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This may be a tough read for some – there is nothing particularly graphic as it discusses something I haven’t done yet.

Elizabeth (from one of my absolutely favourite blogs, Outpost505 – I adore their indexing system as well as their content) posted a comment to our chicken posts this week.  I adored her comment – found it honest and open about her own experience breaking down chickens.  It’s tough to put yourself out there on display especially when a topic is as difficult and complex as ones personal choices of the food they consume.

If you don’t believe this, visit our friends Kiwiswiss who are an amazing family of past-vegetarians who sustainably hunt to feed their family and recently received an email death-threat for their posts.  Their writing is  honest, open and amazing.  They are half a world away and we have shared so many similar paths it’s stirring.

I really encourage you to check out both of the blogs above.

Back to the plot at hand; Elizabeth mentioned that she also had friends who went to a farm to partake in the culling of chickens.  It wasn’t something I thought too much about – at first.

I grew up, in part, in the country.  I have seen chickens killed in the barn yard as a child, pigs led to slaughter, wild animals culled and fish, lobster and crab all extinguished of life.  I’ve hunted (more often without success than with it) for 60% of my life – and watched it up close for another 20%.  I don’t remember a year in my life when my father did not hunt.

I do struggle with cleaning birds (more on that with NO gore here) from time to time.  The smaller the animal, the tougher for me.  Shrimp are the toughest – 30 die for a meal for me.  One moose feeds 14 families for 30 meals at our cabin.  I get even more wobbly with a dead mouse – there is no benefit to it’s departure – simply that my “stuff” (including food) is cleaner, safer, more pleasant.

It’s rather extreme that I have no problem cleaning an 800 pound moose but carry a spider outside (sometimes down 46 stairs) so it can survive.  I don’t love spiders – I don’t even like them.   But it balances in my head.

So I got to thinking about the chicken.  Could I cull one myself?  I think I could – and to be crude, I could with the distance of a gun.  But chickens aren’t killed by remote control.  The process is much closer, much more intimate.  I don’t believe I would get any great pleasure from it; in fact I’ve struggled thinking about it.  And, for me (i.e. not judging anyone else), if I can’t cull it, can I reconcile eating it?

I was processing all of this when I picked up a piece of paper I hadn’t read from the local farmer’s market on Saturday.  “Chicken share.”  Buy a chick now, they raise it, you go to the farm in the fall and learn about the process, the life of an “ethically” raised heritage chicken and witness – or participate – in the cull.  Part of the course is to raise awareness about our personal choices of diet and to increase our consciousness around our personal impact.

The fall is a difficult time to plan events for me – the hunt and harvest occupy a lot of time.  I’m thinking I may have to make some time to explore a murky piece of my psychological geography.