SO AT LEAST THE NAZIS HAD THAT GOING FOR THEM:

'Chicken killing day' (Virginia Phillips, 6/07/07, Pittsburgh Gazette)

Mildred's Daughters Farm has laying hens that produce eggs for its community-supported agriculture subscribers. Barb also had peeps for children to observe. The peeps matured, some into roosters.

Barb noted a few "barebacks" among her layers, a sign that they'd been mounted so enthusiastically they'd lost plumage. The roosters' hanky-panky with the hens caused problems with the eggs. Fertilized eggs have red blood spots in the yolk; this is the fetal chick, which people do not like to see. (Hens without roosters lay unfertilized eggs, the kind we normally eat.). Something drastic and permanent had to happen to the roosters.

Randa was off baby-sitting grandchildren in Maui, so Barb was on her own. A daughter of rural Pennsylvania, she reviewed her options. Ax? Hers was not sharp enough. Shoot them? "Not in the city, and I'm not that good an aim."

Wring their necks? Not easy to contemplate, harder to do. But she steeled herself, and after a strenuous effort she had one limp bird lying on the ground.

Then the rooster got back up. She finished the job with hammer blows to the head. The whole thing made her ill. She figured it was retribution.

She posted a request for "help with chicken processing" on a sustainable farming forum. She got no advice, only mockery for using the euphemistic word, "processing."

In February at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture conference in State College, she said to Sandra, "I really need to learn how to do this."

Thus "chicken killing day" got its name.

Our hostess proposed to teach us the way she'd learned -- actually, taught herself from poultry books. In her view, it's the quickest, least painful method for bird and executioner.

"Why don't you come, too," Sandra had said to me and Susan Barclay.

Susan and I were at the PASA conference representing Slow Food Pittsburgh, a sustainable food advocacy group that sponsors the Farmers@firehouse mostly organic farm market in the Strip. We recruit local meat and poultry producers for the market and for Slow Food's Laptop Butchershop, an e-mail-ordering program connecting people with producers of organic or carefully raised protein.

I didn't reflect. I knew I needed this experience. Susan signed on too but, when killing day came, was sidelined by flu.

There were jokes about Haitian voodoo rites. If this sounds like neopagan sisterhood, consider that four of the group are organic farmers. Two have day jobs working with life and death in hospitals.

We'd all read journalist Michael Pollan's best-seller "The Omnivore's Dilemma," the tale of food's journey to our plates. The author, who'd never hunted or killed anything before in his life, graphically details shooting and dressing a wild boar for a meal.

To have read this episode is to be struck by how distanced we are from the animals we eat, particularly from their deaths.

For me death was particularly remote. I've never watched a life ebb. Humans dear to me died alone in hospitals; dying pets were "euthanized," out of my sight.

The second part: I eat lots of meat (including chicken, but I try to buy local, or at least the kind that is hormone- and antibiotic-free). I work on projects encouraging others to eat meat. I therefore must support taking the lives of food animals. Mustn't I? I realized that I needed to be at the killing, needed to have taken the life, to know. Most important, I trusted these women ... and trusted our motives.

"When you think of the chickens, probably thousands, we've been associated with," Randa mused, "chicken every week, broth, soup..."

The June issue of Gourmet's "A View to Kill" explores the life and death of "the industrial chicken." NPR's Daniel Zwerdling reports that Americans eat nine billion chickens a year, almost 10 times the number they consumed in 1950. Such numbers require megafarms and giant processing plants. Grisly reporting of the way the "industrial chicken" dies -- grabbed, crated, dumped, yanked upside down, shackled, rendered unconscious (not always) and decapitated (not always) by a whirling blade, before landing in a scalding bath -- raises the author's question: Is there a better way for the birds to meet their end?

The Norwegians think they have a solution. Birds, handled gently and still "nestled in their crates," are essentially killed in a gas chamber. The method is called Controlled Atmosphere Killing. Vets allege chickens thus dispatched die unconscious and without pain. Petitioned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, one restaurant giant, Burger King, has announced it will favor suppliers adopting the procedure. Leading animal researchers, including noted scientist Temple Grandin, say the gas system is the "most stress-free, humane method of killing poultry yet developed."