table talk / By Stephanie Silvia

Birds of Arcata

Killing chickens the right way at Wild Chick Farm

(Sept. 11, 2008) “Hello everyone, today was a beautiful day out at the farm. The sun was warm, the air calm, and 102 new little broiler chicks were introduced to the fresh green pasture. Over the last few weeks, activity on our farm has been chuggin’ along as the season marches closer to Summer Solstice — the longest day of the year.”

This June e-mail was my captivating introduction to Sara Brunner, and her Wild Chick Farm, the business she runs with her husband Matt in the Arcata Bottoms. As a former vegetarian and reluctant omnivore, I was curious to see how the idyllic description of chicks frolicking on a sunny day in a green pasture reconciled with the slaughter and evisceration of the grown birds she called broilers.

GALLERY >

Upon meeting Sara I learned she and her husband were once vegetarians concerned about the inhumane and environmentally unsustainable practices of commercial poultry production. Over time they became aware of the possibility of having their ethics and chicken, too — that poultry could be raised with humanity, integrity and attention to the environment. Sara and Matt broke their poultry fast by eating a meal of a chicken they had raised and slaughtered themselves.

People become vegetarians for many reasons: health, respect for animals, concern about the mega-meat industry and its worldwide impact on the environment. Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planetfirst alerted us to these issues. In the ’70s my 20-something peers and I believed not eating meat would help save the planet.

For years I’ve felt conflicted about eating meat — I didn’t think I could kill an animal. Going to the Wild Chick Farm afforded a chance to become closer to the food I consume and to better understand where it comes from.

So I went to see how chickens die. At the farm, Sara led me to where Matt and their friend Kevin Cunningham, a fellow local farmer, were killing the chickens. I came upon three birds hanging upside down in inverted metal killing cones, bleeding, their heads sticking out of the opening at the tip of each cone. Two birds were still; one was twitching. Matt explained that they begin by making a slit on each side of the main artery, where the blood goes to their heads as it drains out of their bodies. This puts the birds to sleep. The trachea is not slit, as that could cause the animal to choke on its own blood. The twitching, he assured me, was involuntary muscle spasms, not conscious struggling birds. The entire process averages 30 seconds to a minute.

The chickens’ heads grew pale. The Brunner’s method makes for a humane kill; this ain’t the chicken that ran around headless in the barnyard after your grandmother whacked it; this is not the factory-bred bird shackled onto a conveyor belt and shocked with an electric stun gun. This is a locally-grown, pasture-fed bird, raised on a mixture of organic grain and pasture grass, hand-killed and eviscerated on-site, made ready for your table by members of your own community.

We headed over to a large vat where the freshly killed birds were scalded for about a minute at 160 degrees to loosen their feathers before being plucked in another device, emerging reminiscent of the naked chickens in old Warner Brother cartoons. This spinning process, surprisingly, takes just a few seconds. Next we stepped under a tarp to the evisceration tables, where five women were happily (yes, happily) gutting the birds under Sara’s expert eye.

1 2 3 4 5 NEXT PAGE >SHARE