In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience — haltingly and humiliatingly. Like the tennis player and the oboist and the guy who fixes hard drives, we need practice to get good at what we do. There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

And you don’t want to it to be you. You want to wait until your surgeon has honed his skills on other people and then have your appendix removed or your kidney transplanted or your hip replaced. Yet it is in our collective interest to have a new crop of surgeons every year, or we’ll run out of appendix removers, kidney transplanters, and hip replacers in short order.  And so the patient of the new surgeon makes a sacrifice to the common good – although, if the bargain were put to him in those terms, he might very well change his mind.

That essay has come to mind often, as I’ve done so many things for the first time over the last few years. Not many of them are physical skills like surgery, which require a very specific kind of learning, based on repetition, that hard-wires the procedure into your brain. But even more general undertakings – designing a hydroponics system, building a hoophouse, making a souffle – have a better chance of success when they’re undertaken by people with experience. The Internet will take you only so far.

As I venture out way beyond my comfort zone, I’ve been grateful that it’s not people I practice on. The soufflé falls, and the worst-case scenario is take-out Chinese. Nobody’s going to die on the table.

But livestock is different. It’s not people, and I am very clear on the difference. But it’s live. The animals we raise are sentient, can suffer, and are completely dependent on our stewardship. When we bungle it, nobody dies on the table, but it’s not take-out Chinese, either.

And bungle it we do. There’s no way to venture into taking care of animals without making mistakes born of inexperience. Almost all the deaths we’ve had around here could have been prevented if we’d simply been better at our job.

I’m not being hard on us here. I know that mistakes come with the territory, and you do your best and try and learn from what goes wrong. But I am responsible for our animals, and it sometimes feel like they got a bum deal being stuck with us instead of, say, Jen over at Milkweed & Teasel.

The issue at hand, this time, is our first attempt to hatch fertilized eggs. We bought six turkey eggs about four weeks ago and popped them under Queenie, our broody Buff Orpington hen. About a week before we were expecting chicks, we found one of the eggs cracked open, so we were down to five. We did, however, learn that at least that one egg was fertilized, so we had hopes for the remaining eggs.

Then, four days ago and a day ahead of schedule, we had an actual chick! It was peeping and eating and drinking, and Queenie was being very attentive to it. We were hopeful that the remaining four would follow suit.

Queenie, distracted

But then things went south. Queenie seemed to have trouble attending to both the chick and the eggs, and she abandoned the nest to keep the chick warm. We had set the Varmintcam up above the brooder, and we knew from the timestamp that the nest had been empty for at least four hours. Was the brooder too big? Did we put the food and water too far away from the nest? We didn’t know.

By this time, the full 28 days had elapsed, and we thought it was possible a chick might have survived, but didn’t have the strength to get out once it had gotten cold. So we tried opening one of the eggs. There was a chick, barely alive, and we tried to warm it and revive it, but our efforts failed and the poor thing died inside ten minutes. Was it a mistake to open it? We didn’t know.

Three eggs were left, and Queenie clearly wasn’t going to be able to keep them warm. But Kevin had the brilliant idea of putting them under Blondie, who was also broody and had hunkered down in a nest box in the coop. I also sent an e-mail to Jen, who assured me that chicks were sometimes much hardier than you think they’re going to be, and told me not to give up hope.

And I didn’t, but it was close.

After Blondie had been sitting on the eggs for a day, we checked on her. She was exactly where we’d left her, but she had moved two of the three eggs out of the nest, and had only one under her. We checked the two eggs she’d rejected, and they were clearly long dead. How she knew is beyond me – and I think she did know, because the one she was sitting on was alive. There was a little hole, with a little beak! And I heard a little peep!

We wanted to make sure the chick bonded to Queenie, so we gave it some help getting out of its shell and put it in the brooder with its little sibling and surrogate-mother-to-be. And Queenie took to it. She tucked it under her wing and kept it warm. An hour later, it was almost dry, and looked comfortable.

But by evening it was dead.

If you had told me this story, I couldn’t have imagined being so sad about a three-ounce, just-born turkey, but I actually had to hold back tears. When we’d found that second chick alive, I’d been elated – yes, actually elated – that our chick would have a playmate, and that little death of an hours-old creature affected me as much as any livestock death ever has.

Partly, I mourned the failure. I suspect we made a number of mistakes, because all the eggs were fertilized and all had developed substantially. Was the brooder too cold? Did Queenie get enough to eat and drink? Should we have put the other eggs under Blondie as soon as we realized Queenie was having difficulty? Should we have watched more carefully so we could have taken corrective action more quickly? But, our role aside, I feel bad for this little chick. I don’t think animals, with the possible exception of cats, should be alone.

We will get more turkey poults from the feedstore when they get a batch in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping everybody will be young enough for the flock to integrate successfully. And I am glad that we got at least one chick out of the effort – and a mighty cute little chick it is, too. But I wanted to do better. I really wanted to do better.

On the plus side, at least I’m not a surgeon.

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This morning, I found one of them wandering around the yard. I put her in the coop with the rest of them, and my heart sank when I realized the other one wasn’t there, either. I did a circuit of the property with a scoop of corn, but couldn’t find her.

Kevin found her, eviscerated, under a bush about twenty feet from the coop.

I understand that, no matter what we undertake, mistakes are inevitable. If your undertaking is woodworking, you will, at some point, have boards that don’t quite meet at the corners. If it’s gardening, there will, one day, be stunted beets or wormy cabbages. Pushing the cooking envelope? Prepare yourself for the occasional take-out Chinese.

If it’s livestock you’re raising, something will die.

It’s happened to us before. One of our turkey poults drowned because we were careless. One of our chicks got picked off by a hawk. We lost a full-grown chicken to what we suspect was a liver overtaxed by chicken treats. And now this.

It was absolutely, positively, unequivocally my fault that our chicken got torn apart by what was probably a raccoon. It’s gut-wrenching.

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On deer hunting itself, McGraw says that responsibility to keep the deer population in check, in the absence of virtually all wild predators, falls to humans and he’s doing his part. I think that’s perfectly reasonable, but he goes on to justify using his flintlock. He admits that it’s unreliable and difficult to use, and that it sometimes fails altogether. He admits that it’s more likely to wound than a modern weapon, and tells a story of wounding a deer and having to kill her with knife.

Why use it? Here’s why:

[W]hen I took up hunting, I eschewed all the technological gadgets designed to give modern hunters an extra edge over their prey. I like to believe that there’s something primitive and existential about the art of hunting, and that somehow, stripping the act of hunting to its basics makes it purer.

There you have it. Mr. McGraw wounded a deer in the name of purity. He wanted to give that poor deer a sporting chance. Never mind that, if he really wanted primitive and existential he would have dispensed with the firearm altogether and gone out with a pointy stick.

What he really wanted to do was philosophize. He wanted to have his venison, but also to make it clear that his thoughtfulness sets him apart from his fellow hunters, those Neanderthals who use things like rifles that make a clean kill easier and more likely.

The more time I spend in the woods with a gun, the more I think that hunting and philosophy don’t mix. Recently, my friend Tovar at A Mindful Carnivore wrote a post called, “Hunting philosophies in ten words or less,” I found that all I had to say on the subject fit into five: Hunt, with care, to eat.

Okay, it’s not literally all I have to say on the subject, but it’s everything important, and certainly everything that could be called “philosophy.” I’ll take a life only if it sustains me (because I eat the animal or because the animal is a threat to what I’m planning to eat or, ideally, both), and I’ll take it in such a way as to minimize its suffering as best I can.

The only ancillary issue worth mentioning is which animals I’ll kill. Because hunting isn’t a necessity for me, I prefer to hunt overpopulated, non-endangered animals, but I’ll take the last dodo if it stands between me and starvation.

While McGraw claims that using a flintlock makes hunting more primitive, I’ll go out on a limb and posit that what he really likes is that it makes it less primitive. It gives him a reason to engage his higher faculties, and it means he has enough to say about it to get himself on the Times Op-Ed page. It means that hunting is a whole-man, cerebral pursuit. So what if a doe dies a slow death?

And that’s what irritates me about so much hunting philosophy. It’s narcissism masquerading as concern for the purity of the hunt. The idea of “fair chase” is at the heart of most of it; it’s supposed to be about giving the animal a sporting chance but is really about making the hunter feel better about himself because the hunt was more challenging. The sense of accomplishment is seriously lessened if you take a deer over bait, but the deer who dies instantly at your corn feeder has it way better than the one you wound and track through the woods for hours.

McGraw’s doe would have taken the Neanderthal with the rifle, any day, even if it meant she wouldn’t have made the Times op-ed page.

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But that’s not strictly true. It isn’t death that makes life precious. It’s knowledge of death.

Something our six turkeys, fortunately, didn’t have.

This year's models

This year’s flock was different from last years. Last year, we had three toms and one hen, a ratio that makes for plenty of strutting and posturing, and some out-and-out fighting. There was a clear alpha, Drumstick, two clear subordinates, Beta and Gamma, and a lot of chest-bumping

Edith, the one hen, seemed unaware of the discord she generated. Freed from the biological necessity of fighting for a mate, she spent her days plotting her next escape. (The play-by-play of last year’s flock is here, in all its chronological glory, but you can read the executive summary in a piece I wrote for the Washington Post.)

This year, by chance, we had three males and three females, and there was peace in the pen. I’m no turkey behaviorist, but it seemed that they paired off. There was very little in the way of displaying or gobbling, and we never once witnessed a fight.

When there’s no displaying, and no obvious alpha male, there’s not much to distinguish individuals. Only one hen earned a name – we called her Lefty for a sty on her left eye – and the name faded when the sty shrank and eventually disappeared. Our turkeys were oddly anonymous.

But we liked them. Last year, I thought turkeys were charmless. I didn’t warm up to their eerie one-eyed stare or the way they never learned not to peck at the Levi’s tag on my jeans pocket. (Of course, I never learned to not wear Levi’s in the pen, so maybe I shouldn’t be throwing stones here.) This year’s turkeys weren’t so different, but in between the two flocks we’d had ducks, so we understood just how unpleasant poultry could be. What we found charmless last year looked more like quiet dignity this time around.

I’ll never look forward to a slaughter day (even for a flock of smelly, messy, alarmist ducks), but it makes it easier to have done enough of them that we know what to expect. It keeps the anxiety to manageable levels.

Going into this, we not only had experience, we had help. We cut a deal with our friend Christl whereby she got a turkey in return for her plucking assistance. And our friend Amanda flew in from clear across the country to take part.

The plan was to do it exactly the way we did it last year, minus the plucker Kevin made out of an old washing machine, which met a tragic, fiery end last slaughter day. We kill the turkeys by severing the blood vessels in their necks (without damaging trachea or esophagus) so they bleed out, and we had a cone set up to hold them while we did it. We had a garbage can of water heated to 160 degrees so we could scald them to loosen the feathers. Kevin set up a kind of scaffold with two hooks and a tarp underneath for plucking.

After plucking, we’d remove heads and feet and bring them into the kitchen for eviscerating. I had the table cleared and covered with a plastic cloth with a layer of newspaper on top of it, and we had the big cooler filled with ice for the finished birds.

We sharpened two knives. And then we sharpened them again. The only pain we inflict in this process – if it goes smoothly – is one cut to the neck. We want our knives sharp.

Everything did go smoothly. We killed, plucked and gutted without incident. It wasn’t cutting their throats, or sticking my hand in a their still-warm bodies to pull out their insides that knotted my stomach. It was the cries of distress from the turkey left behind as its mate was taken from the pen, never to return.

There’s a movie scene that sticks in my mind, although I can’t remember what movie it’s from (if you know, please tell me). It’s a scene where someone who I think is on the run from the law comes across a woman who lives alone in the woods. She has goats, and she isn’t afraid of the fugitive. They sit down and talk, and she has a goat standing at her feet with its head in her lap. She strokes the goat gently, and then, without interrupting the conversation, calmly cuts its throat.

That, I have always thought, is how to kill an animal.

What makes killing so significant isn’t the physical pain inflicted. It’s the awareness that there is such a thing as life, and that it is ending. Minus the awareness, it’s only the physical pain that matters. The knife stroke that takes my birds’ life is not nearly as significant as pain or distress we might cause by mistreating them.

Amanda said that taking their feeder away the day before was more difficult than actually killing them because there would be some suffering involved in twenty-four hours of hunger. Leaving a hen in distress because we’ve taken her tom away makes me unhappy, and we tried to take them in the order that minimized their pain. The actual killing, while certainly not pleasant, feels constructive. We raised these animals for meat, and we cared for them and are killing them responsibly.

Amanda was with us last year, too, but only as an observer. This year, she decided she wanted to participate. She found the prospect of killing a turkey, pulling out its feathers, cutting off its head and feet, and sticking her hand in its guts daunting, but she didn’t want to be the kind of person who shied away. And so she made herself do it – all of it.

Some time late in the afternoon, when the birds were on ice, the kitchen cleaned, she sat down for the first time in many hours. “You know,” she said to me, “it was a good day.”

And it was. It was a good day.

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She was seventeen, and her kidneys failed. For the last few days, she nested in a towel on a table on the porch, leaving it only to eat a few bites and pee on the floor. She didn’t appear to be acutely miserable, but she clearly wasn’t well. As hard as it is to put down an animal who doesn’t seem to be in pain, we preferred to do it before she got to that stage. There’s no recovery from renal failure.

She was an excellent cat, the right combination of affectionate and self-sufficient, and she had a good run. She spent her days chasing varmints, basking in the sun, and studiously ignoring the chickens. She wasn’t particularly food-oriented, but she loved popcorn and toast, and would put her dignity on the shelf to beg for them. She liked to hide behind the couch and pounce on us as we walked by. She talked a lot.

We were fond of her. She was our cat. We will miss her.

Here’s to you, cat.

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Rocky, our smallest chick, so named because she was both a barred rock and an underdog, got picked off by a hawk. She had a beak problem, either a deformity or an injury, that apparently made it tough to eat, and her development lagged behind. Still, she was growing. She was also feisty, and always gave us a hard time when we had to round up the flock.

How not to keep hawks away

The birds have been in Day Camp, an area in front of our house that we fenced off with chicken wire. We put them all out there in the morning, let them peck and scratch and run around to their hearts’ content, and return them to the brooder at night.

Last week, Kevin spotted a hawk circling overhead, apparently thinking about having chicken for lunch. To protect the birds, he put a net over their play area. Although the hawks could probably still see the chicks, we were hoping they wouldn’t have a trajectory in.

No such luck. The hawk went around and under, snatched up Rocky, and headed for the tall trees around the pond. We found some feathers around the back of the house.

That put an end to Day Camp. And, since the chicks were too big to spend 24/7 in their brooder, we implemented an Accelerated Chicken Integration Plan.

We’d planned to wait another week or so, and then sneak the chicks into the big-girl coop late at night, after the big girls had gone to bed. But a hungry hawk lent a certain urgency to our situation. Before it could come back for seconds, Kevin rounded up the rest of the chicks, corralled the five grown-up chickens, and put them all in the run.  Together.

We figured there’d be bullying and confusion and fear, but being bullied and confused and frightened beats being eaten. They’ll just have to learn to get along.

Now, if we can go a week or two with nothing dying, I’ll be grateful.

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The poults were big enough that we put them in the all-purpose poultry pen, which had been vacated by the ducks a week earlier. We’d cleaned out the house and the sheltered area under it, but the duck pool was still there, and we planned to take it out and fill in the hole. As a temporary measure, we covered it with a piece of plywood.

Minus one

The plywood wasn’t quite big enough, and one edge of the pool was exposed. Both Kevin and I, independently, saw it, understood the hazard, and made a mental note to empty the pool and fill in the hole as soon as possible.

But we didn’t do it and, yesterday, one of the poults drowned.

Anyone who keeps any kind of livestock is prepared to lose some. There are predators, there are diseases, there are accidents. But this was just rank stupidity. Terrible management. We were careless and negligent. We understood the danger and didn’t do anything about it. This bird died because we failed it.

Over the two years we’ve been doing this, I’ve accustomed myself to the cycle of life and death, and life again.  But the idea that I killed an animal by carelessness is gut-wrenching. 

Gut-wrenching.

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There’s a difference between killing a sick animal because you don’t want to it to suffer or contaminate the rest of your flock, and killing a healthy animal because it’s reached market weight and you’re going to eat it. We kill all animals with great care, but there’s less sadness when it’s a death we planned, a death that has an upside, a death that sustains our life.

Our six ducks went to the Cone of Silence this past Sunday, and I wasn’t sad. Not just because I wasn’t overly fond of the ducks, but because this is why we got them. We raised them successfully. They had, to all appearances, lived a decent and duck-appropriate life. They had that life only because they would be killed for meat.

The day went off without a hitch. Or without a major hitch, at any rate. There was the usual over- and under-scalding, the occasional perforation of bowel, and the constant misplacing of the poultry shears, but that’s all par for the course. What matters is that the ducks died as peaceful a death as we could give them, and all six of them are now chilling in the refrigerator.

This was our first experience with duck processing, though, and it was inevitable that we learned a thing or two. Here, in no particular order, are the lessons of Duck Day:

1. Ducks have more feathers than you can possibly imagine. They have big feathers and small feathers, wing feathers and tail feathers, down feathers and pin feathers. And not a single solitary one of those feathers is inclined to leave its duck of origin. Kevin rigged a beam to hang the birds from as we defeathered them, but there was no avoiding the central truth of duck processing: Plucking ducks sucks.

2. Ducks can only count to two. When their flockmates disappeared, one by one, the remaining ducks were unperturbed. They suspected nothing. There was no distress until the last duck was left alone. If you’re killing a flock, do the last two together, if you can.

Mom at work

3. Be nice to your mother. That way, she’ll be willing to help you on Duck Day, in return for a duck dinner that you probably would have made for her anyway. And, while you’re at it, be nice to your father. Although he’s too squeamish to participate, no matter what the incentive, and doesn’t even like duck, he might buy lunch.

4. Processing ducks takes longer than you think. It took us all day. Three of us went from 9:00 to 5:00, for six lousy ducks. Granted, we took a long lunch break (thanks, Dad!), but that still seems like an awfully long time.

5. Get the smokehouse built before you process the ducks. If you don’t, it becomes a race against time. The ducks are resting in the fridge, and we’d like to smoke two of them before they have to go in the freezer. As I write, the smokehouse is mostly finished, but we still need the pipe to the firebox, the door, and the racks for it to be functional. The battening and the roof shingles aren’t on either, but the smokehouse is functional without them.

There’s one more important lesson we took away, not just from processing ducks, but from raising ducks: Don’t raise ducks.

Ducks are stupid, messy, and xenophobic. They’re unable to engage with people, unpleasant to clean up after, and a bitch to pluck. They know only food, water, and fear. And each other. Although they’re definitely cute, and they ought to taste good, those are the only two pluses to weigh against a sea of minuses.

Our six Pekin ducks were an experiment, this year’s new species. And although I’m very glad to have six ducks in the refrigerator, plucked and cleaned, I’m thinking pigs are sounding better and better.

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Yesterday we sent the ducks to the Cone of Silence, and I’ll tell you all about that in the next couple of days. Today, we sent Droopy.

Droopy first got sick two months ago. She turned listless and slow. She slumped and dragged. Her tail turned down, and she looked impacted or constipated. Up until then, she had been a healthy, unremarkable, nameless chicken.

We gave her some warm baths, I did some … ahem … exploring of her innards. For a few days, there was no change, and we were ready to send her to the Cone when, one morning, she looked better. And even better the morning after that. She staged an almost complete recovery.

Almost. When I posted about her turnaround, Jen of Milkweed & Teasel, who has vast bird experience, warned that those kinds of recoveries were often followed, in short order, by relapses.

Sure enough. These last couple of days, she got worse and worse. This morning, I gave her a warm bath, and about a zillion little white things, which I assume were insect eggs (between a sixteenth and an eighth of an inch, oblong, in case there’s any entomological expertise out there) floated to the surface.

Thank you, Droopy

When Kevin came home, Droopy looked terrible and, when I told him about the bath, he decided that her time had come. I didn’t argue. She was clearly sick, and clearly suffering. 

When we went to collect her, she was under a rhododendron with several of the other chickens. As we reached in to prod her out, one of the other birds attacked her. Went right for her neck, savagely. I’ve never seen one of our birds do that to another, and it clearly meant Droopy was sick enough for the other chickens to know it.

We got her, and Kevin put her in the Cone and slit her throat. As she bled out, some kind of liquid came up out of her lungs. We didn’t think it was sensible to eat her, under the circumstances, so Kevin buried her – hopefully below exhumation level, if scavengers happen to pass by.

Back in April, when I first posted about Droopy, several of you recommended dispatching her immediately. No good can come of sick chickens, you warned. Kevin agreed with you. And all of you were right. Because I wanted to give her every chance, she had to suffer through another bout of this. And, if it was something infectious that got her, I put our other chickens at risk.

It will not happen again.

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Okay, maybe “a lot” overstates it. But when the one thing you have in common is that you’re slitting the throats of animals, it seems like more than if, say, you’re both Libras.

My turkey killing

It was, apparently, a pig roast that triggered Zuckerberg’s decision to eat only what he kills. He hosted the party, and a number of his guests told him that, “even though they loved eating pork, they really didn’t want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive.”

When I read that, my first thought was, didn’t their mothers ever tell them that when you are invited to a pig roast you don’t tell your host that the whole concept is, on some level, icky? Manners, people!

My second thought was that, if you can’t even think about the fact that your meat was once an animal, you are a class-A sissy.

“That just seemed irresponsible to me,” was what Zuckerberg thought.

Well said, Mr. Zuckerberg.

I don’t believe killing an animal is a moral prerequisite for eating one, but thinking about an animal just might be. And, really, I think that sets the bar pretty low. Acknowledge that an animal gave its life for your barbecue, and consider what kind of life an animal raised for meat ought to have.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that killing animals for meat is moral, but to be unwilling to kill an animal yourself. For most of my 48 years, that was my stance. The only reason I have now become willing is that, if I weren’t, Kevin would have to do all the dirty work, and that’s not fair. I’ve chosen a life that brings me and my food face to face. In doing so, I’ve waived my right to have someone else do my killing.

Mark Zuckerberg, if you’re reading this (ha!), I have a question for you.

Do you like duck?

We have a flock of 6 pekin ducks, scheduled to go to the Cone of Silence in the third week of June. There will be six throats that need to be slit, carefully so the esophagus and trachea are left intact and the bird bleeds out with minumum pain and distress. There will also be duck for dinner.

You’re invited.

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