I slaughtered a chicken!

So one of the things I wanted to do while I was here in Africa was to slaughter a chicken. I don't know why but I figured I love chicken why not get the whole process and where better place than Africa?!

Live chickens are sold in town at the market and my friend McKenna who is a nurse at the hospital is a pro at chicken slaughtering so she was happy and willing to teach me. So we bought one yesterday and stuck it in the pantry overnight. Yes thats right, in the kitchen cabinet.

This is the chicken I affectionately named "CANES" after my favorite Chicken Finger place in Columbus. As an afterthought, maybe naming the chicken I was soon to kill was a bad idea.

Isn't it cute? I was maybe sorta petrified of it. It was clearly scared, probably knowing it was going to die. It would squawk and squirm and it did not like when I held its wings down. Here is the last pre-death picture of Mary and I holding the chicken. (Well, I wasn't actually holding it, but petting it)

Here is the video of us killing it. I thought I was either going to faint or throw up but I didn't! I held on to him very tightly but passed on the original idea for me to stand on the chicken with my feet and cut at the neck. Instead I just held on really tightly. It was awfully bloody.

I didn't realize what a process it was to eat a chicken. However once we cut off its head, we put it in some boiling water and then started to de-feather it. Once it was naked we started to cut it apart, throwing all the parts we dont eat away. However in Africa, they eat the heart, the liver, the gizzard, and the testes. Gross right? Here are some pictures of that process:

 

All these pictures to say that after cooking the chicken, I couldn't bare to eat it. We cooked it on the stove with some onions and seasoning and it just didn't taste like Canes chicken. All I could think about were cutting off the head, ripping out the heart and the liver and all the blood. Yuck. I think this was my first and last chicken slaughtering experience!