From barn to belly

WARNING!  Not everyone will enjoy this post; it's about my trip to the chicken slaughterhouse.  

Today 19 chickens left the Terra Vita Farms, which is a small working farm owned by my friends Anton and Gary, and headed to the chicken slaughterhouse.  I "let" Anton catch the chickens and crate them, but I helped move the crates (heavy!) up the stairs, out the door, and into the pick-up truck.  One of the chickens kept screaming.  Don't be too sad for them; until today, they lived with their momma hens, ran free, ate well, and slept in a warm barn.

At the slaughterhouse, which was a family-owned and operated business, including at least one pre-teen (is that even legal? lol), the chicken's first stop was in the beheader machine:

Although the chickens experience a moment of, um... discomfort as their throats are cut, it was a very quick process.  The only creepy part was that they'd twitch for up to a minute in the machine after their throats were cut.  I've surprised myself at how non-creeped out I've been on the farm, especially considering all the poop and animal bits and interesting smells.  But thank god those chickens were trapped in the machine.  If they actually ran around without heads, I'd have freaked the hell out and gone home.

The next step is a hot water machine that circulates the dead chickens and loosens their feathers.  Then they go into what I'll call the "spin cycle machine."  It's a cylander cilander cylender big empty tube like the inside of a washing machine that spins all the feathers off the chickens.  Finally, the child laborers cut off all the unused parts of the chickens, and they are bagged and returned to the farmer.

Most of these chickens were for sale, so they were weighed and delivered.  Anton and Gary kept a few for themselves, and Anton cooked one for dinner, where it went from the plate into my stomach.  Thanks, Anton!