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Lately there have been a handful of measures to allow city residents to have chickens in their small urban yards. I asked a buddy of mine about how much work slaughtering poultry is, and the following is his response.

Thanks to NuketheWhales!

You may be able to buy one from any farm. I even have friends that may sell you one but they probably just have egg hens.

Raising chickens isn’t my expertise but I can run down the slaughtering procedure for you. This may not be the most interesting thing,and it’s strictly from memory, so here goes…

The weekend before Thanksgiving at The University of Connecticut was a time of little activity to the casual passerby, but at Ratcliff Hicks Arena on the east side of campus a couple of students and volunteers were working hard at one of their annual fund raising/public service events.

The work in question was the slaughtering and evisceration of 400+ turkeys from surrounding farms by members of the University’s Poultry Science Club. The local farms paid a cheaper price to have their turkeys butchered for the upcoming holiday, while members of Club worked to win the fundraising competition and attend a three day trip to Atlanta to experience the International Poultry Exposition.

In the basement of the Ratcliff Hicks Arena, two teams were assembled. The slaughtering team was in charge of rounding up the turkeys, exsanguinating them, defeathering them, and removing the large, unused parts of the turkeys - mainly the feet and head. The process starts with the hanging of the turkeys by wedging their feet in to a modified steel clothes hanger. However, instead of hanging a pair of pants over a strip of metal attached to a hook, the turkey’s legs get wedged between four ridgid rods (These rods form a U-shape, where the leg is in the center of the U, caught in between the two pieces of metal. One leg per pair of rods). The turkey is then hung on a horizontal piece of metal, which is used to conduct a circut through to the upside-down bird by cleverly using a stripped extentsion cord and some properly placed alligator clips.
After seven seconds of shocking the bird to stun it (not to kill), two quick slices of a butcher knife glide across the birds neck, severing the jugular veins and carotid arteries. Once the bird has finished dripping, it is then soaked into a hot water bath to loosen the feathers. When the feathers can be easily plucked off (the bird smells slightly of undercooked turkey and warm bird shit… mmm!) the bird is defeathered in the aptly named “defeathering machine”.

The defeathering machine is a metal box with a spinning steel cyclinder inside. The cyclinder has a series of rubber tubes sticking out of it like a porcupine- as it spins away from the enterance of the box, the person holding the bird hucks it inside, holding on tightly, and carefully turning the bird so that the tubes have a chance to rip all the feathers off. If the holder manages to get all the feathers off and not have the bird get sucked into the machine, he or she then cuts off the feet by working the knife between the bird’s knee joints. Any small feathers that weren’t removed by the machine are hand plucked off. Additionally, if you don’t have a defeathering machine like this, the entire bird could be plucked by hand, but it takes a little time. The head is removed by either cutting it with giant hedge trimmers or ripping it off with the hands. One final cut at the base of neck is used by the hedge trimmers before shipping the bird off in a bucket of water to be eviscerated, where the second team takes over.

The second team’s job is to remove all the unwanted guts from the bird while keeping it from drying out. A ready bird is grabbed from the tub of water- the first cut is right in front of the vent. A circular cut is made to remove the entire tail. With the gaping hole created in the bird, the eviscerator reaches a hand in and removes the intestines, the gall bladder, the stomach, the liver, and the kidneys. Every thing but the liver and kidneys gets tossed. With the extra space created after removing most of the GI system, the eviscerator reaches in again to remove the heart and lungs. You’re lucky if you can able to fit your fingers in between the ribs to remove the lungs without having to shread and scrape them out with a jagged “lung remover.” The heart then gets the excess fat cut from it and is saved with the rest of the giblets. With that side of the bird done, one flips the bird over to lop off the neck (which gets saved) and remove the crop by carefully peeling the connective tissue away to fully extract the partially inflated crop without breaking it. Doing so causes the turkey’s last meal to spill all over your eviserated bird, making more work for the volunteer, as it requires a thorough hose-down to wash out all the junk from the bird’s new orifices.

The hollowed out carcass, along with the neck, kidneys, heart, and liver stuffed inside the bird are then but into a bucket of water were they wait to be weighed, wrapped, refrigerated, and shipped to whatever location. The turkey is ready to eat at this point.

I did some Googling, and found that there are a number of YouTube videos as well as nice step-by-step sets of instructions out there by a variety of farms. I highly recommend brushing up on this information… Here’s a particularly good article on raising and slaughtering chickens…