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greenstorm..from a book I really want to get now, called "Trauma Farm"
We hired a young woman, a university student working her way across the country, to help in the garden, but when she learned I was going to be slaughtering chickens she begged to assist me. This seemed a little twisted at first. While I slaughter animals, I’ve never enjoyed the job, unlike some sadistic farmers I’ve met. She explained that she loved eating meat, and that, like me, she believed it was two-faced to eat meat without having, at least once, participated in the slaying of a living creature. So I said: “Okay,” curious about how this lovely, city-raised, idealistic student would deal with the passion play of death.
Over the years, I’ve developed a simple system with minimal stress for both me and the chickens when I am slaughtering. It’s more complex and much sadder when I’m forced to drive them to the slaughterhouse an island away. I gather the chicken up, holding it until it’s calm, loop the baling twine around the legs, and hook the twine over a nail in the rafters of the woodshed. Then in a swift move I slide the killing blade into its brain through its beak, and let the chicken drop and hang, killing it instantly.
Hardly anyone witnesses real, violent deaths today. Our knowledge of death is now a product of Hollywood films, where the standard victim clutches the heart, or the wound, and keels grandly over, dead. Those deaths are one in a thousand. Almost all creatures when they die release their natural electricity, especially when they bleed out. The bird is already dead, but around 90 seconds after its death it will convulse and shake wildly. As soon as I kill the brain I cut the throat, or sometimes cut the head right off. When the electric death throes begin the convulsing headless chicken will usually just shake and die, but the occasional chicken will flip so hard, it will leap right out of the baling twine and run around, somersaulting and shaking in the ecstatic dance of the death of the nervous system.
The first chicken I killed with my helper watching did exactly that. I was so used to the death convulsions I didn’t think anything about it; then, to my surprise the girl began doing the same dance. She suddenly started screaming and strutting a high, weird-stepping ballet in front of the convulsing chicken. It was completely physical, unthought, visceral, a kind of communion with death and a simultaneous rejection. The guttural noises coming out of her matched her spastic ballet, which echoed the chicken death.
I had no idea what to do. “Are you alright?” I asked when she finally slowed down. A dumb question in the circumstances.
“Yes... yes...” she gasped. “No... no... that was extreme... O man I had no idea... O that was awesome...” She finally choked back her shock and smiled shyly at me, embarrassed. “Wow, I had no idea it would be that real.”
We hired a young woman, a university student working her way across the country, to help in the garden, but when she learned I was going to be slaughtering chickens she begged to assist me. This seemed a little twisted at first. While I slaughter animals, I’ve never enjoyed the job, unlike some sadistic farmers I’ve met. She explained that she loved eating meat, and that, like me, she believed it was two-faced to eat meat without having, at least once, participated in the slaying of a living creature. So I said: “Okay,” curious about how this lovely, city-raised, idealistic student would deal with the passion play of death.
Over the years, I’ve developed a simple system with minimal stress for both me and the chickens when I am slaughtering. It’s more complex and much sadder when I’m forced to drive them to the slaughterhouse an island away. I gather the chicken up, holding it until it’s calm, loop the baling twine around the legs, and hook the twine over a nail in the rafters of the woodshed. Then in a swift move I slide the killing blade into its brain through its beak, and let the chicken drop and hang, killing it instantly.
Hardly anyone witnesses real, violent deaths today. Our knowledge of death is now a product of Hollywood films, where the standard victim clutches the heart, or the wound, and keels grandly over, dead. Those deaths are one in a thousand. Almost all creatures when they die release their natural electricity, especially when they bleed out. The bird is already dead, but around 90 seconds after its death it will convulse and shake wildly. As soon as I kill the brain I cut the throat, or sometimes cut the head right off. When the electric death throes begin the convulsing headless chicken will usually just shake and die, but the occasional chicken will flip so hard, it will leap right out of the baling twine and run around, somersaulting and shaking in the ecstatic dance of the death of the nervous system.
The first chicken I killed with my helper watching did exactly that. I was so used to the death convulsions I didn’t think anything about it; then, to my surprise the girl began doing the same dance. She suddenly started screaming and strutting a high, weird-stepping ballet in front of the convulsing chicken. It was completely physical, unthought, visceral, a kind of communion with death and a simultaneous rejection. The guttural noises coming out of her matched her spastic ballet, which echoed the chicken death.
I had no idea what to do. “Are you alright?” I asked when she finally slowed down. A dumb question in the circumstances.
“Yes... yes...” she gasped. “No... no... that was extreme... O man I had no idea... O that was awesome...” She finally choked back her shock and smiled shyly at me, embarrassed. “Wow, I had no idea it would be that real.”
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Date: 2010-07-05 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-06 12:45 am (UTC)