Having a butchering plan

We have learned that having a plan and the right equipment on butchering day really helps things go smoother than otherwise.

In particular with chickens and rabbits, due to the repetitiveness and small size. I'll speak to meat rabbits as an example here.

1-Having a chest freezer than can also be a fridge at hand. We get the combo chest units that can be both and keep one empty for the day. We get the 7CF on sale and put all the meat in on fridge mode to rest then freezer mode 48 hours later. Then we rotate the meat into the normal freezer and turn that butchering combo off until nest time. You can also just add a $20 programmable thermostat to a freezer to do the same.

2-Lots of sharp knives. My butchering limit is 10 rabbits per morning, I get a bad attitude if more than that. Having sharp knives saves a lot of time. We have an 8" butcher knife for the neck artery cut, removing the head and scoring the hips. A 7" cleaver for cleaving the remaining neck. 3 boning knives 5" and 3 paring knives 3". The multiples are identical. Depending on how I use them, I may still have to sharpen a few if I am butchering 10.

3-A rotation. We bop and bleed a rabbit. Skin, gut, hose off and remove the feet. I go get another to bop and bleed out, while we part out the first one or debone it. It becomes one constant 2 or 3 hour movement depending on quantity. We started with by making 1 small animal gambrel, we have multiple now.

4-Get the kids/spouse involved. We have the kids carry the guts to the chickens, hold the lower feet while the rabbit is still bleeding out, etc. Any help is welcome help in a large family. Large families = large quantities of food stuffs.

5-Have a good attitude. These rabbits get some time with us everyday as far as petting/rubbing and are well provided for. Even 2x a day mostly. Making the butchering day a cluster could be disrespectful to the animal and your own work. Practice thankfulness and be prepared.


What things help you to be more efficient and respectful? What are we missing?

Have you ever been irritated and not prepared for butchering day?

Here is a picture of the area. I set up a battery powered fan and pull the hose down to the sink.

It is located in between the coop/run and composting area. The other half of the counter that does not have the sink has hardware cloth instead of a solid counter top.

This is good info. My husband plans to do the butchering. He normally does the cleaning when he hunts and things like that and I cook. I suppose we could make a day of it like this. Don't know how much help I would be because I have babies in arms or hanging on me all the time. We have a 9 year old girl and she has helped clean animals that have been hunted but I am not sure she would like to help butcher the rabbits, chickens or ducks we raise. She will surely help eat them though. Unless we got into a survival situation, I think I would give her a choice. She is a big animal lover, and it is hard for her to deal with some of this, although she has come a long way in the last several years. Any tips on getting kida involved without traumatizing them?

That answer so depends on the kid. I know 4 year olds that could do it all themselves, but many more older that would be traumatized to veganism. I’d either treat it like any other chore in your house or try to Tom Sawyer them into wanting to do it.

That's good advice for sure. I think our younger kids will see this lifestyle as just normal, not knowing anything different.

Being organized has been a big help. I have made a few changes/additions to the butchering area.
A wall mounted fan, some shelves, additional buckets, kill cones, paver spots for the scalder and plucker. I also set a post and ran a beam with gambrel hook for deer.

I butchered around 50 chickens last spring and around 30 rabbits. The kids aren't quite old enough to help much and my wife is busy with what needs to happen for us to get through a day so I basically do it all myself right now. It was a "heavy" spring will all the dispatching but things are better this year due to being more organized and overall being better at butchering.

I went to the kill cones for chickens after using the chopping block on about 30 of them. It cost me too much time to have to hold the chicken over a bucket while it bleeds out verses the kill cone where I just need to be there long enough to make the cuts. I drilled a hole in the cone and cinch their legs up with a piece of paracord in case they work out during the death throws.

I was dispatching in one area, going to another for scalding and plucking and then back to the dispatch area for evisceration. Now everything is spaced out within a few steps and that helped a lot.

I tried a few evisceration methods and through trial and error, found one that works well for me and that I can be pretty fast at.

I found out through the bop and bleed rabbit dispatch method that some rabbits have harder skulls than others. They were all dispatched immediately but sometimes I broke their skulls and the bleeding out was not as effective they had a broken skull. Cervical dislocation using a piece of rebar has a very consistent result compared to bop and bleed and I have moved to that method.

So far this year, I limit myself to butchering 4-6 rabbits at a time and 8-10 chickens at a time. For me, that has improved my overall attitude and care when processing.

Quail are actually very enjoyable to process and basically process just like a chicken except much faster.

Abigail M Johnson wrote:Any tips on getting kida involved without traumatizing them?

My kids have a natural interest in what I am doing so they usually watch and I let them "help". After seeing the process a few times, they think it is normal. It takes time to make time they say.

My oldest daughter was bothered initially seeing the deer, chickens, rabbits being processed but she is not bothered now. I talked to her about the options and she told me she "likes meat too much to quit". She went through every animal and decided she like to eat them all so it was a process we had to work through. I am unsure if that is normative or not but most are so young that this is just a fact of life.

Maybe I missed this though having something to wrap the meat in would help.

Maybe an assembly line type affair.

One person lays the paper out.

Another person Puts the meat on the paper and another persom folds and seals the wrap.

Lastly, someone to put the meat to chill or freeze ...