Am I More Than One Chicken Away from Skinning a Cat?

The answer to that question, thankfully, is no. I’m able to remain reasonably secure in the hierarchy of human --> ape --> dog --> cat --> chicken --> rat --> slug --> etc. It is, to an extent, an arbitrary hierarchy, placing animals that humans want as pets above others who may be more advanced, but it is also a logical one. A slug is worth less than a dog, and a dog is worth less than a human no matter how you slice it. Each plays its role, but one is worth more and one is worth less.

I mention all this because I ripped the head off a chicken on Saturday. With a butcher’s knife. I held its head taut and sliced intently so it would be over quickly, but that did little to prevent the initial blood spurt, the period during which its head and body operated independently, or the final, neverending dissection.

Killing the animal was the scariest part. Dissecting it was the most disturbing. I was standing there, hands in lukewarm water, plucking feathers, watching its head do circles round the sink. This was the same annoying little rooster who’d run through the amaranth garden and woken me at 6am every day. And now I was watching its severed head do circles round the sink.

The reason I chose to do this in the first place when my family asked is that I eat chicken. If I eat chicken, I thought, I have to be able to kill a chicken. As bad and awkward as I felt doing it, I would have felt worse not doing it and continuing to eat chicken all the time in every conceivable form. Now that I’ve done it, I can at least eat without feeling like a hypocrite. And I can eat knowing I’m following evolution: more dominant species feed on less dominant species across the board. Provided you don’t torture or waste the animal, it’s not cruelty, just nature.

The one thing I’m having trouble getting over, though, is the chicken’s skin. When wet, in the sink, it feels exactly like that of a dog or a cat. Which is kind of disturbing because we have a dog and a cat in our yard here that are almost exactly the same size. I know I could get desensitized to killing and skinning chickens. What’s to say I couldn’t get used to doing the same thing to dogs and cats? For now, I know, the hierarchy, but it’s an unsettling line to draw.