We Ate Bunny The Rooster

This DOES SHOW the slaughter of a chicken! If you cannot handle that then don’t continue!

We ate Bunny for dinner. He was one of our roosters. That is what we raise our chickens for. We have roosters for meat and egg layers for eggs. We try to give all our chickens a happy life and you can follow along and see their life and living conditions daily over on the Chicken & Eggs page.

So this is how we slaughter a chicken.

Meet Bunny the rooster. He was a good rooster.

This is called a “Killing  Cone” and it is what we use to hold the chicken while we chop his head off.

This is how you install a chicken into a killing cone.

WARNING!!! The next pictures are GRAPHIC!!!

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Addie doesn’t enjoy cutting the chickens head off but it must be done if we intend to eat him.

Addie says: Before anybody says “I can’t believe you do that” or “How horrible…” or “That’s wrong” … think a bit.  I hate doing it, I get really upset and have to really steady down so I don’t freak the chicken out any more than I have by catching him (or her, sometimes a hen has to go). For me it’s not the actual death that is the worst part, everything that lives dies, no exceptions to my knowledge.  It’s the distress associated with death that upsets me, and I do my best to minimize that, and to try to take pride in knowing that until that last bit of his (or her) life this chicken had a pretty nice life.  It wasn’t stuck in a tiny cage, it got enough food, it got to indulge in instinctive behavior like roaming around in the yard and woods, scratching and pecking and looking for yummy tidbits.  He even got to hang out with the ladies.  He wasn’t culled as a day-old chick simply because he was male.  And since I’m not vegetarian, the meat has to come from somewhere.  Our flock only can be so big, and there can only be so many roosters in the flock or they fight and they stress the ladies.  So sometimes someone’s gotta go.  And when they do, I try to have the respect for them, and do it well personally.  I show them the respect of not going off while it happens and hiding, pretending magically a chicken left the flock happily and suddenly a dead chicken appeared.

After the chicken has rested for about a half hour in the killing cone so all the blood can drain out and he stops flopping around from his nerves firing off, we dunk him.

First you boil some water in a pot large enough to hold the chicken. Then let it cool to around 185*F or so. Next you dunk your chicken in it and give him a swirl and check occasionally to see if the feathers pull out easily by tugging on the tail and wing tip feathers. Once the feathers come loose with ease you then give a quick splash into another bucket of cold water to cool the chicken off just enough so you can handle it without burning your hands.

Next up pluck and gut the bird 🙂

Basically we use a pallet made table. We spread out some news paper on the work surface. Cover two buckets with plastic bags, one for guts and one for feathers. We have a 5gal water jug on hand with soap for washing hands, table, and tools etc…

If done correctly up to this point then the feathers should just wipe right off basically. Then you begin to gut the bird. In this instance we left the wings and legs on and roasted him on the grill as is after removing the guts.

Once you are all done plucking and gutting then you dunk the bird into the cold water and wash him off. We have a second bucket of fresh water to pour over the bird as well after the dunking just to make sure we got everything.

While the plucking and gutting was going on with Addie, I (Doc) started the grill by stacking a bunch of small logs in it and letting them burn to coals. Addie and I at one point went to the garden in the back field and picked out our personal corn cobs for this meal.

So now we cook 🙂

The chicken is basically set on it’s meatiest side until it reaches 160*F then we flip it and wait till it reaches that same temp again on the other side. The grill stays around 350*F starting at 400*F…

Dinner time! YUM ! ! !

Bunny had a lot of meat on him. He was very good and we were very pleased with him. I ate him with Famous Dave’s Rich & Sassy BBQ sauce.

Special thanks to our friend and dinner Bunny.

I won the wish bone break but it turns out that Addie and I had the exact same wish anyhow so it didn’t matter who won after all 🙂

We finished dinner off with our home grown corn that I seasoned with Old Bay Hot seasoning.

Everything for dinner tonight, aside from the seasoning and sauce, was home grown and made off grid. The chicken was hatched from an egg right here on our homestead by another chicken named Pixie and raised without the use of a mechanical incubator. Just straight up bird sitting on his egg 🙂 . The corn was grown from seed in our garden. The fire was made from wood grown on our property. The water came from our spring found just outside our cabin doors.

This is about as self sufficient as we can get folks… Hope you enjoyed it.