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<\/a><\/p>\nTrue to their breed characteristics, my girls were calm and friendly, even tolerating manhandling from the children without pecking.\u00a0 Puffy was a favorite as she would hunch down in submission whenever the kids approached her, allowing her to be picked up easily.<\/p>\n
They were good foragers and loved to get out and spend the afternoon digging in the leaf debris for tasty bugs.<\/p>\n And they were smart enough to know to take cover and never go home when the red tailed hawk was waiting on them.<\/p>\n Experience with a heritage breed is enough to get you hooked on chickens.\u00a0 Although you will be sure to make detours to flashy “newcomers” like the Ameraucanas and their blue green eggs.\u00a0 Blue and Chirpee were the first chicks we raised on our farm because we couldn’t resist the thought of those colorful eggs.\u00a0 I should have known Pretty was destined to be my farm manager when she was still smiling as chick poo ran down her leg.<\/p>\n Over the years we’ve had Wyandottes, Buff Orpingtons, and New Hampshires, among many others.\u00a0 But despite the fact that we always butchered extra roosters for meat and turned 3 year old layers into stew hens, we never raised any specific meat breeds.<\/p>\n I was horrified when I first saw a batch of broilers brought to the processing plant where we took our ducks to be butchered.\u00a0 The chickens were sickly, balding, and lethargic.\u00a0 The NCDA agent was searching through the crates, condemning birds before putting them on the line, and tossing half dead\/half alive birds into barrels to be incinerated.\u00a0 Some of the birds had smothered, piling into the corners of the crates during transport.\u00a0 Many of the birds had either been cannibalized or had sores or scabs from injuries.\u00a0 I was expecting the farmer to be hauled off by police, but all the other farmers in line with their livestock were shaking their heads in commiseration.<\/p>\n “Such a shame,” they murmured.\u00a0 “Those birds are almost too stupid to live.\u00a0 Doesn’t matter how hard you try to raise them naturally.\u00a0 They end up looking diseased and feeble.”<\/p>\n And over the years I saw that this was the case.\u00a0 While waiting in line with my ducks, I always saw broilers coming in, looking nothing like the bright eyed and gloriously feathered cockerels we always caught and carried off to the monkey bars for butchering at home.\u00a0 Farmers explained to me how broilers were hard to transport for processing because their breasts were so large that breathing was difficult and they couldn’t handle a lot of stress.\u00a0 Also, due to their quick growth, their legs were weak so they didn’t walk around much on the farm and they were easily injured in the crates.\u00a0 To complicate things further, their feathers couldn’t fill in as fast as they grew, which left them with bare spots so they often pecked at each other.\u00a0 What was especially difficult for farmers in my area was that the processing plant did not have a reliable schedule.\u00a0 Most broilers only lived for 6-8 weeks before their hearts could no longer oxygenate all that muscle tissue.\u00a0 If the broilers reached their maximum age at a time when the processing plant decided to shut down for 2 or 3 weeks, the farmers ended up holding on and hoping the birds made it until they could be brought in to butcher.\u00a0 And when they were brought in, they often looked terrible.<\/p>\n When a neighboring farm began raising broilers on pasture, I saw that, even in an opportune environment, the birds weren’t anything like my free range chickens.\u00a0 My neighbor had a lovely pasture, with a movable canopy tent for shade, and a Great Pyrenees for protection.\u00a0 Yet those birds just sat there under their canopy tent.\u00a0 With acres of lush grass around them, they just sat there, next to the feeders and waterers.\u00a0 Eventually he would move the canopy to a new spot and there would be a large rectangle of bare earth, covered in feces and feathers, left behind.\u00a0 I never saw a bird stray out into the sunshine or chase a bug into the grass.\u00a0 I had never seen anything like it and it made me not the least bit interested in raising a meat breed of chicken.<\/p>\n Until Pip and Peep.<\/p>\n Pip and Peep were a pair of Jumbo Cornish Cross broilers given to us by a friend whose daughter hatched them as part of the embryology unit in school. Upon learning that the chicks wouldn’t live past 6 or 8 weeks, she handed them over to us so her children could be spared from watching a chicken cardiac arrest.\u00a0 They were ridiculously friendly.\u00a0 Since they were already 3 weeks old and were fully feathered, we simply put them in with the rest of our free range flock.\u00a0 We figured we’d butcher them in a few weeks.\u00a0 Or whenever we got to it.<\/p>\n We saw them every morning and night when we were tossing out feed for the flock.\u00a0 And they appeared to be doing just fine.\u00a0 Our flock has 4 acres to roam and several roosting areas in the coop, outside of the coop, and in the goat barn.\u00a0 So there’s no reason for the chickens to pick on newcomers and there’s space for both the dominant and the submissive members of the flock.\u00a0 As soon as we came out to the barn yard, Pip and Peep would be at our feet, pecking at toes and fingers, hoping for handouts.<\/p>\n They didn’t stray all the way down the driveway or into the woods by the property line.\u00a0 But they did wander all over the barn yard, into the buck pasture, and out of the fencing into the front yard.\u00a0 They didn’t actually scratch and they didn’t roost, but they did peck around, they took dirt baths, and they hung around with the other chickens with ease.\u00a0 They even came running at full speed whenever the scrap bucket was brought outside.\u00a0 It wasn’t the smoothest of gaits, somewhere between a duck waddle and a drunken cowboy, but it was effective enough to get a good piece of the kids’ sandwich crusts from their lunchboxes.<\/p>\n I waited for their legs to get weak.\u00a0 I waited to see them struggling to breathe.\u00a0 I waited to see them stop wandering around and just sit.\u00a0 I waited for them to act lethargic or not be ready to eat every morning.\u00a0 But it didn’t happen at 6 weeks old.\u00a0 Or 8 weeks old.\u00a0 Or 12 weeks old.\u00a0 So then I did what I do best.\u00a0 Got distracted and stopped thinking about them.<\/p>\n Pip and Peep, as well as the extra roosters we ended up with, were all April chicks.\u00a0 So they should have been butchered around October.\u00a0 Cockerels make a nice size meal at 6 months old and, besides, I hate to feed extra chickens through the winter when they need more grain due to fewer bugs and insects around.\u00a0 Too bad October has Halloween.\u00a0 And November has Thanksgiving.\u00a0 December has Christmas and January has New Year’s Eve.<\/p>\n Not to mention all my kids are school age now.\u00a0 So there’s no more wandering outside on a random chilly weekday morning and deciding it’s a good time to butcher.\u00a0 I believe the school considers “staying home to butcher roosters” as “unexcused.”\u00a0 I’m fully capable of butchering without the extra hands but it seems to defeat the purpose of the family farm.\u00a0 Plus, I try to squeeze every ounce of return out of those 36 months of pregnancy.\u00a0 And my weekends are now filled with birthday parties and basketball games, sleepovers and scout events.\u00a0 So 6 month old roosters quickly become 9 month old roosters.<\/p>\n They might have even gotten older than that.\u00a0 Except for the fact that one day, as I emptied the waterer, Pip came over to wait for a drink.\u00a0 And I noticed a weird spot under his wing.\u00a0 He stood quietly as I lifted his wing.\u00a0 He looked at me with surprise as I gasped in horror.<\/p>\n His skin was splitting.\u00a0 Just cracked open because the meat was busting out.\u00a0 It wasn’t bloody or infected or yucky.\u00a0 He didn’t care if I touched it or moved the skin.\u00a0 I could actually have grabbed the skin and kept peeling it down.\u00a0 He was so big that his meat was bursting out.<\/p>\n That’s when “Butcher Roosters” made it to the top of To Do List.\u00a0 And it didn’t even get derailed by the hospital visit.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 We carried the roosters, two to a hand, to the monkey bars.\u00a0 Pip and Peep had to be carried individually.\u00a0 Since they were too large to even hold their legs together.\u00a0 We had to carry them with a hand on each leg.\u00a0 And they were so heavy no one was strong enough to hold them upright while I tied their legs.\u00a0 Instead we had to lay them on their backs while I tied\u00a0 a doubled length of baling twine to each leg.\u00a0 Where we could see the bare spots in their feathers that other farmers complained about.\u00a0 And where I saw them have breathing difficulty for the first time.\u00a0 Apparently all that breast meat is enough to cut off your oxygen supply when it’s pressing you onto your back.<\/p>\n But the discomfort was short lived.\u00a0 Literally.\u00a0 By Sunday afternoon, Pip and Peep were strung up, cut up, and sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter, just like all the other roosters.\u00a0 Except for a couple differences.\u00a0 Perhaps you can tell a side of Pip’s breast meat from one of my heritage free range cockerels.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n