The man walking toward me was splattered with blood. His forearms were stained a pale magenta, his cheeks spattered with red flecks. The crumpled hide of a deer lay in a heap against the wall of the building behind him. Skinny hooved legs stuck out of 50-gallon oil drums nearby. It was like a scene out of a horror film.
But instead of brandishing a machete or a chain saw, the man with the bloodstained forearms carried a stubby pencil and a clipboard.
“Dropping off?” he asked.
It was the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, several years ago, a sunny and chilly day. For the first time in my life, I was visiting a slaughterhouse—with my children, 9 and 13, in tow—and found that it was hopping. A line of trucks idled, everyone waiting their turn to drop off the birds they’d been raising for the last six months. A white-haired man with a weathered face and a worn-out cap leaned out of his Ford—stacked with several layers of crates holding white turkeys—and asked my daughter: “What did the turkey say to the chicken?”
She stared up at him for a second and then shrugged.
“Nothing,” he chuckled at her. “Turkeys can’t talk!”
My family was still new to farming, having moved to Greene County, New York, from Brooklyn only a few years earlier. Since then, my husband and I had just about learned how to kill and process chickens. But this was our first year raising turkeys, and we’d been overwhelmed at the thought of slaughtering 25-pound birds on our own. It wasn’t qualms about killing the turkeys; it was more whether we could do it without causing undue stress to the birds with our novice hands and backyard equipment.
When I first dreamed of moving upstate and raising our own animals for food, I wasn’t thinking about sharp knives and bloody hands; it was more about lambs dashing through clover-filled meadows and pots bubbling on the stove. The thing is, I love animals. I had tried to quit meat as a teenager, after my older sister made me read pamphlets about the horrific lives and deaths of factory-farmed creatures. Decades later, she’s still a vegetarian, but I could never abstain for long. That’s the other thing: I love meat, craving it so intensely that the sight of raw beef can set my mouth watering. So, for me, a workable alternative to quitting meat was to make sure that the animals I eat have been raised—and killed—well.
My friend Susie taught me how to slaughter birds.
She’s a farmer who lives a few miles down the road from me, and back when we first moved in 2010, she was raising poultry and pigs on her tiny acreage. We immediately connected over our shared beliefs that animals intended for consumption should be treated incredibly well—but she was actually living the life I was still imagining.
So Susie started inviting me over, on days when she was processing geese. It’s weird to say, but I enjoyed it. Not the killing, but that was over quickly. Susie would bring the geese into her makeshift abattoir—her garage—one by one and gently invert them into the cone. “I’m sorry, baby,” she’d say, and then she’d cut their heads off. We held them still until they stopped thrashing and the blood had drained, and then we’d put them in the plucker.
That’s when things would get sort of fun.
Usually, Susie invited a few friends, and we’d stand around the processing table plucking and gutting and gossiping. As with cooking and quilting and even laundry, slaughtering was once a communal activity, a time to come together and connect. Those who grew up reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series surely remember Laura and her sisters playing with the pig bladder on slaughter day—and, later, delighting in the delicacies. As Edna Lewis wrote in her classic cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking: Hog-killing was once one of the “special events of the year.”
It was at Susie’s that I met Dana, the owner of the slaughterhouse. I don’t know what I expected a slaughterhouse owner to look like, but Dana is adorable and friendly and has a pierced tongue. So, when it was time for my family to kill the first turkeys we’d raised on our farm, I called her—and asked if she could handle it.
We pulled up to Dana’s that day with our four brown-and-white turkeys in dog crates. Two guys were moving along the lines of vehicles, pulling out birds by the feet, and carrying them upside down into the building, wings flapping madly. I found the sight a little uncomfortable. Susie didn’t carry her birds like that. But my qualms were mixed with the gratitude I felt towards everyone at this small slaughterhouse. Dana had told me she had 850 turkeys scheduled to be processed over three days. These men were friends she’d hired to help out, and they were hard at work doing an essential job that the rest of us don’t want to do—but still want done.
My son, who was 13 at the time, helped me carry our two crates over to the door of the slaughterhouse. We put the turkeys in a patch of sun. We’d fed them since they were a day old; we still felt a little protective towards them.
“We’ll give you a call when they’re ready,” said the guy with the clipboard.
I didn’t particularly like our turkeys. They were Bourbon reds, an heirloom breed that looks more like a wild turkey than the mammoth broad-breasted white creatures that make up 99 percent of the American turkey population. They came to us from the hatchery as day-old poults, beautiful and swanlike with downy blond fuzz. Then they were funny teenagers who followed us around the farm and, suddenly, they were horrendous adults with faces like a reptile’s, which changed from pale red to lavender to blue according to their moods. And those snoods: that dangling thing that hangs down off their beaks when they are excited and retreats into a little stub when they are calm. Our toms were imprinted on us and would stand outside our kitchen window, fluffing their feathers and elongating their snoods, trembling with the effort of showing off for us.
They were also predators. They killed several chicks, and one of our gorgeous little brown Welsummer hens that was almost full-grown: They pecked her eye out, and she burrowed her way into a roll of wire fencing and died there. And they scalped a younger hen. We found her, still breathing but with a bare and bloody head, and tried to save her, but she was dead in the morning.
We couldn’t wait for the turkeys to be gone, so our chickens could range freely again, and our dog could roam the barnyard without being chased.
But they were living creatures, and as we drove away from the slaughterhouse, I hoped it would be over quickly. I felt the same way at Susie’s, watching her carefully taking a bird through its final moments. I once told her I wished I could be tougher, that I could stop feeling so squeamish about killing an animal. She said that feeling would never go away, and I shouldn’t want it to. “It’s what makes you try so hard to do it right,” she said.
Modernity has allowed us to distance ourselves from death. Most people only see gore and blood and slaughter in horror movies, where the act of killing is done by people who are deranged or evil—giving us license to distance ourselves even further. In reality, the animals we eat are often killed by people who are underpaid and undervalued. Peter Singer’s most recent book, Consider the Turkey, describes in gruesome detail the industry behind our Thanksgiving dinners, which is horrific not only for the birds, but also for the workers, often migrants who perform repetitive, soul-killing jobs to make sure the rest of America has access to cheap and plentiful meat.
But his argument conflates the industrial model of meat production with the very notion of killing an animal for food. And there, he and I differ. There are better ways to end a life: with respect and with gratitude. I’m fortunate to have the choice to do it myself, or to take my animals to a place like Dana’s, which farmers and hunters across my community rely upon for this essential task.
I got a call from the slaughterhouse the day after I dropped off my turkeys. They were ready. The same men, bloodier than the day before, carried them out to the truck for us and helped us load our empty dog crates. I thanked them, then drove to meet some friends who’d claimed our largest turkey, in exchange for 18 pounds of pork they’d raised and cured themselves. On the way home, we stopped to see a neighbor who’d shot a deer and had venison to offer us. We loaded our car with three brown shopping bags filled with white paper bundles of meat and headed home. It was a bloody weekend.
As I finally turned my attention to the coming feasts, I felt grateful—to the animals who had died; for the certainty that they’d had good lives; and to the friends and neighbors who had helped us fill our freezer with a winter’s worth of food.
I was ready to start cooking.
Larissa Phillips lives on a farm in upstate New York. Her last piece for The Free Press was “Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor.” Follow her on X @LarissaPhillip, and learn more about her work on the Honey Hollow Farm Substack.
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