We have two less animals around our house as of today.  We took the roosters to some friends this morning to be made into chicken.  Yeah, I know, they already were chicken...but now they are eatable chicken.  

Side note: I don't suggest you read the rest of this or look at some of the pictures if you are squeamish. 

Here are our chickens in their run.  Notice one rooster heading for corner to get in the shed:

But Jake got him cornered:

And caught him:

Here he comes:

And into the tub for transport:

Lydia was excited that the rooster got to go for a ride with us in the van: 

His tail feathers stuck out a little for a while until he pulled them back in:

They didn't try to get out but I sat on the tubs on the way to Alex and Jean's house anyway just in case. I didn't want roosters flying around in our van. 

They were just finishing up their own when we got there so they were ready for ours.  I had never experienced a chicken slaughter before.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.
I learned something new- if you swing a chicken around in circles by it's legs it will go limp and not really know what is going on.  I guess that stands to reason.  So, even though our rooster were already sorta in a daze from riding a half hour in tubs they got swung around too:

Then (the worst part) they got their heads chopped off with an ax.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be...well, for me that is...I guess it was kinda bad for the rooster. 

Then Alex held him upside down between his legs until he stopped trying to flap his wings (meanwhile, his head was laying on a pile of feathers with his beak opening and closing...I didn't like that):

Then they hung him up by his feet and let him bleed out and also waited until he relaxed.  I guess it takes a few minutes for the muscles/nerves/etc to realize he's dead: 

Then he got taken down and dipped into a bucket of really hot water.  This loosens up the feathers for plucking:

Hanging up again, he gets his feathers all pulled out.  Jean was worried that he would be hard to pluck since he wasn't a meat bird (they were both Plymouth Barred Rocks). But they feather seemed to come out easily and they were pleased that he didn't have pin feathers yet- apparently they get those when the weather starts to get cooler and they are hard to remove: 

The next step is a good rinsing:

Then processing- cutting off the bottom of the legs and the rest of the neck, removing the crop and innards and any missed feathers.  There is also an oil gland on the behind that is removed, which I didn't know about and found rather interesting. It keeps the feathers oiled so they are water proof. 
Jean said our roosters were quite a bit tougher than their meat birds. She had a hard time pulling their guts out and cutting through their skin.

Lydia ate graham crackers and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to what was going on, at least she didn't seem to be.  But on the way home she said things like "bak baks are in the bag now.  we have them for supper tonight.  they don't bak bak anymore."   She got most of it right...only we aren't eating them tonight. I think I'll wait until I forget what they looked like first. :)

While we were packaging them the girls (and Elmo) sat on the sofa (mostly...): 

Jean cut one of the roosters in half for me but it was not an easy task so the second one remained whole. They weighed around 6 pounds each.  Here are the five they did this morning and our rooster on the cutting board:

And there they are- that'll be about two weeks worth of meat for our family! :)