Light grayish-blue is the color of the eyes on a dead chicken. Fresh eggs are heavenly and watching Gallus gallus domesticus peck and scratch is soothing, but somehow in my agrarian quest I forgot about the ultimate law of the universe. Small games of life and death come with farming.
It started with the birth of my first child and three successive pregnancies. Enough parts of my cerebrum shrunk during this time that I also took up raising chickens, giving myself enough beings to nurture to practically lose my mind. The dead chicken eye that has stayed through hazy sleepless nights and diapers, was from my first round of fowl babies. The neighbors’ grey pit-bull, Pako, barraged through my freshly staked fence and swiftly broke all their necks in a game of chicken. When I found Pako panting proudly next to my lifeless hens, the hormone soaked frontal lobe of my brain conjured up an old wives tale. I delicately picked up a lifeless eyed chicken, and began slapping the pit-bull with the dead fowl. The argument is teach the dog you are upset and why; the rebuttal is your swollen ass is slapping an aggressive dog in the face with a dead bird! Also, I had heard by tying the kill around a dogs’ neck they learn shame and won’t repeat the crime. So after yelling and slapping the unfazed dog, I tied the chicken around his neck and sent him home. The next day the neighbor gently explained the poultry necklace had failed. The dog sweetly snuggled with the new down pillow under its head all night.
Disgruntled and disgusted, I bought more pullets. Pako stayed away and we eventually moved. However, there are many chicken killers in this big bad world; foxes, coyotes, large rodents that steal the heads. I became accustomed to these deaths by declaring it the circle of life. But the dead eye haunted me when I had to become the chicken killer.
Five of my hens had to go. Age and illness were catching up and space was tight. Minimal research revealed killing your chickens is part of having chickens; I just had to deal. Breaking the neck is the most humane manner of slaughter, but fowl assassin was not in my repertoire. Obsessing, I started casually asking random people how they were at killing chickens. Surprisingly, some had experience, others just theories. One such expert described hitting a chickens’ head against a rock until it fell off. Another told stories of a piss-and-vinegar grandma grabbing the hens’ head in one hand and the body in the other for a twist and pull to accomplish rapid carnage. There is the Opheliac style of tying a rock around her neck and throwing her in the pond. Hiring Pako seemed easier.
Earlier in the summer I had to kill one of my best layers. She had contracted a common virus and became lifeless. Dreading her looming death, I kept her alive a few days hoping she would bounce back with the food and water I forced down her throat. But reality always finds away in. My first attempt at butchery was to lay her head on a rock, her limp body on the ground, and then gently place the handle of a garden rake across her neck. Then I jumped. My bulging mama belly bounced. The rake launched me back and the hen grunted a short cluck. I couldn’t decipher her tone, was that a mocking laugh or a melancholy groan? Either way she was still alive and I was relieved there were no witnesses to the absurdness of this sorrowful scene.
I moped and blubbered to my husband of my botched murder. Like the chicken his response was cryptic; either a snort of disgust or one of amusement. With speed that would impress a pit-bull he found a small hatchet and whacked the bird on the head.
The mass execution happened during the winter, after my third child was born and I completely forgot that snow accentuates the redness of blood. I did, however, become curious about the subject of beheading. It is the oldest method of execution. Cheap and practical, many cultures believed it was the less dishonorable and least painful way to go. Germany practiced beheading up until 1938 and some Arab countries still use it as form of execution. The “intracranial perfusion of blood” keeps pain to a minimum and consciousness is lost in seconds.
The catch with chickens is they can still move and perform basic bodily functions without their heads; hence the saying. In rare cases, some chickens have loitered up to 18 hours, scratching and flapping around Sleepy Hollow style. This is rare, but if you are sloppy a part of the spinal cord remains intact and continues to send signals to nerve cells to function. Part of this happens no matter what, but complete decapitation low enough on the neck is necessary to avoid prolonged blood and muscle movements. Accepting their termination became horrific with this possibility that they might keep on living a headless existence anyway. I started to doubt that even a pit-bull would chase such an abomination.
My father and I set a log in the snow as a chopping block and opted to embalm each bird in a black garbage bag. Some chicken owners believe that flocks sense when their pen mates are being killed and suggest you shield the survivors from the gore. My remaining girls didn’t appear to care and were even thankful that the pecking order was shorter. Chickens had always seemed so fragile to me, so I was surprised I had to use all my strength to keep each chicken from running around with its head cutoff. It remains a reminder that our strongest moments come before death. I thanked each hen for her eggs and apologized for taking her life. With each thwack of the axe, I imagined the sunny chicken afterlife of bug-filled fields deprived of pit-bulls.
Fox in the Hen House 