The Slaying of Rex Goliath

Today's blog post is coming to you from the Cafe Wren in Luck, WI. We awoke this morning to a terribly violent thunderstorm buffeting the house with rain and wind, filling the sky with lightning and rattling the earth with thunder. Around 7:20 a.m. lightning struck a pine right behind the house and the power went out. As both of us are dependent electricity and internet access for work, we had to flee the coop to get to the Wren (and its free wi-fi) by 10 a.m. when Steph has to punch in. All of that to say, if my diction and grammar seem a little more... earthy... you'll know why.

This Saturday was a day long foreseen, though anticipated more with a sense of foreboding than of excitement. That's because Saturday was the day of our first home chicken butchering.

You'll recall, we'd been given four roosters in our order of hens back in October. Well, for chicken raisers only vaguely interested in hatching out future birds, four roosters is far too many. So around 8 a.m. Saturday morning in the wet and chilly air we set about our work. Steph's mom, Sue, a seasoned pro at chicken butchering, came to teach us her ways. In addition to the three roosters we also had to butcher a hen that Hildy had wounded when playing a little bit too roughly.

We started with the roosters. Steph administering the death blow, all of us plucking, me cutting off feed and heads, and the ladies (whose smaller hands fit inside the birds) performing the interesting task of eviscerating.

Thanks to Sue's guidance and skill We were done and cleaned up by 10 a.m. and off to a tasty breakfast, which had prudently been put off until after the butchery. Both Steph and I were in a pretty charffy state most of the morning, but being hungry made it better.

The title of the post comes from the name of one of the roosters. When you order a batch of mixed breeds they always include a rare breed. Our rare breed was an enormous and glorious white rooster, whom named after a bottle of wine we once had that has a big picture of a rooster on it called Rex Goliath.

Rex and the other roosters are in the process of becoming chicken broth. We threw the sick hen in a crock pot to make dog food, since she had an open wound and all.

The only lasting trauma from the morning was that our hands smelled all day of the death we'd wrought -- more literally than Macbeath's too I might add. Just did a sniff-test and it looks like I'm finally in the clear. We're guessing that the smell is actually from the grease, but who knows.

Figured poultry butchery might not quite be the right occasion for photographs on our family friendly farm blog. So here are some other pictures.

Hildy's still a flopper

Our surviving rooster with Henny Penny

Finally, my father-in-law Mike thought it would be a good idea to take a video of the pigs, his favorite of our animals, eating some fun slops. So here's our pork-tet gobbling up some hard-boiled eggs, courtesy of Mike and Sue.