MEAT RABBIT UPDATE!!! YEAR ONE

If skeet shooting show jumping hurtling hurdling rabbits....I'd recommend rock salt instead of lead.....pre seasoning with salt, without bustin' your choppers with lead shot might work better for you.

 

It takes time to overcome that , I read "and those of my family."
Have hubby & you both do it the first time , My wife watched as I puked a few time's (She is the strong one with this )
I still get queasy (im the kill zone & first cleaner ) .
I don't have a problem in .MIL type life/zones & was quite ok helping , it's the critter & your heart that effects me for the first bit.

 

Don't give them names!

 

A good question....and a good answer.

As a child who grew up in the 50's, on large blocks of land where free range chickens were kept, chickens were primarily kept for eggs, and the occasional roast chicken dinner of a Sunday. Either my mother or step grandfather dealt with the neck chopping, de-feathering, gutting and dressing. As children we were interested spectators, and we had seen the process enough that there were no mysteries with it, and we got the connection between the live chicken, the dead chicken, and the end product....food on the table. We had no emotional investment with the chicken, and understood that the icky, smelly, messy elements of the process were necessary for the cooking and eating the chicken. Chicken on the menu was something of an uncommon treat. Frozen chicken, was occasionally purchased, when my folks were flush with money, but we mainly butchered and cooked our own chooks.

These days, factory produced, intensively farmed chicken is so cheap, that the inconvenience and expense of home grown chicken has been avoided by the vast proportion of the population by consumers contracting out the killing, butchery, packaging, and transport to the consumers to others. Few people actually witness, let alone participate in home killed and butchered produce anymore. They haven't had the psychological preparation for home butchery anymore. There are other contributing factors in people becoming averse to home killing and butchery....The anthopomorphising of animals in popular culture (The film "Babe" is a prime example); ethical veganism, the rise of animal welfare and animal rights movements, the urbanization of humanity, municipal regulation, limiting and banning domestic food production and slaughtering etc There are many reasons why folk find the slaughtering and processing animals for food, distasteful, and psychologically upsetting.

The good news for you, is that you can see the necessity and the benefits of slaughtering, butchering and cooking your own chooks, rabbits, and other domesticated small holding farm animals.

Most of the aversion to killing and butchering animals for human consumption is psychological: even the disagreeable smell of chicken guts being removed from the chicken's abdominal cavity.

Here are some things to ponder over.

1. We are not separate from the animal kingdom....we are part of it...and we eat, we survive, and if not particularly good at survival, may end up eaten by other animals. As omnivores, we eat plants, and animals and just about anything else that crawls, walks, swims or flies, in order that we continue surviving. Killing prey is an essential element of how we have survived for as long as we have...there is little adaptive value in ignoring that fact. There may come a time when that necessity will again become a matter of survival, and it bodes our inheritors' life prospects well, if we maintain that art and skill.

2. Don't keep food species as pets. Don't name any critter that you aren't prepared to kill, butcher and eat. Don't encourage your children to do so either. Naming Cats, dogs, parrots etc is ok, but sheep, goats, pigs, beef cattle etc....no: not unless they are called rib-eye, bacon, lamb chop, goat vindaloo.

3. Start with something easier on the psyche....like fish. Go fishing with someone who cooks their own catch. Observe, learn to kill, gut, and fillet freshly caught fish.

4. Some folk find a ritual prior to slaughter and after processing is finished, is helpful in assuaging personal feelings of guilt in taking the life of an animal.

5. Wear surgical gloves when butchering and eviscerating animals...it will feel less messy, is probably a good hygiene precaution, and will leave you with less of a feeling that there is blood on your hands.

6. Watch, and help, as appropriate, another person who is slaughtering a chicken, sheep, goat or hog. Become accustomed to the spectacle of death and dying and struggle of the slaughtered animal. It will come as much less of a shock when you have to do it on your own.

7. Learn the anatomy of the critters that you are slaughtering, including what healthy animals look like, what healthy animal's organs look like, and what unhealthy and diseased animal organs look like. There is survival value in that.

8. Use the practice of home slaughtering and butchery to accustom older children to the process. I did that with my boys, using it as an opportunity to demonstrate basic animal anatomy and to demystify the process of field dressing, and skinning game.

9. Try and maintain a sense of calmness about preparing for, and slaughtering the animal. It will make it less stressful for you, and the animal.

10. Make sure that your tools are sharp. Blunt instruments make the work harder, and more frustrating for yourself, and it will only serve to prolong the agony and distress for the animal being slaughtered. A quick and painless death for the animal is also safer and more painless for you.







A Chicken Experience

How to Get Over Being Squeamish at the Sight of Blood

Farm Confessional: What Butchering Your Animals Really Feels Like - Modern Farmer

 

I butchered one of my yearling Billy goats the other day. It was hard to kill him because he was beautiful! My wife said she would do it, so of course, I had to at that point.There is nothing fun about killing something.
Chelloveck makes a great point about people being removed from what our source of Meat entails, and it's not pretty, but it is necessary if you don't want to be a slave to WalMart! Remember also, in Venezuela people are killing and eating the family pets because they are starving! How Terrible would that be?
One shot to the back of the head and it was over. I really don't like slaughtering the goats. Sheep don't bother me as much because they lack character, goats on the other hand are very friendly, almost like dogs. I've been thinking about selling the goats and eating the sheep. This would provide me with an income to help with the feeding.It runs around $200 a month to feed all my animals, 12 goats, 8 sheep, 10 Turkey's and 12 Rabbits and about 30 chickens.
Standard Goats sell here for about $125 for Billy's and $150 for nannies. Mine are fathered by a Papered Nubian Goat so I could get about $250 for them, because they grow to be about 200 lbs or better and are great Milk producers.
I don't think I'll ever be 100% OK with it, but it does get easier.

 

And sometimes you have to develop a sense of humor about it.

one summer morning we were sitting at The Breakfast Table, my grandparents had this big Oak round breakfast table with a big window.

my grandmother had had a run-in with the Tom Turkey the day before so she was going to "get rid of him and put him in the freezer" her words.

She was use to wringing the chickens necks really quickly and then butchering. So she decided to wring the turkey's neck and given that he weighed about 30 pounds and my gran weighed about 90 lbs. Watching her pick up that turkey up to wring its neck, get tired and set the turkey down and her and the turkey stagger around 3 or 4 times was the funniest sight. We couldn't help ourselves we sat there drinking coffee and laughing.

My Gran looked up and saw us sitting there laughing she instantly got mad, grabbed the axe and chopped off his head, stomped off with the turkey to hang it and pluck it.

Needless to say she was mad at all of us for a couple of days and there was some major sucking up but to this day we all tell that story with fond memories of my Gran.

So farming life is no different than urban life, a good sense of humor goes along way.