Lost a hen today
Today I had to kill one of my Arucana hens.
Arucanas are the fabled "Easter egg chicken" that lay blue and green eggs.
The "girls" are getting up to speed with this whole egg thing, they are laying about 5-6 per day. What happened with this particular hen is called a prolapse of the oviduct. Basically, an egg gets stuck in the ductwork on the way out and the hen pushes her guts out. Literally.
I only have a few Arucanas, and some of them are roosters (can't tell them apart until they crow). This one was a funky gold-brown color. Had I left her to her own devices, and let her stay in the coop with the other birds, they would have literally eaten her alive by picking away at her oviduct that was hanging out. The only humane thing to do was to put her down.
Very sad to lose a bird, but we have to make the best of things. She's all plucked and gutted, ready to be the guest of honor at tomorrow night's dinner. Buster got the feet and guts, chicken feet being his favorite treat.
Inside her body cavity were at least 9 egg yolks in various sizes that were to be laid as eggs over the next week or so. It was fascinating to see, albeit morbid. When I gutted her, there was no hard shelled egg, so I went and looked under the place where we hang critters to bleed out, and sure enough, there was a big blue egg. Since we weren't sure how long it had been stuck either in or out of the hen, we decided not to eat it, so I threw it in the woods across the road for the little critters to eat. The head went out in the forest by our range for a different set of critters. In the end, all that goes uneaten by someone or something from one of our chickens is the feathers.
We eat chicken a couple of nights a week. After buying the day-old chicks and growing them out to eating size, our cost per bird is $3.89, which is cheaper than the supermarket and we know how they were treated from the start. They get fed well, housed well, plenty of excercise and fresh air, and even treats in the form of table scraps and grass clippings. No comparison between these and store-bought chickens. The white meat is even dark and juicy because they actually get excercise, unlike "factory farmed" birds with pale, white, dry breast meat.
It's an interesting thing, chicken is cheaper today than it was in 1950. This is a result of factory farming them and the advent of Cornish cross breeds. Cornish crosses are a hybrid breed of chicken that is basically lazy. They sit around and do little more than eat and poop in massive barns that hold sometimes 10,000 chickens wall-to-wall. They are debeaked when they are born so they won't pick each other and given a massive dose of antibiotics in order to deal with the squalor they will be raised in. They are fed a high protien diet and are ready to butcher at 8 weeks of age. Yup, 8 weeks. The chicken you get at KFC wasn't old enough to crow!
That's not how things are here. Our birds are treated like pets, regular members of the family. Well, except for that whole chopping block thing...
OK, gotta go jump in the shower. Maybe next time I'll tell you about our heritage turkeys!
Arucanas are the fabled "Easter egg chicken" that lay blue and green eggs.
The "girls" are getting up to speed with this whole egg thing, they are laying about 5-6 per day. What happened with this particular hen is called a prolapse of the oviduct. Basically, an egg gets stuck in the ductwork on the way out and the hen pushes her guts out. Literally.
I only have a few Arucanas, and some of them are roosters (can't tell them apart until they crow). This one was a funky gold-brown color. Had I left her to her own devices, and let her stay in the coop with the other birds, they would have literally eaten her alive by picking away at her oviduct that was hanging out. The only humane thing to do was to put her down.
Very sad to lose a bird, but we have to make the best of things. She's all plucked and gutted, ready to be the guest of honor at tomorrow night's dinner. Buster got the feet and guts, chicken feet being his favorite treat.
Inside her body cavity were at least 9 egg yolks in various sizes that were to be laid as eggs over the next week or so. It was fascinating to see, albeit morbid. When I gutted her, there was no hard shelled egg, so I went and looked under the place where we hang critters to bleed out, and sure enough, there was a big blue egg. Since we weren't sure how long it had been stuck either in or out of the hen, we decided not to eat it, so I threw it in the woods across the road for the little critters to eat. The head went out in the forest by our range for a different set of critters. In the end, all that goes uneaten by someone or something from one of our chickens is the feathers.
We eat chicken a couple of nights a week. After buying the day-old chicks and growing them out to eating size, our cost per bird is $3.89, which is cheaper than the supermarket and we know how they were treated from the start. They get fed well, housed well, plenty of excercise and fresh air, and even treats in the form of table scraps and grass clippings. No comparison between these and store-bought chickens. The white meat is even dark and juicy because they actually get excercise, unlike "factory farmed" birds with pale, white, dry breast meat.
It's an interesting thing, chicken is cheaper today than it was in 1950. This is a result of factory farming them and the advent of Cornish cross breeds. Cornish crosses are a hybrid breed of chicken that is basically lazy. They sit around and do little more than eat and poop in massive barns that hold sometimes 10,000 chickens wall-to-wall. They are debeaked when they are born so they won't pick each other and given a massive dose of antibiotics in order to deal with the squalor they will be raised in. They are fed a high protien diet and are ready to butcher at 8 weeks of age. Yup, 8 weeks. The chicken you get at KFC wasn't old enough to crow!
That's not how things are here. Our birds are treated like pets, regular members of the family. Well, except for that whole chopping block thing...
OK, gotta go jump in the shower. Maybe next time I'll tell you about our heritage turkeys!
posted by MVTCoPete | 10:01 PM
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