Chicken killing classes
That is very useful. I never want to kill a chicken, but I do see the neccessity and recently helped my cousin find a good site describing how to do it humanely for food.
This is a great site for that purpose, Catscan:
http://butcherachicken.blogspot.com/
Maybe that's the one you found for your cousin, even.
That is a great site...the one I found was similar, although I found it had a certain quirky sociopathic quality expressed by an 11 year old son's response to the whole business.
I have euthanised chicks and with so many roos hatching realise that the most humane (and sensible) thing to do is give them a wonderful 4 or 5 months of free range life and then have them butchered. There is no way so many males could survive in nature. I have sold them at that age to local immigrants who are comfortable with butchering them and have a cultural ritual that minimizes stress and pain.
But I just don't want to.
Catsy, that was from the same guy's blog. You can click on those chicken butchering pages from the 11-year-old's experience pages.
We do our own butchering; we order straight run chicks and butcher out the cockerels when they're a decent weight. We know how they were raised and they have a decent life, although we keep them in the chicken tractor rather than allowing them to be free range, to avoid their getting too tough and to make it easier to scoop them up when it's time. By then the pullets are in another enclosure getting used to the older hens and vice versa. We have also butchered our own lamb.
I thought it was the same at first too...but the one I found was made by a single mother and the child was a little more detatched and happy go lucky about the matter (you would have to see the site to understand). There was information that was quite useful though, like to make sure that you pulled the head down in the killing cone so you could make a clean cut.
I know it is much, much, kinder to raise and slaughter them humanely yourself...I have to go by a major Central Valley feed lot off highway 5 for work every summer and the suffering you see there is unbearable. And it is probably one of the better ones.
Seeing that feed lot would probably put me off meat for a long time. We eat almost no beef but we like pork and I think those feedlots are just as bad. Mostly we try to eat deer or things we've raised. I wish it were easier to find humanely-kept animals around here, for the table.
I was buying a lot of pork for a while...it was so cheap. Then I found out why. Now, although I adore pork, I never buy it.
I too would like to find some humanely raised and slaughtered local beef, pork, lamb, goat and poultry. The "Prairie Land" grassfed ground beef from a Midwest Farmer's Co-op I purchased for mucho dinero at the local supermarket, turned out to be, on closer inspection, imported from Australia where they specialise in grassfed livestock.
I suppose our huge midwest prairie is being used for mono-culture fuel crops instead?
But of course, Catsy - that's the American way!