Over the summer i spent some time at my bandmate's farm in Wisconsin. He started raising chickens there and we slaughtered one together, de-feathered it, put it on the grill for a while and then went to town. Rather than feeling guilty about killing it, i felt great that i got to see it alive in an environment where someone who really cares was tending to it and making sure its life was a happy one. Sure, we could have not killed it...We could have released it into the wild but i think its chances of survival would be about the same out there as it would be in my bandmate's coop (which would be zero percent). eating meat is awesome. I eat so much meat that i'm beginning to think maybe it'd be smart to cut back. But if i do, it's because my health is suffering, not for any moral reason. I don't understand why some people are so blindly critical of it. One girl went as far as calling my bandmate a "modern day slave owner" for raising chickens!
OK, so quick question for my own gross poetic knowledge - when you de-feathered it, did you drop/submerge the corpse in a pot of boiling water for a couple of seconds and then remove the feathers (I've heard it's very easy to do this way) or did you use another method? If you did, what method did you use? I assume you de-feathered it before you gutted it, is that correct?
Yes, although I don't think it was boiling water, just hot. And the chicken had to be dipped more than once throughout the de-feathering process to really soften it up. There is a much easier method though in which you use a tub-like apparatus that spins the chicken around inside it, and there are rubber claws around the inside that gently and efficiently de-feather it for you. That's what my bandmate does when he's alone or short on time, but we wanted to do it by hand as a bonding experience. And yes, it was totally featherless before we gutted it. One interesting thing I did not know until I did all this is that there are people in the world who eat pretty much all the organs inside a chicken. All the things I'd normally throw out - liver, gizzard, weirdly phallic neck bone - are apparently considered delicacies by a lot of people, so he packages them and sells them by the pound.
Thanks to you and ThatsAFreeThinker, I appreciate the insight. I had researched the method online but wanted to know more from people who had observed/participated in the practice so this is really helpful. I totally agree about the chicken neck, btw.