Killing Chickens

On Sunday, in one of the most beautiful places imaginable, Davie killed his first chicken. There we were, in what could have been a child's drawing of mountains, the green humps of hills overlapping forever into the distance. And there was Davie, standing in front of a clump of chickens strung up by their feet on a tree branch, surrounded by Nicaraguan friends urging him on. It was the perfect paradigm: death in the midst of so much life.

Our friend Fatima, who works at the pharmacy next to our house, had been inviting us to kill chickens with her for quite a while. Last year she and three other women started a small poultry business as part of a class assignment for one of her agriculture classes. When they realized that there was a real demand for locally-grown chicken in this community, the group of women continued the business even after the class was over.

We have been buying Fatima's chicken when they slaughter a round of them every other month. It's good meat, tender with a strong chicken flavor. So we decided it was time for us to dispel the meat-eater's vague illusions about where meat really comes from. With this conviction in mind, we put on our boots and stomped bravely off to the farm.

When we got there, we realized that boots weren't the only chicken-killing articles we should have put on. We had assumed that there would be plastic aprons or ponchos at the ready, but everyone else was just wearing normal clothes, now completely covered in blood and chicken feathers.

Fatima showed us the different stations of the process. The 100 or so chickens that would be killed that day were held in a small building, where Fatima's brother was weighing each live chicken and then stuffing them into a big burlap sack. At six weeks of age, they all weighed around seven pounds, with the males weighing slightly more and the females slightly less. Fatima told me that this particular kind of chicken doesn't lay eggs. (Though I wondered if that was just because they were too young to lay eggs). They buy the chicks from a vendor in Esteli and feed them a mix of grains until they are large enough to slaughter.

The next step in the process was of course the most dire: slaughter. They took the chickens over to a structure made of three small tree branches tied together like a goal post and hung the chickens from their feet on the horizontal pole. Fatima took a knife and quickly slitted a chicken's throat. It flapped around a bit as the blood drained out of its neck, but it made less of a ruckus than I had expected. Then it was Davie's turn. He drew the knife once and then again across the chicken's throat, and then it was over. The chickens flapped about for a bit, spewing blood across their white feathers before finally going still. A dog lapped up the blood that trickled down the rocks below the dead chickens. (Later I saw a few egg-laying hens pecking about this same blood).

After the chickens were dead, they submerged them in a big pot of boiling water to remove the feathers. Then they took them into a sort of kitchen. After soaking them in ice water and picking off any remaining feathers, an assembly line of four or so people cut open the chickens and removed their organs. Some of the organs they kept (the liver, the heart, and the gullet), but the intestines they discarded. Then the chickens were divided into the various cuts that customers request – wings, breasts, legs, etc. For me, watching these whole chickens being hacked and gutted and taken apart was maybe the grossest part of the process.

That night for dinner we made ourselves some fresh-killed, honey-baked chicken, and it was delicious. Amazingly, after all that, I was no less disgusted to bite into a juicy bit of meat that only hours before had been a living animal. I'm not saying that eating meat is necessarily a good habit, but at least now I understand it a little better.