DIY Kill Cone alternative part 2
Thank you Darren and Jake for the
comments on our DIY
Kill Cone alternative.
I always hold the head of
each bird until it bleeds out, but some chickens have a lot of fight
and wiggle their way free and back up in the bucket.
A few pieces of a 2x4
attached to the inside of the bucket with drywall screws decreases
movement while the chicken is in the bucket and seems like it would
prevent a bird from getting all the way out if you lost hold of its
head.
Jake uses a traffic cone,
which I bet would work better than a bucket if you can find one and
figure out an easy way to mount it at a comfortable height.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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That looks like a good improvement to the bucket idea.
I have to say, I've been tempted to swipe a traffic cone from the side of the road on more than one occasion :-). The best mounting I saw was a pair of parallel 2x4's, with the square bases of the cones screwed to the tops of them. I think there were about 4 cones in the row.
I think it's really interesting how common the kill cone is in America. Here in Finland it's illegal to bleed out an animal without stunning it first. Chickens are killed by decapitation, larger animals are stunned with a bolt pistol and then bled.
In my opinion it seems to be a lot more work in bleeding a chicken than to decapitate it, why is it so popular over there? The heart continues pumping for some time even after decapitation so it can't be so that the meat would spoil if the bird isn't bled out, and a swift blow with an ax or a billhook just seems so much easier.