This past week, we’ve been in New Zealand visiting Toby’s family in Christchurch. Their family friends, Frances and Victor, live on a “lifestyle plot” which is essentially a personal farm. One evening, after several glasses of wine, we got excited about the idea of killing and plucking our own chicken. Conveniently, Toby’s parents had planned to have dinner at Frances and Victor’s place the following day.

We both enjoy eating meat — we’ve been trying to avoid any beef that isn’t grass-fed after Brooke began reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma and decided to try to eliminate corn from her diet (this seems to be a common reaction to the book). Though we eat meat, neither of us have never had to be responsible for raising, catching, or killing our own food. We do think it’s important to be comfortable with the idea of killing our own meat — by eating meat we’re part of the reason that animals are killed and we felt that we should be able to experience this directly or not eat meat at all.

By the time we arrived at Frances and Victor’s, a 4-month-old rooster had already been caught for us (if we had had to run around catching the chicken ourselves, we might still be there running around in circles). A rooster had been selected because roosters are less valuable to their farm - the hens are kept for eggs (Victor told us that roosters have absolutely no market value). Toby had the honor of wielding the axe to cut off the rooster’s head, and then we both plucked the rooster after dunking it in boiling water to loosen the feathers.

Lessons Learned:

• Killing and plucking a chicken takes a lot of time - we now have a much deeper appreciation for the work of farmers (and farm machinery). The prices we pay for free range chicken don’t seem so high after all
• Farm raised chickens are much, much smaller than the chickens you buy at a grocery store
• Chickens really do run around after their head has been cut off
• All farm animals know when a chicken is being taken to slaughter - our chicken was squawking loudly and it definitely seemed to affect the other chickens and cows

We found this experience to be quite thought provoking — it definitely made us think hard about our relationship to our food. We are still eating meat — we didn’t find the experience to be as difficult as expected, and we both agreed that we would do it again if need be.

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