The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  A baby bird fell out into my hand and immediately commenced the psycho spaz dance performed by the other newly hatched chicks. Still curved into an egg shape, he was a skinny thing with slicked down feathers that looked like molten silver—a Splash Orpington, who when fully grown would be a huge, striking white bird flecked with gray. “Ready?” I asked Emmett. He nodded, and cracked open the incubator lid. I slipped the baby chick into a corner, away from his puffy brethren, so he could learn what it was like to move around in his own space without getting too trampled. Approximately one hour of rolling around the incubator seemed to straighten them out—but until then, everything about this tiny life was a prostrate curved comma, including its perfect, tiny feet.

  Salmon Faverolles are an exceptional chicken breed originating in France. The hens are sweet, good-natured beige ladies with feathered feet and puffy cheeks and chins. They possess five toes, rather than the typical four: a circus sideshow touch that compliments their whiskers and beards. They lay almost an egg a day all summer long—a tinted, cream-colored egg, the likes of which you’d never find in a grocery store—and enjoy foraging for weeds, bugs, and garden scraps.

  The males are spectacular. They’re built like tanks with low, heavy breasts, and wear plumage straight out of Chaucer. They have beards like a woodsman, dark and full. Add to that a long, luscious, black stallion tail and a cream-colored saddle with accents of mahogany, and you can picture them crowing over pilgrims wending their way to Canterbury.

  Unlike other roosters, the Salmon Faverolle roosters are a completely different color than the females, yet another anomaly in the chicken world. It makes them easy to sex as youngsters: as their primary feathers grow in and replace the soft baby down, which happens about a week after hatching, you can easily tell the boys from the girls. This is exciting, because an untrained eye usually can’t determine the sex of chickens for at least two months. And of course, everyone hopes to hatch out more pullets (proto-hens) than cockerels (proto-roosters).

  I had put ten Salmon Faverolle eggs in the incubator. Cost of one dozen fertile eggs: $30. Cost of shipping them from a friendly farmer in Texas: $15. Cost of incubator: $120 (although I managed to con one out of my mother as a Christmas present). Cost of electricity required to keep incubator running for twenty-one days straight: at least $15.

  Given my initial investment, I anxiously awaited the moment when I could officially determine the sex ratio of my clutch. I looked at pictures online; I picked the chicks up to hold their feathers up to the light. And each time I did, I thought, Please tell me you’re light brown, and not black.

  After two weeks, there was no denying it. Of my first Salmon Faverolle hatch, six out of eight chicks were male. To add insult to injury, one of the two females was a “sport” (a genetic anomaly)—white-colored instead of salmon. She’d make a fine egg-layer, but if I was trying to keep to the heritage breed standard, hers weren’t the genetics that I’d want to pass along to the next generation.

  What was there to do, besides go back to the drawing board and order more eggs? And since my incubator held forty eggs, why not fill it up? I contacted farms and ordered some Salmon Faverolles, Blue Orpingtons, and Buff Orpingtons, and fired up the incubator again.

  The surviving seven chickens perched in the small coop. (Hope is second from the left.)

  Cockerels, like all young animals, are cute. Roosters, however, are not. In fact, they’re parasites. If you retain all of your cockerels and permit them the luxury of turning into roosters, the first thing that will happen is your feed bill will go through the roof and your egg business might not even break even. The second thing that will happen—unless you build an entirely separate coop and yard for the boys, which again is cost prohibitive—is that your hens will be miserable.

  As soon as they mature, roosters turn into hungry, noisy, horny, sexually deviant motherfuckers. They will pick out an individual hen and chase her around the coop, yard, pasture, driveway, and porch until eventually she tires enough to be mounted. They will also gang-rape hens; five or six roosters will chase down a hen together and form a ring around her. After one rooster mounts her, everyone else has to have their way with her, too. During this whole process, the hen—as you’d might expect—is screaming her head off and frantically trying to get away. But she can’t, because she’s surrounded on every side by more horny roosters.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, when they mount the hen, the roosters bite the feathers on the back of her head and dig their talons into her back. After only a few weeks of roosterfest, my hens were sporting bare backs and bald spots. They no longer looked like happily free-ranging beauties, but abused factory-farmed critters.

  I grew up in a household that eschewed Barbie for her unrealistic, over-sexualized view of the female form. To me, the meaning of roosterfest was clear: patriarchy had set up shop in my chicken pasture. Remember, the gentle hens are the ones who do all the work, passing an egg that comprises 3 percent of their body weight every twenty-six hours. Scaling up, this is the equivalent of a 150-pound woman giving birth to a 5-pound baby every day. Meanwhile, the roosters eat, sleep, shit, crow, fight, and fuck. And all of these processes are repeated at least a dozen times in the course of twenty-four hours.

  My rooster-dominated yard was cruel. It was embarrassing when visitors stopped by to see the happy free-range chickens—and instead found themselves explaining to their kids what the roosters were violently doing to the hens. The roosters were inhaling chicken feed, too; a fifty-pound bag disappeared every other day. It had to stop.

  I admit, roosters are quite beautiful. And in order to breed heritage chickens I’d need to keep a few of them. But empathy for my hens overcame my general animal empathy, and I realized that an egg-eating vegetarian is essentially a chicken-eating vegetarian, anyway. If you eat eggs, male chickens somewhere are dying. (Ditto, by the way, for most male dairy animals.) With this realization, I’d just grasped a fundamental tenet of livestock management: female animals are useful; male animals are not. Or, more accurately, female animals are useful alive while male animals are not.

  It would be fine if livestock were magically born in a 1:10 male-female ratio. But they’re 1:1, just like the rest of us. (And with my luck, they’re 2:1, with the males outweighing the females.) The truth is, you need only a few males to keep a large herd or flock of females going.

  Most male chickens don’t even get the chance at life: they’re tossed by the hundreds into trashcans and left to suffocate. Male dairy cows, thin-boned and lightweight, aren’t worth the feed to raise them into steers. They’ll never have the steak-growing capacity of Anguses or Longhorns—stout breeds specifically developed for muscle mass. So male dairy cows are slaughtered young, and their anemic, weak flesh—which usually hasn’t seen the light of day, much less an exercise yard—becomes veal parmigiana.

  Emmett and I could choose to look the other way. We could sell our roosters to the local feed store, where someone less thin-skinned would pick them up for a few dollars and turn them into dinner. (Or worse—since there’s a strong cockfighting culture in Sonoma County, the roosters could very well end up in the ring.) We could go on pretending that we were vegetarian, even though our desire for eggs—and our need to safeguard the hens who produced them—had signed the death warrant for male chickens under our care. Hell, we could tell ourselves that the animals were going to be picked up by another farmer who desperately wanted to provide a safe, happy home for roosters.

  Fuck that.

  Emmett got out the hatchet. And I went to get the Buff Chanticleer.m

  I’ve heard it argued that the way a creature lives doesn’t matter. That when he’s facing the hatchet, whether it’s in a huge processing plant or at the hands of the farmer who raised him, he’s still going to fight like hell. He’s still going to die a miserable death, he’s still going to suffer, he’s still going to do everything in his power to cling to life.

  Later I’d have roosters that struggled. But I�
�m telling you, the Buff Chanticleer’s attitude was so accommodating that it caused me to wonder whether I had a reincarnated Zen master on my hands—one who had screwed up and was patiently waiting for death so he could have another shot at personhood again.

  Normally roosters hate being held. I simply walked up to the Chanticleer and scooped him up, where he waited sweetly in my arms, more like a lapdog than the testosterone-filled rapscallion that he was.

  Emmett and I spent fifteen minutes postponing the inevitable, during which time the rooster didn’t let out so much as a peep. We laid him down on the stump over and over, pressed his head this way and that, trying to determine what position would grant the cleanest, quickest death. He patiently bore our ministrations until we felt certain we had the best shot at a one-swing death.

  I held him, and Emmett—with stronger muscles and surer aim—swung the freshly sharpened hatchet home.

  Yes, the bird continued to spasm and flap after the head had been severed from its body. Yes, there was blood. But there wasn’t much of it, and within fifteen minutes—after a tenminute bleed-out period, a quick scald at 145 degrees F in a water bath, and some frantic feather plucking before the skin cooled down—we had something that didn’t look like a chicken. Rather, it looked like chicken. Reaching this point was cause for celebration: the chicken was quite definitively dead, and stripped of the things (head, feathers) that made it look personable. We were no longer standing guiltily by a woodshed with a live bird and a hatchet, wondering whether one of the cyclists breezing by on the road would careen into a tree when he glanced up to see us hanging a flapping, headless chicken from the rafters. Now the chicken was not only dead, but also dead looking; no fingers were severed in the process, and the tears that were shed had since dried; no bicyclists came to harm, and as far as we knew, they had their eyes on the road and we were the only witnesses to the murder. Success, right?

  Surely, we thought, the hard part was over. After this it should all be smooth sailing. Within minutes, we’d have an oven-ready bird, stuffed with halved lemons, garlic cloves, and rosemary sprigs, its supple skin rubbed with salt, pepper, and vegan butter, some sage leaves slid under the skin.

  Ha.

  Postpone that vision of a perfect oven-ready carcass for, oh, three more hours. In its place, picture two idiots with a blunt knife tentatively slicing into a bird’s dead, naked ass. For an hour. Then picture a certain city slicker (chosen because her hand was significantly smaller than the country boy’s) sticking her fingers into the aforementioned bird’s ass. For another hour—during which she repeatedly smells her hand, which smells exactly like concentrated chicken shit. Only then, in the third hour, would the actual organs be removed.

  We moved tentatively through the chicken cutting and gutting process, terrified of rupturing the gallbladder or the lower intestine, a mistake that would result in spoiled meat. After such a traumatic process (for us, not to mention the bird), we didn’t want the bird’s death to be in vain.

  So, to be sure the meat stayed edible, we spent the next three hours trying to gently cut into the bird’s cavity and delicately remove its organs. None of the websites we referenced, some of which contained very detailed, graphic pictures of the process, deigned to mention that all of the organs were suspended in connective tissue that resembled in strength and texture those giant spiderwebs that nearly frustrate Frodo and his friends in their ring quest. None of them mentioned that if you touched the bird’s lower intestine, even if that intestine wasn’t ruptured and the meat hadn’t been spoiled, your hands would smell like concentrated chicken shit. And that an extremely sharp knife wasn’t just handy: it was necessary. Also, that a substantial amount of courage would be required to stick your hand blindly into the rooster’s still-warm viscera, even if that rooster was a rapist. And that even more courage would be required to plunge in, grab a fistful of viscera, and yank. HARD. Perhaps this should be obvious, but I for one would have appreciated being told that there is no room for gentleness when it comes to evisceration.

  In other complications, all of the websites we referenced detailed the processing of Cornish Cross chickens, a hybrid bird specifically developed for meat production. Our handsome heritage fellow was nothing like these birds. Cornish Crosses are, as far as I’m concerned, not real chickens. They’re Frankenchickens. I’d encountered them a few times, most notably at an Amish farm in upstate New York, where they seemed woefully out of place with the bonneted children and hand-sewn laundry flapping in the breeze. The birds I saw were, at the tender age of two months, ready for slaughter. Heritage birds don’t really flesh out until six months or so: our Buff Chanticleer was eight months old at the time of his death, having been purchased as a chick from a local chicken fancier shortly after our fox tragedy. The Cornish Crosses did not race around the pasture, chasing insects, flying up into trees, and clambering on top of the hens like my rooster did; rather, they walked a few steps and then lurched into a sitting position, exhausted by the effort required to carry the weight of their own breasts. All in all, they seemed dull, pathetic, and somehow revolting—even in the ideal, sustainable “chicken tractor” model that the Amish farmers were using. While the chickens were free-range, they never got further than a few feet from the tractor, so the term didn’t seem to mean much. (And by the way, even the free-range, organic chickens from Whole Foods are Cornish Crosses.) These weren’t chickens: these were pre-meats that happened to eat and breathe.

  By contrast, our rooster was a living, breathing entity that happened to become meat. His smaller breast and body cavity meant it was harder to stick a hand inside him to get the organs out. His age also meant that he possessed some things that the two-month-olds lacked. More on this later.

  Some aspects of processing heritage birds and Cornish Crosses are the same. Like step one: removing the feet. With a knife tip inserted in the joint, they snap off easily. Swallowing my disgust, I bucked up and processed the feet so that I could use them later to add richness to our chicken soup. I dipped them briefly in boiling water and then “pulled off the socks,” which is an entirely pleasant euphemism for an entirely unpleasant procedure. Starting at the ankle, I removed, in one multi-toed sheet, the scaly skin covering the foot. A couple of toenails popped off in the process. I pulled off the other two that didn’t, and then repeated the process for the other foot. Both “sockless” feet went into the refrigerator

  Step two: removing the oil gland. This was another simple, outside-the-body step that involved cutting off a fatty section of the triangular tail that was said to give an off-flavor to the meat. It took a few slices, but eventually I removed all of the yellow fat on the tail.

  Now the bad news: Everything up until this point was the easy part. Next, it was time to blindly cut into the bird’s bum without cutting into its large intestine (which obviously terminates right there). After poking at the bird with a dull knife for fifteen minutes, we finally made a tiny, finger-sized hole. Another forty-five minutes of additional hacking, and a circle large enough to accommodate a very small human hand exposed the bird’s cavity, filled with a confusing mess of grayish organ blobs.

  Emmett made a chivalrous first attempt at sticking his hand in the cavity, but couldn’t squeeze in more than a few fingers—no way were his broad knuckles fitting past the narrow hips.

  “I’ll do it!” The way I said it made it sound like I was volunteering out of the kindness of my heart, although clearly I was the only option left. I seemed to have fooled Emmett, though: he acted surprised by my generous offer.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I acted offended by the question. “It’s my rooster, isn’t it?”

  Brave face on, I plunged in ... to the warm, squishy, whatthe-fuck-am-I-doing-here land that comprises the innards of a chicken.

  We’d been taking turns trying to disembowel the rooster for forty-five minutes. I was able to stretch the cavity a bit, making it large enough so that Emmett could just barely jam his hand in. At the
moment, he was the one wrist-deep in bird guts.

  “Just pull!”

  “I can’t, I think something’s breaking.” He stared at the dead rooster, a look of concentration on his face, apparently trying something new with his fingers and the viscera. “It’s all stuck in there, it won’t budge.”

  “Well, can’t you just grab and pull?”

  “I’m trying! There’s no room for me to open my hand.”

  “Obviously, people do this,” I said. “So we should be able to. Here, let me try again.”

  I stuck my hand inside the bird—the slippery organs once again refused to be caught by my fingers—and wished for this to be over. We were getting snappy with each other, and even snappier when we thought about how many more roosters were still running around raping hens in the yard. (Twenty-one, to be exact.) We’d been at this for over two hours now—closer to three if you counted the catching, stressing, and killing part. At this rate, it would only take us seven nine-hour days to process all of our roosters.

  My mind was elsewhere—counting chicken breeds and the number of roosters we’d need to keep—when suddenly I noticed that I was using my fingernails to slice through the connective tissue and loosen the organs from the walls. Which was gross, but I seemed to be making progress.

  Emmett went to open a window. The smell of dead chicken was really starting to get to me. “You know, I really think we’ve broken the fucking intestine,” I said. “It smells disgusting. How the hell are we supposed to eat this shit?” I pulled out my hand and thrust it in Emmett’s nose. “Ugh, smell it.”