Wednesday, June 29, 2011

The meaties






So we planned to get meat birds. I called the local feed supplier and ordered 12 “broilers”. They arrived on April 16th, 2011. They were so cute. Exactly what you see in the hallmarkish Easter shots. Fuzzy, yellow, and soft. We went to pick them up the woman working passed us a box (no bigger than a shoe box), that contained our dozen chicks. We ordered their starter feed and grits (to keep them from getting “pasty butt”), and headed home. We had spent the days prior to pick up building a coop for meat birds. A coop that did not have perches or elevated areas, one that the birds could move freely in without any obstacles that could frighten them. This type of chicken is very timid, and also frightens extremely easily. Or so we read whilst researching Meat Birds.
It was new for us to have chicks that had no momma. The chicks we hatched under our bantams were pretty low maintenance as they has a broody hen taking good care of them. These orphan meaties on the other hand had to be coddled, right down to wiping their butts for them. If you don't check on their butt and remove any dried on excrement they will develop a syndrome known to chicken people as “pasty butt”. It is exactly what it sounds like. It causes an obstruction and the chicken is unable to defaecate and ends up dying. The task of chick butt cleaning is a little bit odd and especially difficult as they all look exactly the same and move around so fast that even with only 12 chicks you can't tell which ones you've already checked...
Enough about that.... all of our meat birds made it past that stage and were off to a good healthy start. We needed to install a heat lamp in their coop and tuck tape all of the edges so no draft could get thru to the chicks. In this stage they have no feathers at all to protect them, just each other. So they would pile up in a little clutch under the heat lamp until we would open the door and then they would scramble to get away from us. As the birds got larger and their feathers developed we were able to let them out to run in their enclosure. You would think they would have been itching to get outside, but having never even seen outside it took them a few days to all venture outside.
I don't know how much you know about meat birds but they are ugly! Their legs are like 4x the thickness of a layer and they grow at such a rapid pace that it seems obscene. They eat like it is the last supper at all times, and are lethargic at best.
It was easy to incorporate other chickens (6 bantam hens and one bantam rooster) in with them. They didn't seem at all territorial or aggressive. And so they lived 12 broilers and 7 bantams. That was until two weeks ago on Saturday. They had reached the ripe age of eight weeks and it was time to take them to the slaughter house. We had discussed if we would set up a “kill station” at our house but decided that for twelve birds it would be more cost effective to pay the $2.50 a bird to have them slaughtered and plucked and gutted for us.
So before work on Saturday morning we loaded the birds into specially designed boxes (we borrowed from the slaughterer), and headed up to drop them off and say our last goodbyes. I am not a huge sentimentalist nor do I have a problem with eating meat (especially not meat I raised and know to be happy, healthy, and organic), but it was a little sad and hard to drop those little dudes off knowing what they soon faced. The sadness only lasted til I remember how nice it would be to have a chicken roast once a month.
So after work on Saturday we went to retrieve our birds. They were in a huge basin of ice cold flowing water. All twelve of them (and a zip lock bag full of feet). We went to work packing them into bags and transporting them home. Once we got home we had to immediately wrap them in freezer bags and store them for the months to come. You would be amazed at how much space eleven chickens take up in the freezer.
That night we roasted our first home grown chicken. It was amazing and delicious....
Next year we will do it all over again...

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