Food or Friend? The moral dilemma of keeping livestock

By now I can compartmentalize with chickens. I have been raising them for multiple purposes for a few years now. I’ve created the environments suitable for incubating eggs and bringing forth life, and I’ve taken the lives of chickens for both mercy and sustenance.

I keep an assortment of laying hens for a beautiful bounty of eggs, and keep birds for no other reason than for how they look. All of them could be made into a meal for someone if needed, reason enough to keep them. But now lies a moral dilemma before me.

This guy.

A sweet gal called me up last week asking about our beef. We ended up on the topic of chickens and whether or not we process our own. She told me she had three roosters she needed to process, but there wasn’t anyone within 2 hours who would do it. These roosters ended up throwing off the rooster to hen ratio in her flock and she had been keeping them separated to keep the peace, but ultimately planned to make them into dog food. That’s just the reality of living close to the land and keeping livestock. Many of us don’t like it, even though we know it’s part of the agreement you must make when keeping these animals.

Culling. It doesn’t strictly mean death, it just means removal. This could be selling off, rehoming, placed into other pastures for a different job like pest control, but sometimes it means harvesting them. I agreed to harvest these birds for her. Then she unloaded them from her truck.

These birds didn’t look like all the other birds I harvested. You know, big fat white ones, or brown ones that all look identical to one another. They were unique and looked like the birds I keep in my backyard flock. The motley weird ones with personalities and names. “Damn it. I have to keep this rooster,” I thought. Glancing over at Eddie to see if saw me swooning.

I tried to compartmentalize the “job” I agreed to while I moved them to our truck in the handoff. He has silkie feathers, outrageous hair. I know he’s a “no good mutt” but what would his offspring look like if I let him breed with my naked neck chicken… or that other white fluffy one. Can I create another chicken that looks like he’s in a rock band?

The sweet women saw my pupils turn to heart shapes and she told me she would be more than happy to have me keep him, or rehome him, she just couldn’t harvest them herself and felt bad they were sitting penned up. She hatched them herself and they were friendly, they just didn’t have a job and needed another purpose. When we parted she said, “…just let me know, whatever you decide to do, I’m happy with it.”

“So… what should I name him?”