Learning to Butcher
We’ve had a buildup of roosters and now old laying hens so the past few weeks we have been butchering 2-4 per week for meat and broth. It’s been a real blessing.
The boys have been asking about learning to butcher for some time now. We’ve been trying to give them their own homestead domains, both to give them something of their own to work towards and to foster a sense of responsibility. So far this has looked like gardens and chickens but more animals is high on their list of requests.
First, I suppose, is learning to go from flock to food with what we already have. So last week Stewart stood by them at the counter and talked them through the gutting of the chickens. These photos are of Abram’s time at the butchering block but Elijah, ever the extrovert, came directly to me after his turn and proclaimed it “Fun!” with two eyebrows up.
So I’m thinking they’ll want to continue helping with this for the foreseeable future. Which is great since I learned to butcher roosters at 29 and they, at eight and ten, would do well to get a jump start on me in just about all areas of life.
LOL – I can certainly hear Elijah’s voice saying it was fun. Great lessons for these young men.
That’s great! I learned when I was 35 and 39 weeks pregnant with my last…on a mean rooster, off of a youtube video. It was an experience, that’s for sure.
Now I can do 20/day on spent birds that people give me (I just schedule drop off for the same day from multiple sources). I see you use the skin ’em method. It is the easiest!
I still have probably a gallon of schmaltz to process outside. We live in MT and everything is frozen so it is in suspended animation until after the holidays.
I’m 41 and in the new year will be processing my first ever roosters. We had two from our spring hatch. One, aptly named roast, is loudly crowing now. His counterpart, Tandoori, isn’t crowing at all, and is smaller and more scrawny ( I did the hansel and Gretel test on him yesterday hahahaha ). I hope like your son I can find it somewhere near fun?!
27 and never killed anything bigger than a spider before – and that’s been some years ago. 😉 But anyway just about to move to a small farm in France and to adding more livestock to our lives. Chickens, sheep, pigs. Learning step by step whatever needs to be learnt to live sustainable, close to nature and as directly as possible from the land that surrounds and sustains us. Butchering will be one of these learnings – and I’m curious, excited, frightened and feeling very alive at the same time about this – as always when it comes to new homesteading tasks. 🙂