Raising Chickens

On our farm, a 190 acre dairy farm with timber, pasture, and good tillable McLean county soil for crops, Dad was master of the dairy barn and the sheep lot and my Mom the absolute ruler of the hen house. She bought baby chicks, nurtured them, fed them generously, took their eggs, killed them, butchered them, cooked their flesh in various ways, ate them, and started the cycle over the next spring with more baby chicks. To the chickens, had they been able to think like humans, she would have been God-mother, sustainer of life, their executioner and destiny. She filled her roles in the life cycle of those chickens with ease and grace. It was something to behold.

Our farm was how we made our living. Raising animals was not a hobby. The check from Prairie Farms dairy in Carlinville and the egg money kept our family afloat. It was serious business, and death was part of the equation.

As her youngest child I bore special witness to her dominion over the chickens. As the youngest child by far and at eight the only kid living on the farm I was her helper and companion, observant and complicit in all things having to do with the chickens. I fed them when she couldn’t, gathered eggs, helped with the baby chicks at the beginning of their life and at the end when she butchered them. To be honest, the days we butchered chickens were much like any other on the farm. It was a task that had to be done and we were the ones who did it. We thought little of it.

Death and farming went hand in hand. Each year Dad bred one of the bigger more beefy Jersey milk cows with Angus or Hereford semen to produce a calf we all knew would be butchered at about fifteen months of age and kept in the deep freeze in the basement to feed us through the year. Our farm was at the crossroads of a gravel road and a state highway. Careless dogs, running loose like farm dogs did then were sometimes hit and killed by cars and trucks on the road. Lambs born on January nights and neglected by their mothers froze to death. Jersey calves were occasionally still born or died from scours. But no animal on the farm matched the death rate of the chickens.

Each spring we bought fluffy baby chicks in cardboard boxes from the hatchery in Bloomington. My time on the farm extended past those days my parents talked about when they let their hens sit on a clutch of eggs and hatch chicks themselves.

“Why not let hens hatch their own eggs Mom?”

“This works better,” she said. “We can keep eating and selling eggs year round, and buying chicks from the hatchery means lots less roosters.”

Hatchery chicks were sexed to guarantee females. We only kept one rooster. In fact, being male was nearly fatal on our farm. We kept and raised heifer calves to become milk cows but sold the little bulls within days of their birth to a man down the road that raised them for veal. We had one buck sheep and each year we shipped all the male lambs while keeping the best of the ewes. We had but one Jersey bull, then when we switched to artificial insemination, no bull at all.

Soon after we sold Joe, the last bull on the farm, my Dad shared this astute observation with me. “Of all the things alive on this place, the only ones with balls are the buck sheep, the rooster (though you couldn’t see them) you, and me. It’s good to be human, don’t you think?” I had to agree.

Mom and I would drive to the hatchery in Bloomington about this time of year and fill the station wagon with flat cardboard boxes full of chicks. You could hear them peeping and scratching inside. Because there were no seat belts then I turned around in the back seat and lifedt the lids on the boxes, sometimes bringing a chick out and cupping it in my hands, a ball of soft yellow with a beak, beady eyes, and fragile legs underneath.

We put the chicks in the brooder house, a small one room chicken house with electricity and South facing windows. We put them in flimsy circular pens made of corrugated cardboard a foot high. It didn't take much to corral baby chicks. Over the circles hung heat lamps. Keeping them warm meant keeping them alive.

“Why circles Mom? Why not a square pens?”

“Because chicks have tiny brains and they’re not very smart. They pile up in corners and smother each other, suffocate. Take away the corners and more live. That means we get more eggs and more chicken on the table.” Mom was a practical thinker.

As it was, not all the chicks made it through the first week. Each day it seemed we threw a few of their tiny carcasses into the manure spreader outside the milk barn. But after they started sprouting real feathers they became hardier. They grew at an amazing rate. Before you knew it we added them in with the mature hens in the big chicken house with the fenced in yard. They had transformed themselves from chicks to pullets. As they began producing eggs, and throughout the year, we thinned out the flock by butchering the older hens. My Mom’s belief was that the older a hen the tougher the meat. Young chickens were better for frying. She stewed the old ones, often with dumplings. A chicken butchering day was sometimes announced by my Mom at breakfast.

“After I get the breakfast dishes done I want you to help me do up some chickens.”

Do up meant butcher. It started with catching them. Just inside the hen house door, hanging on nails, Mom kept two long wire chicken catchers with wooden handles on one end and twisted wire hooks on the other. The hen house floor was cluttered with feeders, a shallow water tank, and a short broad open pail with cracked oyster shell for their craws. In one corner were elevated racks for roosting, and in another long boxes filled with straw where hens nested and laid their eggs. Armed with the wire catchers Mom and I would herd the hens into an open corner of the chicken house, where they piled up much as chicks would I guess. We reached under them, trying to get the wire hook around one of their scaly yellow legs. When we got one we pulled it out, squawking and flapping its wings. Mom would look over the hens I caught with a critical eye.

“No, let that one go, she’s too young. Go after the older girls.” Mom was better at it than I was. I was afraid of hurting them, and she was not.

When she approved of the chicken I caught I would draw it to me and grab both of its legs with my hand. I hated that part. If you weren’t careful to keep the hen away from you it would slap you in the face with its wings. Sometimes I would let go out of fear. Mom chided me.

"David, that chicken is not going to hurt you. Hang onto it now and take it out.”

When we were successful in catching and holding a good candidate for butchering I would take it outside the house and tie it by the legs, upside down, to one of the lengths of baler twines hanging from a pine tree. That pine was great for climbing. Its limbs grew evenly spaced and parallel, like a ladder. From two of the lowest limbs six baler twines hung. When we had six chickens hanging there we were done with the first phase. It was a strange sight, and the hens looked perplexed, hanging upside down, three hens on one side of the trunk and three on the other, their wings spread. They hung there quietly, clucking softly, completely unaware of what was about to happen.

My Mom was the executioner. On the days we did up chickens Mom put a sharp butcher knife in her apron pocket. As the chickens waited innocently, upside down, she approached them and drew out her knife.

You might think that the actually killing of the chickens would be somewhat solemn. We were after all ending the life of a living breathing thing. I had learned somewhere that when plains Indians killed buffalo they said a little prayer of thanks. Later in my life while traveling in Morocco I learned that Muslim teaching requires families to buy their chickens alive and kill them in a manner prescribed by their religion, respecting its life. While you might have expected there would be some ceremony or at least a token of notice as to what was about to take place there on our farm, in fact the impending death of six chickens my Mom had raised from chicks and profited from during their lifetime, I have to report there was absolutely none. Not only did she acknowledge nothing, she often talked about something else entirely.

“What do you like best about Sunday school?” she once asked as her fingers encircled the neck of the first chicken, closing around it just below the beak and eyes and stretching its neck towards her, drawing it near. In addition to being ruler of the hen house she was the Sunday school superintendent at the First Presbyterian Church in Danvers.

“I like it when they let us rewrite the Bible stories in our own words.” I had recently written as a Sunday class assignment my version of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. In my version, Moses’ words to the Pharaoh came as he stuck a snub nosed .38 revolver into his ribs. “Let my people go… or else.”

“Yeah, that was a good lesson.” As those words were coming out of my Mom's mouth she cleanly sliced off the head of the first chicken, drawing her knife across its neck with a quick jerk and tossing the now separated head against the base of the tree. When she was done there would be a small pile of six chicken heads there. The cats would eat them later.

That head was immediately motionless and obviously altered there at the base of the pine tree, it’s eyes either shut or open but fixed. In contrast the rest of the chicken, its body, was jerking and flapping wildly at the end of the baler twine, causing the chicken, or most of it, to swing in an wide arc under the tree limb spraying blood which splattered on the ground in a scarlet line much like you might find in a Jackson Pollack painting. My Mom went quickly through the chickens, killing three on one side of the tree trunk, then three on the other. When she was finished it was mayhem, six headless chicken bodies swinging wildly, sometimes banging into each other, the twines suspending them at times twisting together. We would step back and watch. Occasionally drops of blood found its way onto our skin or clothes.

Our Aunt Lou and Uncle Ed used a different and more traditional method of killing chickens. They used a hatchet. After placing the chicken’s neck on a tree stump, they chopped it off with one thunk and let it flop around on the ground. Mom thought that was messy.

When I first helped do up chickens I was perplexed at why and how the body of the hen would react so violently to death while the head of the hen immediately went still. Mom explained it this way.

“I think bodies pretty much do what brains tell them to do. The last thing that chicken’s brain told its body, when it felt my knife on its neck, was ‘Get the heck out of here.’ All that wing flapping is the chicken trying to fly away from danger. But as you know, we put the chicken in such a dangerous position that it was too late. But its body did what it was told and tried to fly away anyway. That’s why they flap their wings.” I liked the way my Mom explained things.

When the chickens were still, hanging straight down and no longer moving, Mom and I would go to the milk house and fill two five gallon buckets with scalding hot water, bringing them back under the tree where we had a little bench to sit on. We would sit side by side, dunking the hens in the hot water and pulling off their feathers. Later I would collect and burn the feather in our burn barrel. Void of feathers, and much smaller in appearance, Mom would then slice open the chickens' abdomens and rake the guts into one of the buckets. I liked to see what was in their craw, some call it a gullet or gizzard. Mom let me cut that little skin pouch open with my pocketknife and inspect it. Inside was what they most recently ate. There was chicken feed in there, but also bugs from their outside yard, and kitchen scraps Mom would make me throw over the fence; bits of potato peel, beet tops, carrot ends. It was like a science project only I wasn’t in school.

We would continue to talk there on the bench about this and that as we worked; the Cubs, school, things I wondered about. When we were all done she put five dressed chickens in bags and sent me with them to the deep freeze in the basement. The sixth one she took to the kitchen for supper that night.

It might seem grisly and violent to you, but it was just another day’s work for us on that little farm. I have to say I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t mind doing it all again.