A while ago, I posted about how we had an unexpected rooster. For a while I really liked him–he was friendly, and I liked the sound of his crow. But he kept up his cook-a-doodle-do at 5:30 am for too long. Normally I”m not opposed to waking up this early–but not so much when I’m pregnant. I wanted to sleep in occasionally. Please. The horrible thing about a rooster for an alarm clock is he doesn’t have a snooze feature. Its just lots of crowing until you get up and let him out, and then he still goes at it.

My desire to sleep in won over any small desire to keep the rooster, and one night my brother in law ripped his head off. I did most of the plucking, butchering and cleaning (badly I might add–it was my first time and I had no clue what I was doing). After resting in the refrigerator for a day and half we ate him for dinner. It was pretty good too.

Our dinner of homemade bread, homemade strawberry jam, and homegrown chicken.

My toddler liked the rooster a lot. He would copy the crowing sound when he heard it and say, “Mommy, rooooster.” I wondered if we should tell the children exactly what we were doing, and we went ahead and did. They didn’t seen the actual killing of the chicken, but did see me plucking and butchering him, and knew  exactly where the chicken came from when we had it for dinner. They weren’t too bothered by it either. When asked about the rooster now, my toddler will say, “Rooster died,” not sadly but just as something that happened.

I enjoyed the experience of raising and butchering my own meat. But it isn’t an experience I’m going to continue to pursue anytime soon. First of all, it wasn’t cost efficient. The chick cost $2 to begin with and then 3 months of care and feed, plus an hour to butcher and clean. He was probably a three to four pound chicken. Compared to grocery store prices–not a great deal. (Meat birds are a lot bigger in less time, and I’m not factoring in the price of a free range local chicken vs. the factory raised birds in the store, so there is a lot more to think about in the process. But a straight up economical analysis of my bird doesn’t come out that well.) I didn’t particularly enjoy the butchering process. It’s not something I want to repeat in order to get meat every time. Maybe if I actually learned better how to do it, I would be more willing. We also have enough projects and improvements in the yard that raising chickens for meat isn’t a priority. But I’m glad to have had the experience–and also glad that most of my chickens are hens that are now laying eggs, a much easier source of protein to deal with.