Just Call Me The Angel Of Death

So we had sort of an interesting week here, chicken-wise:


as you may recall, our Stupid Chickens haven't been laying that many eggs lately, despite the fact that we repeatedly assure them that they will become dinner if they don't start putting out.  Of course, Bee and I have never been able to work up the nerve to follow through on that threat. 

We had one get sick and die of an unknown reason a few weeks ago, though, so we decided to supplement and get a few new chickens:

These are teenagers (or 'pullets', to you non-accidental-homestead-folk), which means we didn't have to go through the annoying and smelly process of raising chicks in our bathroom again: the pullets were old enough to be thrown outside with the full-grown chickens.  Of course, the full-grown ones then found it immensely amusing to spend their days harassing the younger ones, but -- hey! -- that's life!

Anyway, we hoped that these pullets will start laying eggs in a few months and that maybe the adults would suddenly remember that -- oh, yeah! -- they're supposed to lay eggs, too!  However, nature stepped in the way, in the form of a neighbor's dog, who last week came into our yard, went all the way to the back, pushed open the door to the chicken yard, and massacred two-and-a-half chickens.  Yes, one adult and one of the new pullets died that night, and one adult lingered for a few days before Bee and I decided it wouldn't get better and finished it off ourselves.

SO: now we had two rarely-laying adults and one pullet left.  The useless adults spent their days chasing the pullet around and worrying Bee and me about our ability to introduce MORE replacement pullets into the mix.  So, this last Sunday, we finally Did The Dirty Deed:

(though ours wasn't this pretty, having been skinned, shredded, and slow-cooked all day)

Yeah, we decided not to be such pussies, and Bee offered to skin the birds if I'd kill them.  So I looked up several videos on hypnotizing and killing chickens peacefully (thank you, YouTube!), then spent half an hour trying to hypnotize a stressed-out chicken on my lap (stupid YouTube!) before finally deciding I couldn't do it and making Bee slit its throat instead.  He did the next one, too, with some assistance from me (mostly in the form of me hesitantly placing a finger on one chicken foot to "hold it still" for Bee).

But I really got my hands dirty when it was time to clean the chicken: it was my job to gut it and, not knowing of any other way, I got lots of interesting things under my fingernails as I attempted NOT to let the contents of the crop and intestines touch the chicken meat.

Bee wanted to film the event for posterity.

I talked him out of it.

One thing I DO wish I could show you, though, was the egg area: each chicken had about three strong egg yolks anchored in her body and a mass of tiny eggs (chicken caviar?) growing next to them.  I'm too lazy to learn about egg-production, but I guess those egg yolks eventually get surrounded by egg white and encased in a shell before they're squeezed out.  They really were surprisingly-beautiful to get to see.  I tried to offer one to our cat, CeCe, but the ungrateful feline turned his nose up at it (he did the same for the fresh salmon roe I offered him last year during Battle Stations!)

Bee and I have talked a lot about being more-aware of where our food comes from.  If we're going to eat meat, we'd ideally like to raise it humanely ourselves.  However, I just don't think the neighbors would approve of us keeping a cow and a few pigs in our tiny, suburban back yard.  We really don't even have the space for more than our allotment of chickens.

But now we're wondering about buying a bunch of live three-month-old broiler chickens locally (thank you, craigslist!) and immediately killing and plucking them ourselves.  We haven't decided if we actually have
1) the freezer space
or
2) the balls
to do it . . . but we're talking about it.

For now, we're sticking with the bees and the egg-layers.  I'm totally into "collecting" different breeds this time around, having grown tired of the monotony of only two types of chickens for the last two years.  Plus, different breeds make identifying the eggs a little easier . . . which means we'll have an easier time telling who isn't laying eggs any more and will therefore become next Sunday's dinner.

Because I'm sure you want to know, I'll tell you the names we came up with for these four:

• the tiny brown one blending into the pole on the shelf in the back (and pictured at the top of this post) is Pippin, who may be an Araucana (which lays "blue-green" eggs).  She's my favorite so far.  Naturally, she is picked-on by the others.
• The white chicken (a White Sex Link) in the back is the dog-attack survivor, who Bee named Bilbo.  Now that there aren't any adults to harass her, she has become the bully.
• On the ground in front is  an Amber White, who Mr. C decided to name "Matasha".  No, I don't know why.
• And on the feed can, surveying her domain (until Bilbo catches her at it), is Finneaus, a Leghorn (yes, like Foghorn Leghorn from Bugs Bunny).

We are looking at getting a few more (thanks, craigslist!), as soon as some folks return our calls.