Like a Chicken with its Head Cut Off

Until August 10 I had never intentionally killed a vertebrate. I have remorselessly killed many insects. While I respect their ecological niches, if any chance exists they might crawl on me, I want them dead immediately. However, I feel more compassion toward vertebrates. They have highly developed nervous systems capable of experiencing intense pain, and I hesitate to cause them any.

Unfortunately, this approach has long been in conflict with my diet. I love meat. On the occasions I have opted for meatless meals, I always find myself envying my dining partner’s steak. Living in the US, it was easy to reconcile a cheeseburger with my distaste for gore. I understood mentally that meat processing involved carnage and pain. However, I didn’t understand it emotionally. When strolling along the aisles of a typical American grocery store, the meat is hardly recognizable as once belonging to an actual animal. The killing took place somewhere remote, and the result appears sterile. My attitude toward the individual animals was equally remote.

This distance ended abruptly during our Cultural Foods Day on August 10. It began with the delivery of two goats to our training center. Their lower bodies were restrained in bags, but they appeared calm. Undeterred by the prospect of eating these animals, the other trainees and I set about becoming attached to them. We petted, named, and sincerely tried to comfort them. I frantically tried to find an apple to feed them. I wanted them to enjoy a final dessert, but one of my Namibian coworkers stopped me. He said we shouldn’t feed them so soon before slaughter.

We had only two goats, and the Americans and the Namibians mutually agreed slaughtering a large animal was best left to the locals. We felt slightly more confident with chickens. I emphasize “slightly.” Someone placed a box containing several scrawny chickens in the corner of the yard and called for a few volunteers to kill them. I couldn’t bring myself to do the deed initially. I opted to hold the chicken while another trainee cut off the head with a pocketknife. The chicken was remarkably calm until its head was no longer attached, then the body convulsed wildly, and I had to muster all my self control to keep it pinned to the ground. Later, one of the other chickens freed itself post-decapitation and energetically illustrated the idiom “jumping around like a chicken with its head cut off.” They really do hop and flap. It’s simultaneously unnerving and funny.

I eventually marshaled the courage to slaughter a chicken. One of my coworkers pinned down the body and I pulled its neck taut. As I put the knife to it, I lost a bit of my nerve and closed my eyes, which—in hindsight—was a bad idea given the close proximity of my fingers. Regardless, I still felt the knife saw through feather and sinew and bone. When I did open my eyes, I was holding the chicken’s head in my left hand, and the beak was soundlessly opening and closing.

I was surprised by my reaction during the first few hours afterward. I was fascinated with everything inside the chicken. Eggs developing inside a chicken look like an alien embryo station. The shell doesn’t grow until late in the process, so dozens of exposed yolks grow in a spiral pattern along some sort of placenta-like organ.

Along with this anatomical fascination, I temporarily developed a macabre sense of humor. I would move the lifeless beaks and narrate little puppet shows for my co-trainees who, being accommodating souls, would giggle uncomfortably. I have included a picture below of me playing with a goat head as evidence of this phenomenon.

Since then multiple people have told me about faster, cleaner, and more humane ways to kill a chicken. I do not plan to implement them anytime soon. Not because I plan to maim chickens willy nilly, but because I don’t plan to kill anything in the near future. I still eat chicken. I still feel conflicted about it. Slaughtering a chicken did little to resolve my moral ambivalence toward eating one. I alternate between feeling fine about the experience and feeling disgusted. However, meat is an integral part of Namibian cuisine and is almost impossible to avoid. I may reconsider my dietary decision to eat meat when I return to the States. However, for the next two years I will continue to enjoy my KFC, because, yes, KFC is in Namibia.