butchering a chicken - bleeding out

2 Responses to "butchering a chicken - bleeding out"

Vicki says:

October 9, 2025 at 12:35 pm

Very organized, thank you. The only thing I would like to do different is to use a “slaughter cone”. Do you have comments on this? I will be slaughtering medium size breed ducks.

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1. Lisa Lynn says:
  
  October 9, 2025 at 1:37 pm
  
  Hi Vicki,
  A slaughtering cone, or killing cone, is a nice tool to have on hand if you will be butchering often. I have only used a killing cone at a friend’s house. He raised the chickens and we came and butchered our birds at his farm…back before we moved to a agricultural property.
  
  His homemade killing cone was made out of sheet metal that he cut and shaped into a cone. It worked pretty good. However, he didn’t fold the edges, or cover them with anything, leaving a sharp metal edge. I cut my arm open on the raw edge and didn’t have any antiseptic with me. So I washed up with soap and used some tape to hold the cut shut until I was done butchering and could go home and clean it. Moral of the story is this…if you make your own homemade killing cone out of sheet metal, you should either fold the edges or cover them with something, like oh maybe duct tape, just to make sure you don’t slice your own flesh open.
  
  My only other observation about the killing cone was that some of the chickens got up enough ‘flutter power’ to flop out of the killing cone in their death throes. Not the end of the world (for us, maybe for the chicken)…but the meat can get bruised in the process.
  
  A killing cone is designed to hold the chicken upside down while you nick the arteries on either side of the neck to bleed it to death. I have dispatched them this way, and it works. But I felt better about ending their lives quickly. This is completely up to you. If you choose to kill your birds this way…they do die fairly quickly and I don’t think it is a horrible end. I just like chopping their heads off in one fell swoop and getting it over with instantaneously. Putting them in a feed bag with their head through a hole allows me to hold them pretty still while I decapitate them.
  
  Hope this isn’t too much info! Thanks for stopping by and best wishes with your butchering!
  
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