To Kill a Roasting Bird

I walked down the dirt road to the processing room with camera in pocket, eager to document our first experience of transforming a living animal into something recognizable as "dinner". I love taking pictures and envisioned shooting beautiful and arresting images of the process. They would be respectful of the animals giving their lives to feed us, while at the same time, unflinchingly direct and honest. 

Err...right. When all was said and done, that camera didn’t come out of my pocket until the very end of the day, after I had washed all of the blood from the killing station and taken a good reflective break in the brisk air outside. The photos I took were rushed and sheepish - some even frantically blurred. With the camera in my hand, I suddenly felt like a voyeur, cheapening the solemnity of the act we had just participated in. I was embarrassed to even pull the camera up to my eye and shot blindly at the machinery, deciding that would be sufficient.
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First Slaughter and Processing - Chickens

Processed Freedom Rangers ready for cooling and packing

We had our first experience with slaughtering and processing animals yesterday. One of our friends raised about 85 pastured chickens (Freedom Rangers) and after 9 weeks it was time to feed them to the masses. His customer base in Queens, NY had been asking for chicken since he started selling at the market and today they got their wish.

It's his first year farming and processing livestock on his own, so this was a learning experience for everyone. About eight of us showed up for processing. Only one had processing experience, so it went a little bit slow at first, but then we got into a pretty good rhythm. We started around 8am getting set-up and walking through one batch very slowly. By 2:30pm we had processed all the birds, packed them up in plastic and stored them in the cooler. Weighing, pricing and labeling took place later that afternoon.

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