This past week on Wednesday, October 28th, the biology class took a field trip to Merry Lea Environmental Center to help them with butchering chickens. We also learned about the inner workings of a chicken.
This was a very interesting experience. We got to see the chickens get butchered, and then we scalded them and plucked them so that we could then dissect them to see their organs and how everything was connected.
I was fascinated by how easily the feathers came off once the chickens had been scalded, which is when you dunk them in boiling water for a couple seconds to loosen the feathers. Once they had been scalded, we took them to a table and the feathers just came right out. We didn’t even have to pull on them that hard.
Once all the feathers were plucked off, we took them inside a shed and were shown each step in the dissection process. We first had to disconnect all the organs from the skin and meat of the chicken, and then they all came out in a big clump. After all the organs were out we laid them out and got to see the anatomy of the chickens and how everything was all connected.
We got to see the egg making process each step along the way. Most of the chickens had multiple yolks of eggs in different stages, from just a small yellow ball to a fully formed egg, shell and all. The gizzard was another fascinating part of the chicken. The gizzard is where all the food the chickens eat gets ground up, and because they have no teeth, chickens will sometimes actually eat small pebbles so that in the gizzard they can actually grind up their food.
Under normal circumstances, the school would’ve used the meat from the chickens in the cafeteria for lunch sometime, but because of COVID-19 we all got to take home the meat ourselves. The Friday of that same week in biology class we went down to the cafeteria and separated the meat from the bones of the chicken.
This whole experience was super informative for me, and it was really cool to see how the chicken that I will soon eat was raised and then eventually butchered. Although this experience was a little disconcerting it was not completely off-putting, so I will still be eating meat, but I do also think that it is important to understand that not all chickens have a life like this. Most chickens that we eat for meat are grown in giant warehouses, and get so big that they can’t even walk anymore.
I feel like especially in this instance it is a good way of showing that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. For instance, the chickens that are kept inside and grown naturally, don’t get to live a good life, because they can’t do anything except eat. This is a great example of we as humans messing with nature in a way that is then unnatural. However the chickens that we butchered were raised on a farm, and so were able to move around, and were not genetically modified to have the most possible meat, thus making them unable to do basic motor functions.