We get a lot of questions about butchering chickens over here on the podcast, and those questions range from “I have a backyard flock and I would like to be able to cull a few hens and some roosters every year,” all the way up to, “We are planning to raise enough meat birds for ourselves and our neighbors and we need to know what tools we need to get started on that.” In this episode, I am going to do my best to get you comfortable with the idea of butchering a few hens on your kitchen counter, and reassure you that you have every tool you need, and it really is a simple and straightforward process - but there is a learning curve, and it is worth learning.

This is an ancestral skill that used to be fairly familiar to many people; if you have read many older books you know they are always butchering this, that, or the other chicken and it doesn’t even barely make a comment in the book because it is such a simple and familiar process to people in the days of old. We will cover the tools you need for both a simple few birds a year, all the way up to the larger batches that involve more equipment; we will talk about involving your kids in the process, and we will talk about the clean-up and packaging process at the end as well.

I hope you find this episode to be very useful and interesting, and please be aware that we are going to talk about all the blood and guts in this episode and it is appropriate for all ages, but please be aware before you jump in.

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