The Price

At this time last year I got my first muscovy "ducks" (which are not actually ducks in the same way coastal redcedars are "thuja" and not "cedrus" or rose of sharon isn't a rose- their common name is a legacy of our tendency to reuse colonial names instead of using new names for new species). There were five of them, all female: Lilac, Silver, Cream, Chocolate, and Chocolate II. Later in the year my family brought me up a drake from the coast ("Drake") and the little flock was completed.

We can discuss how I name my animals some other time.

The muscovies overwintered in a little shed I modified out of a lean-to. The girls had relatively rough feathers; they hadn't had water to bathe in where they came from, just drinking water. Bathing encourages their waterproofing gland and makes them sleek and weather resistant. I didn't let them out because I wasn't certain they'd stay, but I did give them a very small outdoor yard that had a tub of water to bathe in. They bathed a lot, and pooped a lot, to the point where I needed to chip ice-shit mixture away from their tub to empty it.

In the spring Chocolate started sitting on a nest of eggs even before the snow was gone. She hatched 6 adorable ducklings and mothered them well. Lilac and Chocolate II hatched, and Chocolate II stole the babies, taking care of a total of 18 little ones. They were also adorable. As the weather warmed the Silver and Cream also sat but with less success and I lost some ducklings both to an unknown issue (narrowed down to niacin deficiency from too much foraging, heat stroke, or mushroom poisoning) and to the evacuation.

Tiny yellow/black fluffballs grew up into truly lovely birds faster than I could imagine. Muscovies are very quiet birds. They make a little hissing or trilling sound depending on sex, fly around some, and congregate in little groups to chat and look at the sky. Often they'd be perching on my deck railing when I looked out in the morning, and even still the youngest little girl will fly up to my railing to hang out.

Thing is, none of the birds I have can live well in the same sex ratio in which they're born. I ended up with very roughly 18 male muscovies to 8 females hatched this year. Once those eggs hatched the fate of most of those males was set. If I wanted to continue keeping muscovies - and I love them and would be very sad to be without them - either I or someone else would have to kill some. When I raised rats I carefully placed all my babies in pet homes. There are not pet homes for male birds. And... I was not going to ship my babies off to be confused and terrified before they were killed.

I had a taste of what was coming in the summer. Lilac had a prolapse: that's where the poop/urine/egg tract (it's all one hole in birds) inverts and there are parts hanging out the body that really should be inside. I hate it when this happens to any animal. There's a really high chance for infection if it's not dealt with quickly and it just hits my creeping horror buttons. We caught her, tried to re-insert the organ, but there was too much damage and things wouldn't line up right. Tucker helped me; we calmed her, held her down, and chopped off her head with an axe. When she had finished bleeding and twitching I plucked her, gutted her, cut her up, and put her in the freezer.

I don't remember if that was before or after I caught everyone and put them in a rigged-up trailer to evacuate them in the face of our wildfires. We drove for hours, then they had to be caught in the trailer and transferred to a small enclosure. The enclosure had a pool and plenty of straw so they were happy there until they had to be shepherded back into the trailer and hauled back.

Work was busy and the birds were still growing so I left well enough alone.

At some point they molted, growing new feathers to keep them warm over winter and it turned out Chocolate II was actually Lilac II.

When snow started to fall in October I realised just how much muscovies forage. Once the ground was covered my feed bill quadrupled. I started going through a full bag of feed a day, which I supplemented with corn to add carbs/heat/fat to help the birds prepare for the winter. When I went away for a week I left my petsitter with a pile of feed bags over a meter high so they wouldn't run out.

The males were starting to come into sexual maturity. They were tusseling over food, but more worryingly they were starting to mate. Open pools of water act as an aphrodesiac for birds so when I filled my kiddie pools every evening mating would start. Because I had double as many males as females, and because they mated on water, the females would be in the pools for a long time with their heads pushed under water over and over. Over-mating can also increase the chance of prolapse. It was time.

Josh came over last weekend. There was a bunch of stuff that needed doing in addition to the birds and we both did all that first: clean the chimney, assemble the snowblower, get straw. On the night before butcher I filled the pools many times so the muscovies could all play their game of diving into the pool, flapping their wings in a shower of sparkling water, and running out and away as fast as they could. They traded dives like kids waiting their turn on a slide. The next morning their feathers were frosted on the tips.

There were more muscovies to butcher than I had time and energy and choosing which ones would go on this first day was difficult. I kept some specifically in to choose among to breed later and some just because I liked them (Chocolate's first 3 boys, Friendly the black muscovy who eats out of my hand, and a gorgeous chocolate drake) and some were just harder to catch so they didn't make this round. We carried them to the large kill cone set up between two aspen trees at the far end of the yard, tucked them in there, and I held their feet while Josh cut off their heads. After the first one ravens began to circle. Some dogs were making a ruckus down the road and Avallu moved from one corner of the property to another to protect us. He didn't complain that the enticing blood smells made his job harder. Thea was locked inside so she wouldn't get her puppy curiosity and enthusiasm in the way.

Some I stroked their heads and I cried a little. Some were businesslike. When the head was cut off blood came in twin streams from the stump of the neck and stained the base of the trees an astonishingly red colour against brown leaves and the little bit of snow on the ground. When the heads landed on the ground they blinked and the beaks opened and closed; the bodies in the cones convulsed a bit and then eventually stilled. They were placed side by side in the snow until it was done.

None of this was easy. Not easy, either, was the following ten hours of wrestling with scalding and plucking and gutting and finally letting the carcasses freeze outside once they were gutted.

It won't be easy to cut up the carcasses, to slide breasts into the sous vide and then sear them, to confit or render down the bodies for stock. My feelings are sadness and some sort of resigned awe, or perhaps awe-struck resignation. Every human is made out of dead things: dead animals and dead plants that grew out of dead animals at some point in our past. That's a fundamental truth. There is meaning in putting my hand on the taut reality of that truth and feeling it thrum.

But honestly, more than anything, I love my animals. They are a self-contained society of alien beauty and behaviours. They enrich the world by their presence. If I am going to allow them to breed, if I am going to let their generations progress into the future with each one slightly more suited to my land as I gently steer their evolution, then some will also need to die. My choice is to be the person who kills them.

And so I have.

The Price

At this time last year I got my first muscovy "ducks" (which are not actually ducks in the same way coastal redcedars are "thuja" and not "cedrus" or rose of sharon isn't a rose- their common name is a legacy of our tendency to reuse colonial names instead of using new names for new species). There were five of them, all female: Lilac, Silver, Cream, Chocolate, and Chocolate II. Later in the year my family brought me up a drake from the coast ("Drake") and the little flock was completed.

We can discuss how I name my animals some other time.

The muscovies overwintered in a little shed I modified out of a lean-to. The girls had relatively rough feathers; they hadn't had water to bathe in where they came from, just drinking water. Bathing encourages their waterproofing gland and makes them sleek and weather resistant. I didn't let them out because I wasn't certain they'd stay, but I did give them a very small outdoor yard that had a tub of water to bathe in. They bathed a lot, and pooped a lot, to the point where I needed to chip ice-shit mixture away from their tub to empty it.

In the spring Chocolate started sitting on a nest of eggs even before the snow was gone. She hatched 6 adorable ducklings and mothered them well. Lilac and Chocolate II hatched, and Chocolate II stole the babies, taking care of a total of 18 little ones. They were also adorable. As the weather warmed the Silver and Cream also sat but with less success and I lost some ducklings both to an unknown issue (narrowed down to niacin deficiency from too much foraging, heat stroke, or mushroom poisoning) and to the evacuation.

Tiny yellow/black fluffballs grew up into truly lovely birds faster than I could imagine. Muscovies are very quiet birds. They make a little hissing or trilling sound depending on sex, fly around some, and congregate in little groups to chat and look at the sky. Often they'd be perching on my deck railing when I looked out in the morning, and even still the youngest little girl will fly up to my railing to hang out.

Thing is, none of the birds I have can live well in the same sex ratio in which they're born. I ended up with very roughly 18 male muscovies to 8 females hatched this year. Once those eggs hatched the fate of most of those males was set. If I wanted to continue keeping muscovies - and I love them and would be very sad to be without them - either I or someone else would have to kill some. When I raised rats I carefully placed all my babies in pet homes. There are not pet homes for male birds. And... I was not going to ship my babies off to be confused and terrified before they were killed.

I had a taste of what was coming in the summer. Lilac had a prolapse: that's where the poop/urine/egg tract (it's all one hole in birds) inverts and there are parts hanging out the body that really should be inside. I hate it when this happens to any animal. There's a really high chance for infection if it's not dealt with quickly and it just hits my creeping horror buttons. We caught her, tried to re-insert the organ, but there was too much damage and things wouldn't line up right. Tucker helped me; we calmed her, held her down, and chopped off her head with an axe. When she had finished bleeding and twitching I plucked her, gutted her, cut her up, and put her in the freezer.

I don't remember if that was before or after I caught everyone and put them in a rigged-up trailer to evacuate them in the face of our wildfires. We drove for hours, then they had to be caught in the trailer and transferred to a small enclosure. The enclosure had a pool and plenty of straw so they were happy there until they had to be shepherded back into the trailer and hauled back.

Work was busy and the birds were still growing so I left well enough alone.

At some point they molted, growing new feathers to keep them warm over winter and it turned out Chocolate II was actually Lilac II.

When snow started to fall in October I realised just how much muscovies forage. Once the ground was covered my feed bill quadrupled. I started going through a full bag of feed a day, which I supplemented with corn to add carbs/heat/fat to help the birds prepare for the winter. When I went away for a week I left my petsitter with a pile of feed bags over a meter high so they wouldn't run out.

The males were starting to come into sexual maturity. They were tusseling over food, but more worryingly they were starting to mate. Open pools of water act as an aphrodesiac for birds so when I filled my kiddie pools every evening mating would start. Because I had double as many males as females, and because they mated on water, the females would be in the pools for a long time with their heads pushed under water over and over. Over-mating can also increase the chance of prolapse. It was time.

Josh came over last weekend. There was a bunch of stuff that needed doing in addition to the birds and we both did all that first: clean the chimney, assemble the snowblower, get straw. On the night before butcher I filled the pools many times so the muscovies could all play their game of diving into the pool, flapping their wings in a shower of sparkling water, and running out and away as fast as they could. They traded dives like kids waiting their turn on a slide. The next morning their feathers were frosted on the tips.

There were more muscovies to butcher than I had time and energy and choosing which ones would go on this first day was difficult. I kept some specifically in to choose among to breed later and some just because I liked them (Chocolate's first 3 boys, Friendly the black muscovy who eats out of my hand, and a gorgeous chocolate drake) and some were just harder to catch so they didn't make this round. We carried them to the large kill cone set up between two aspen trees at the far end of the yard, tucked them in there, and I held their feet while Josh cut off their heads. After the first one ravens began to circle. Some dogs were making a ruckus down the road and Avallu moved from one corner of the property to another to protect us. He didn't complain that the enticing blood smells made his job harder. Thea was locked inside so she wouldn't get her puppy curiosity and enthusiasm in the way.

Some I stroked their heads and I cried a little. Some were businesslike. When the head was cut off blood came in twin streams from the stump of the neck and stained the base of the trees an astonishingly red colour against brown leaves and the little bit of snow on the ground. When the heads landed on the ground they blinked and the beaks opened and closed; the bodies in the cones convulsed a bit and then eventually stilled. They were placed side by side in the snow until it was done.

None of this was easy. Not easy, either, was the following ten hours of wrestling with scalding and plucking and gutting and finally letting the carcasses freeze outside once they were gutted.

It won't be easy to cut up the carcasses, to slide breasts into the sous vide and then sear them, to confit or render down the bodies for stock. My feelings are sadness and some sort of resigned awe, or perhaps awe-struck resignation. Every human is made out of dead things: dead animals and dead plants that grew out of dead animals at some point in our past. That's a fundamental truth. There is meaning in putting my hand on the taut reality of that truth and feeling it thrum.

But honestly, more than anything, I love my animals. They are a self-contained society of alien beauty and behaviours. They enrich the world by their presence. If I am going to allow them to breed, if I am going to let their generations progress into the future with each one slightly more suited to my land as I gently steer their evolution, then some will also need to die. My choice is to be the person who kills them.

And so I have.