The Chicken Grinding Trilogy

T-1 day

So my bosses have been telling me about this day for a bit, where we go and grind chicken up for the dogs. We have to go to a Hutterite farm and pick up a couple thousand dead chickens and then take them to some other guy’s farm and grind them up for dog food, so it should be fun.

Day 1

Oh my god. Ok so that was the most disgusting thing I have ever done in my life. Hands down. What happened, ok, we got up at 5:30 in the morning to feed the dogs and ended up leaving around 7:00. We got to the Hutterite farm at maybe 9:30. We drive around to the back of the barns and Don goes “there they are” so I look and there’s all these chickens on the ground but they’re covered in snow so you can just see their feet sticking up in the air. We just start grabbing chickens and throwing them into the trailer.

We were there for two hours, and I picked up 1572 chickens. I know because I had to count them.

Between our trailer and this other guy named Kenny’s trailer we got 5500 chickens. On to the grinding.

We had to drive the long way back to Aaron’s place (the guy with the grinder) because the roads were so bad getting there. I’m not sure what time we got there, maybe 2ish. Aaron had been at the Hutterite farm before us and was almost done grinding his chickens. So we started loading buckets onto his trailer while we waited. Then it was our turn.

Ok so Don was in the trailer putting chickens through the grinder and me, Faye (Don’s wife) and Doris (their friend) were on the ground trying to develop a system of loading buckets and moving them. After standing around for a bit I ended up being the one to pack down the meat into the buckets. So I was sitting there, on a block of wood, wearing rubber gloves, in below freezing weather, for something like two hours. This was literally the hardest thing I’ve physically ever done.

So aside from my knees hurting and my hands being freezing cold, it smells god awful. Like, apparently the past two times that they’ve done this its’ been around 10 degrees instead of -5 but Don says he’s never noticed a smell. Now if you know me you know that I have been blessed with a terrible sense of smell. My blessing did not help me today. When all sorts of chicken bits are being mashed together, it smells, strongly.

Next, it gets everywhere. Aaron built a little cover to guide the meat down to the buckets and whatever, but when you’re sitting right in front of it that does not matter. I got covered in chicken guts.

Also, because they’re laying hens, sometimes there are eggs. Once, when I was leaning over to scoop up some of the meat that missed the bucket, one came flying at my head, and dripped down into my face.

So yeah, in addition to all my other tribulations, I got egged in the face by a dead chicken.

After the aforementioned two hours, there was a pause and I was finally able to stand up. My knees hurt like hell, I had to pee, and I was freezing cold. When we got there, Faye had gone to pee behind the hay bales, because Aaron’s house was a field away from where the grinder was. At this point I was probably a little shell-shocked (ha ha) and just in the mindset of “I need like a minute, and then maybe I’ll be ok again”. So I walked across the field (I had to hop two fences) to Aaron’s place. Thankfully he was there and directed me on where to take my slimy, bloody gear off and where the bathroom was. The bathroom was immaculate and even had a shower. I was incredibly tempted for a minute since there was still egg in my hair but figured people would notice my absence. When I got back Kenny was there and they had already started on his trailer. Faye was doing my job but she’s short so she could do it standing and god know I wasn’t asking for it back. I ended up helping to pass chickens to Don from the trailer. Everything was running smoothly for a bit except the daylight was waning and then all of a sudden we ran out of buckets, with about 500 chickens still left. No one really minded since we didn’t want to do this in the dark. So we packed up approximately 150 buckets into Kenny’s trailer and went home. Kenny would buy more buckets and we’d just go back again tomorrow.

Day Two

We started at normal time, up at 8:30, then eat breakfast, and feed the dogs. Then Don put chains on the ATVs and I got to drive them around the block to test them out. Normal stuff, we were supposed to meet Kenny at 2:00 so we left around 1:00.

We get there and we have to wait for Kenny, when he shows up we go back to grinding chickens. I get to ferry them from the trailer again. Today its’ just me, Don, Kenny, and Rob (their friend).

A couple of things about picking up chickens, and please dear god DO NOT read this if you are eating.

So picking up chickens is especially unpleasant. Kenny’s got a closed in trailer so it smells, bad. Not as bad as sitting in front of the grinder but still not good. The chickens are cold and wet from being snowed on and just... just gross.

A couple of things I learned about handling dead chickens.

1. The best place to grab them is their feet, the neck also works but feet are better. Grabbing chickens from the ground was easy but when they’re all in a pile they settle a bit and it can be hard to pull them out.  
2.  Do not pull them out, grab from the top of the pile and work your way down. I repeat do not pull on the chickens that are stuck in the pile.
3.  If you have to pull out the chickens pull by their feet. If you pull by their heads, there are three possible outcomes, one, everything goes ok and the chicken comes out of the pile, two, you pull the chickens head off, or three, you accidentally crush the chickens’ head in your hand.
4.  If you pick up a chicken head that is not attached to a body, it is OK to freak out, as long as you do so quietly and continue working.
5.  DO NOT look into their eyes. You’ll regret it, immediately.

OK, you can start eating again (unless you never stopped you monster).

After another hour or so of grinding chickens, all of a sudden, we ran out of buckets. Again, with maybe another ~ 150 chickens still in the pile. Rob told Kenny he could just cut up the rest of the chickens by hand, and then we started putting the buckets into the trailer. About 100 buckets in our trailer and maybe 250 in Kenny’s. And there's still about 100 buckets left. Kenny says he’ll pick them up tomorrow. After that was done Rob left, and we drove to Kenny’s to unload the buckets. Kenny and Don have a deal where he can use Kenny’s walk in freezer to store meat. So we get to Kenny’s after about an hour of driving.

He’s got an old hunting camp building set up on his property and the freezer is in the back. There’s a doorway about two feet off the ground with no door that we walk through. The ground is slippery with snow and soft and muddy so we can’t get the trailers lined up with the door, just get them close. The freezer is through one room, up a step, and through another room near the back. You can see but its’ dark, there’s dirt on the floor but it’s slippery and muddy. Nearer to the freezer there’s blood on the floor and on some buckets just sitting out. It smells like that artificial cold smell that comes with freezers, and also death. Definitely the sort of place I could see someone storing my lifeless corpse.

We start unloading our trailer. Its open at the top and the back doesn’t come out so you have to swing the buckets over the railing and onto the floor. Then we carry them over to where Kenny is trying to figure out how to stack them in the freezer. About a third of them have lids, the rest are open. My right shoulder starts to hurt after a while and I’m hungry. After what feels like an hour we’re done with our trailer so we get a bathroom and snack break while Kenny moves his over. Don carries the buckets over to the doorway and lifts them up. Then I slid them across the floor and carry them the extra few meters over to where Kenny stacks them up.

So yesterday I said that kneeling by the grinder was physically the hardest thing I ever had to do. That was until today. My shoulder killed, my forearms started to hurt and I felt like I was going to throw up. Like, I’m not a big runner but you know that feeling when you’re trying to run steady for a long ways and then you get that gross taste in your mouth there's too much saliva and also too much information but you know? That’s what I felt like, from lifting things, I mean I’ve gotten tired before but god never like this. After Don moved to the front of the trailer we started a count down. Thirty more buckets, eleven, nine. Four more trips. Done. I honestly felt like I wouldn't mind being gruesomely murdered. 

Don and Kenny go look in the freezer. There’s and front and a back room and the back room is completely full, and there’s about 30 buckets in the front room. Kenny asks Don if he’d be willing to go back with him tomorrow to finish grinding the chickens if he got more buckets. He says feeding dogs’ whole chickens is “some northwest territories bullshit”. Don says sure. It takes us two hours to drive home, we get back around 8:30. And we get to go back again tomorrow.

Day Three

The morning starts off pretty normal. Its’ been two days without running dogs so we run two teams that morning. I get to drive after about halfway. The second team looks better than the first except Erie is in lead and he’s a little unfocused. We feed the dogs and then load up some meat into the truck to sell to Kenny. They’re bags of beef that each weigh between 30-40 lbs. We count up 1239 lbs. The truck gets stuck getting out of the yard. We have to unload all the meat and Don gets out the dog truck to pull out the pickup. Then we load the meat back into the truck. This ordeal takes about half an hour. After lunch we leave to meet Kenny for 3:00. We get there and load 24 buckets into the trailer and move the meat out of the truck bed to make room for some other equipment. Kenny shows up at 4:30. Just me, Don, and Kenny. We finish grinding the rest of the chickens. They figured the total number of buckets was about 510. We help Kenny load the rest of the buckets into his trailer and then move the meat into the front. Kenny and Don chat for about half an hour while I sit in the truck nearby and play games on my phone. We get home around 6:30 and unload the buckets into Don’s freezers. I mentally cheer after putting down the last bucket. I am so tired of lifting buckets. My shoulder hurts, my forearms hurt and my legs are bruised from buckets hitting the sides of my knees. I never want to see another bucket.

So I go pick up the water buckets and water the dogs. Then we go inside and I shower, and finally get to wash all the dead chicken off my clothes. And so chicken grinding is finally done. Until next spring.
                      

                     Where I sat on day one.                               Grinder set up.                              A couple of the buckets.