable making food decisions for the household. So last year or the year before he just signed us up for this, and it’s okay, the food is great, but I cannot follow the recipes. I just– photos, and then blocks of text, and sometimes they’re way too detailed, and sometimes they’re not detailed enough, and I get lost and confused and can’t follow them.
Anyway. This week they sent us a Cornish game hen. And I thought, you know, I have of late become somewhat experienced in the poultry-as-food market, why don’t I know anything about them? Wait, I do know something, the chickens my sister raises that I help process are Cornish Cross chickens, which means they are hybridized with Cornish game hens, and if those are very small birds how the heck are these meat chickens so big?
So I Googled it. And my friends. Oh. My friends. I found out.
Cornish game hens are not game or hens, they’re just chickens. They’re very large chickens. But wait, you say. I’ve had a Cornish game hen. It’s tiny.
Yes. They’re slaughtered at 3.5-4 weeks of age.
Which is the age my sister’s chickens are when they are first allowed to go outside instead of staying in the brooder. They have just gotten their feathers and are able to reliably keep their body temperature steady.
“Cornish game hens” are meat-chicken chicks.
My sister’s Cornish Cross chickens, when they meet their destiny, are usually around four months old. They are not quite sexually mature. I really pissed-off my tries-not-to-be-soft-hearted brother-in-law one time when I pointed out that in distress, they don’t cackle like full-grown chickens, but often still peep like chicks. As the man who has to administer the killing blow, he does not like to contemplate the fact that they’re basically still babies.
They are four times the age of Cornish “game hens”.
I mean, they’re all just meat blobs. Is it better to prolong their lives and let them see the sky? They’re really stupid, they’ve got very little capacity to appreciate much besides grass and feed. But I just, wow.
The best part of this was inspecting the actual package, which proclaimed “Free range” on it. This animal would not have been old enough to survive outdoors. To earn that label, how many days of an animal’s life must be spent outdoors? My sister answered: generally, commercial “free-range” animals are kept in a football-field-sized room with one chicken-sized door to the outdoors, which is never shown to them. If even one of them notices the door, let alone goes through it, that’s an unusual occurrence. She does not let her Cornish cross chickens free-range because they are too stupid to dodge hawks; instead they are raised on pasture, which means they’re put into a bottomless cage with a half-mesh, half-solid top (so they can escape rain), which is then moved daily to fresh grass. Free range, she says, these chickens will sit down, eat all the grass they can reach, and then starve. So they have to be prodded onto fresh grass daily.
(I also inspected the carcass and was not impressed with the finish plucking job. I could do better. It makes me feel quite good about my efforts.)
As a more uplifting side note, some of Ann’s egg chickens have promoted themselves to free-range. (They are also raised “on pasture” but they don’t need a roofed pen because they’re smart enough to hide from hawks, so they have a coop to sleep in and shelter under, and a fence.) They can fly, briefly, and so some of the more agile and ambitious ones routinely escape over the electric fence– which is more a deterrent to predators than the birds– and while this goes on all year, during the winter the hens are kept down near the barn, so instead of roaming the woods and fields, they roam the driveway and barn and porch. During turkey slaughter, one of these hens let herself out and came in to check out the barn, and had to be driven out. (We were like dude, you don’t want to see this. Their pen, which is a greenhouse, overlooks the whole turkey processing area; during setup, they were all plastered against the mesh watching us work. On the actual day, Ann left the night cover down so they couldn’t watch the turkeys die. Some of them wriggled free and did anyway. Who knows what they understood of it. None of them seemed upset.) The egg chickens are a different breed, and are so gregarious, so curious, so funny, they’re really a joy to be around. (She mostly has a commercial egg breed, the Red Isa / Red Sex-Link, and it breaks my heart to think of these creatures de-beaked and stuck in cages because they’re so nosy, just so so so nosy, they want to see everything and be everywhere and even though she doesn’t hand-raise them so they aren’t tame, they want to look over your shoulder at everything you do, they just won’t let you touch them.)
I pulled up in my car and opened the door and a hen poked her head in to see what was up. When I came back out to get something out of my trunk, she tried to jump in.
In early spring I think I am going to set up a chick brooder on my back porch, and get a batch of a couple of dozen heritage egg breeds with pretty feathers, and hand-raise them. Hand-raised egg chickens will come when called, will sit on your lap, will let you catch and pet them. I think the light and the peeping would benefit me in the dark late winter, and I think the pretty chicken feathers would benefit the flower arrangements Ann wants to do, and I think having tame chickens like when we were kids would be pretty great.
It doesn’t matter what the local ordinance is out here on chickens, because I’m not going to keep them once they’re old enough to be out of the brooder. Though I’m not sure how I’m going to transport them across the state at an age where they have feathers… We’ll find out when I get that far.
