Chickens and Their Heads

I was making chicken stock yesterday, onion and celery simmering in the pot, when I got the chicken out of the fridge and prepared to clean it. It was a whole chicken, packed by the supermarket on a foam tray and wrapped in plastic. Tap running, I pulled it from the plastic wrap to give it a wash when I dropped the bird with a startled "Ughh!" and jumped back with a pounding heart.

The chicken had a head.

I was glad no one was at home to witness the sorry spectacle of me taking fright like that. After all, I am supposed to be a tough farm girl and there is protocol to be observed. One does not go round shrieking at the sight of a dead animal. But in my defence, chickens you buy from the store aren't supposed to have heads still on them, especially not tucked underneath so you don't see it until you've lifted the thing up in your hands.

Maybe it awoke in me some dark memory of the time I tried to make a business of chickens. I was about fourteen and starting to appreciate the lucrative business opportunities open to one when the raw materials are provided free by their parents. I was already making a nice bit of money with the calves I raised every year on our farm. The trouble with the calves, though, was that I only saw a paycheck once a year. With chickens I figured I could get a steady cash flow by selling their eggs every week. I already had a flock of bantam chickens running loose around the farm but they were more like pets than anything else. What I needed were professional egg layers so I called up a proper egg farm and arranged to buy 20 of their hens.

I don't know whether I was duped and sold geriatric birds or what but those pea-brained featherbags didn't lay half the number of eggs they were supposed to. I gave them the best food and care any chicken could aspire to and all they did was grow fat. And man oh man, were they dumb. My brother used to call my bantam chickens slow-witted but after the egg-layers arrived he began to regard the bantams as competitive chess players. The egg layers had spent their entire lives indoors before I got them. The outdoor run I attached to their coop gave them a lot of enjoyment but they simply weren't used to being outside. Every movement near the coop sent them into an absolute panic. It soon became apparent that these chickens were no more than three of four neurons ahead of a dandelion in terms of brain development and when they sensed danger a primitive mental panic switch was thrown. The mechanism was clearly of the most rudimentary sort with only a fixed-period timer to regulate it. Once the switch was activated the birds would run around in circles and squawk at the top of their voices for ten minutes even if the thing that startled them in the first place immediately became identifiable as a wholly benign presence, such as myself carrying the feed pail. The birds would not shut up until the timer had run its course.

Those hens never got to laying many eggs. The day came when I decided to put seven or eight of them in the freezer and sell the rest. Our neighbour Albert came over to do the mercy killings and my sister, whom I had somehow talked into joining me in the chicken venture, stood with me to assist. Albert quickly and efficiently dispatched the first few hens and then suggested that we girls learn how to do it. I went first. Shaking like jello on a jackhammer I killed one chicken and handed the axe back to Albert so quickly I nearly cut his hand off. Theo came up for her turn. I could see she was having even a harder time than I was working up her nerve to do it. The chicken, which Albert was holding upside down, began to cackle hysterically and flap its wings. Albert gently suggested to Theo that she not delay any longer. Theo was fighting a tremendous inner battle and kept raising the axe only to lower it again slowly a few seconds later. Finally, with Albert's gentle persuasion she raised the axe and brought it down swiftly. But even then something in her couldn't go through with it and the axe merely bumped the chicken hard in the back of the head, causing it to squawk even louder. Theo tried to hand the axe back to Albert but he seemed to feel that since she had come this far she ought to finish the job. Again he positioned the bird and again Theo raised her axe. She had a calmer, steadier look in her eye and I thought she was really going to do it this time but she pulled up at the last moment so that for the second time the axe only clipped the bird soundly on the back of the head. Albert didn't resist this time when she pushed the axe back at him and fled to a safe distance.

Anyway, that was the end of the chicken business. I sold the rest of the hens to my friend's dad, who wanted them in spite of my warnings about their shiftless attitude toward egg-laying. The bantams lost their elevated status and once more became the dumbest animals on the farm. And one of the slaughtered hens, after we had brought them into the house for cleaning as soon as Albert was done, took a few years off my life when it suddenly scrambled to its feet in the kitchen sink and flapped its wings while craning its neck this way and that as though trying to look around the room with the head that was no longer there.

The lesson you should have learned from today's blog is this: the presence of a head on a chicken is no indication of life. There may be a head and no life. There may be a life but no head. (And if you don't believe me look up "Mike the Headless Chicken" on the internet and you'll find out about a young rooster who lived for a year and a-half without his head before tragically choking to death in an Arizona motel.) And now I'm tired of talking about chickens so good night.