Yesterday, me and Josh had promised each other we were going to buy a chicken and slaughter and give it is a gift to our families, because we love our families, not because we have a strange burning to desire to kill animals.
Unfortunately, or maybe luckily for a certain chicken, it was the first day of "remember your dead grandparent festival" (not the official name). This meant there was no meat allowed in our house for the next 15 days. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily for a certain chicken, all of Josh's grandparents were still living. So we decided that we would both kill one chicken for Josh's family.
Everyone went on their regular trip to the nearby village of Lubhou to use the internet. I went to get ice cream and I met Josh (grinning from ear to ear) in the internet cafe. He was holding black plastic bag containing a live chicken with its little white head poking out. Kim was behind him holding back the tears after selecting the chicken that they chose to name "unlucky".
There wasn't a bus for ages so we had to walk with a chicken in a bag back to our village for about half an hour. It was getting pretty hot in its bag so we had to stop to give it a drink of water every now and again. When we got to Josh's house we started arguing about how to kill it. We had 2 knives, an extremely blunt but heavy Gurkha knife and what I can only describe as a sharpened butter knife. We went for the butter knife but I had to be demoted holding the chicken as we thought I probably wouldn't be strong enough to kill it with one swift blow. Even our resident farmer couldn't watch, she had only ever killed chickens by a shot to the head.
It all happened very fast. We took the chicken to the back of the cow shed, I took it out the bag and Josh showed me how to hold it. It was very still and didn't struggle at all. Then with one swift move Josh took its head clean off. THEN THE FLAPPING BEGAN. I had the chicken by its legs, but forgot to hold back its wings. So it flapped for a good 30 seconds, making quite a mess of us all.
Then we plucked it and I was given the gory job of gutting it. This involves putting two fingers as far up the chicken's bum you can, reaching up to its neck and pulling out everything you can feel. Laura (our resident farmer) then told us what all the internal organs were and then Tara (our resident psychotic) decided to feed them all to the local stray dog and film it.
It was amazing how fast it goes from live animal to what you see in the poultry section of the supermarket. I was expecting the experience to turn me vegetarian, but I would say it's probably made me feel better about eating meat. Especially as I found out that the Dali Lama eats meat!
Food for thought :D
Mariam
xx
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