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Choppin’ Chickens, Pullin’ Pullets

The Source

I always had the feeling that the chickens had Grandma figured out. I think they knew that if a hen didn’t lay an egg a day the animal was scheduled for Sunday dinner. My guess was that as soon as they saw her coming out to the brooder house the non-layers would quickly jump onto an egg in an unoccupied nest. Grandma was a sweet lady, but if he didn’t pull your load (lay your egg) then get ready for the hot grease. I don’t think it labeled my brother and I as serial killers to say that chicken killing day was the highlight of our summers on our grandparents’ farm. There were two commonly accepted methods of killing chickens in those pre-chicken-factory days. You could chop of the hen’s head or use the grab and pull method. I think that when Grandma set up housekeeping on their Pike County farm she was a puller. The method was simple: you step on the chicken’s head then pull on its body and if your tug was a good one the two would be separated. But by the time I was old enough to know what was going on her arthritis had forced her to join the ranks of the choppers. Grandpa Orr had made a special chopping block that he placed just outside Grandma’s violet-laden front porch. Grandma would go out back of the house to grab a luckless clucker, take her hatchet from Grandpa’s workbench and march out to the chopping block. To my knowledge she never lost any fingers but I can well remember one day she lost her dignity. Remember, in those days women did not wear pants. Dresses were the only coverings allowed whether you were driving a tractor or going to church. She’d called my brother and I out to the front porch since she knew we wouldn’t dare sleep through a chicken chopping, and when we got there she already had the hen’s head on the block. Keith and I loved this part because we knew that after the chicken lost its head it would circle around like, well, like a chicken with its head off. Blood would spurt everywhere and two little boys would squeal with delight while the ghosts of the ASPCA could be heard groaning in the distance. But on this particular day Grandma’s luck ran a-fowl of her plans. The headless chicken headed right toward her and no matter how fast she backed up the headless hen kept coming toward her. Stephen King would have loved the irony of it all as our grandmother backed into a large bush on the edge of the driveway. She fell backward across the bush with her legs sticking in the air like football goalposts. It was magnificent. KFC is an attractively decorated restaurant but it has no sight to equal Grandma’s rolled up stockings sticking straight into the summer air. My mother Freida happily inherited her mother’s cooking skills, but unfortunately she’d not quite mastered the trick of chicken killing when she and Dad were starting their marriage. Dad said that Mom preferred the neck-pulling method but had never actually tried it herself. When he came home from work after one of the first days of their marriage he found Mom in the yard, crying, holding a chicken’s neck that was about six feet long. Unless you raise your own chickens, you’ll be chowing down on a hen that’s been “humanely stunned.” Of course no chicken has ever come back from the frying pan to testify that this is humane, but let that pass. The workers hang them by their feet on a moving line and the chickens are then passed over “rub bars” which are claimed to sooth them by rubbing their chests. They’re then stunned with electricity, carbon dioxide, or reducing atmospheric pressure. Finally a single cut is made by a machine to the bird’s throat with workers standing by to dispatch any chicken that misses the cut. Doesn’t sound like much fun to me. I’ll bet that not once does a chicken processing plant worker ever end up with her feet sticking in the air. We’ve gradually moved further and further from the source of our food and the methods we now find abhorrent were once a necessity when your supper was in the back pasture. Seasoned 4-H’ers don’t usually shed many tears when their prize hog is auctioned off unless the price is too low. My vegan friends probably stopped reading this in paragraph two and this is by no means a plea for the vegetarians of the world to start eating Big Mac’s. To each his own, but you’ll have to excuse me if I grin a bit when I grab of handful of chicken nuggets and think of Grandma. All I know for sure is that when she fried up the hen in an inch of lard then made milk gravy with the scrapings that heaven was just around the corner. Remind me sometime to tell you how she butchered hogs.