The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [119]
After I had loaded and he had slaughtered several batches, Daniel offered me his knife. He showed me how to hold the chicken’s little head in a V between my thumb and forefinger, how to turn it to expose the artery and avoid the windpipe, and how to slice down toward you at a spot just beneath the skull. Since I am left-handed, every step had to be reverse engineered, which tangled us in an excruciating moment of delay. I looked into the black eye of the chicken and, thankfully, saw nothing, not a flicker of fear. Holding his head in my right hand, I drew the knife down the left side of the chicken’s neck. I worried about not cutting hard enough, which would have prolonged the bird’s suffering, but needn’t have: The blade was sharp and sliced easily through the white feathers covering the bird’s neck, which promptly blossomed a brilliant red. Before I could let go of the bird’s suddenly limp head my hand was painted in a gush of warm blood. Somehow, an errant droplet spattered the lens of my glasses, leaving a tiny, fogged red blot in my field of vision for the rest of the morning. Daniel voiced his approval of my technique and, noticing the drop of blood on my glasses, offered one last bit of advice: “The first rule of chicken killing is that if you ever feel anything on your lip, you don’t want to lick it off.” Daniel smiled. He’s been killing chickens since he was ten years old and doesn’t seem to mind it.
Daniel gestured toward the next cone; I guess I wasn’t done. In the end I personally killed a dozen or so chickens before moving on to try another station. I got fairly good at it, though once or twice I sliced too deeply, nearly severing a whole head. After a while the rhythm of the work took over from my misgivings, and I could kill without a thought to anything but my technique. I wasn’t at it long enough for slaughtering chickens to become routine, but the work did begin to feel mechanical, and that feeling, perhaps more than any other, was disconcerting: how quickly you can get used to anything, especially when the people around you think nothing of it. In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.
When Daniel and I got ahead of the scalder, which could accommodate only a few birds at a time, I stepped away from the killing area for a break. Joel clapped me on the back for having taken my turn at the killing cones. I told him killing chickens wasn’t something I would want to do every day.
“Nobody should,” Joel said. “That’s why in the Bible the priests drew lots to determine who would conduct the ritual slaughter, and they rotated the job every month. Slaughter is dehumanizing work if you have to do it every day.” Temple Grandin, the animal-handling expert who’s helped design many slaughterhouses, has written that it is not uncommon for full-time slaughterhouse workers to become sadistic. “Processing but a few days a month means we can actually think about what we’re doing,” Joel said, “and be as careful and humane as possible.”
I’d had enough of the killing station, so after my break I moved down the line. Once the birds were bled out and dead, Daniel handed them, by their feet, to Galen, who dropped