There Once (briefly) was an Ugly Duckling

Following on from the previous post about rearing chickens for meat, today I move onto ducks.

We breed our own Muscovy Ducks for meat (which are actually closer to geese than ducks), hatching the eggs under broody hens. It keeps the hens happy. The ducklings grow up with their adoptive mum and live their life in with the chickens, free-ranging over the smallholding. We make no effort to grow them especially fast, but by about four months old they are big enough to eat. A male Muscovy has a deceptively good amount of meat on it, quite easily doing six meals.

One of the Muscovy girls

We occasionally use a couple of 

Muscovy eggs to keep a broody hen happy.

These two were born on 21st July. 

Six Muscovy ducklings under the care of the three Silkie hens

This year we are trying something quite different. We came upon the chance to purchase some meat strain Pekin ducks. This was when we extended the opportunity to the rest of our smallholders club and ended up with 174 ducklings in a stable for a brief time.

We kept twenty of the ducklings for ourselves. Six will be kept as egg layers, the rest are for meat. Their growth rate has been quite astonishing. They came to us at 10-12 days old and we kept them safely in a stable until they were four weeks old. Their first day out saw them diving head first into a rather green pond, but the subsequent preening brought their soft white breast feathers through. Suddenly they started to look like ducks rather than ducklings.

That was only a week ago but the ducks are growing daily. They should taste nice as they have found the raspberries! Luckily there are plenty growing beyond their reach.

Anyhow, the best way to illustrate their rapid growth is to leave you with a series of dated pictures.

23rd June 10-12 days old

23rd June 10-12 days old

5th July 22-24 days old

9th July 4 weeks old

13th July 4 weeks 4 days

16th July 5 weeks old

20th July 5 weeks 4 days

22nd July 6 weeks old

It's a short life for a meat chicken

This seems a long time ago now

Six months does not seem a long time for a table bird to live before it makes the journey into the freezer. Before I became a smallholder I definitely would have questioned why a bird couldn't enjoy a longer life before that life was taken for our culinary pleasure.
That was until I finally plucked up the courage to dispatch some of our older cockerels. They were tough as boot leather!
Add to that the fact that cockerels if let grow too long will become aggressive to each other and ungentlemanly to the hens.

Suddenly a touch of reality strikes home. These birds are not pets. They will live for six months and that's it. So the best I can do is give them a good life.

Three Ixworths and a Muscovy duck

Until this year our meat birds have been Ixworth chickens, a traditional breed, and Muscovy ducks. We didn't feed them any different to the other birds, for they all lived together. The Muscovies grew to a good size but the Ixworths were mostly leg with slithers for breasts.

The Ixworth trio when we had them.

Smart birds, but not a lot of breast.

But it gets more complicated. Six month old birds would be considered slow-grown. Commercial hens will be ready in 6 weeks. Over the years this age has come down dramatically. At the same time slaughter weight has risen equally dramatically. Since the 1940s, slaughter weight has doubled while slaughter age has halved.

Graph taken from Compassion in World Farming document

Now there is so much that I find abhorrent about intensive poultry farming. But the age of the birds is, as I have discovered, not quite so straightforward. The birds probably have no expectations of how long they will live, but would certainly prefer to have space and freedom while they are alive.

We recently reared some chicks taken out of a highly intensive system. Their rate of growth was astonishing, as was their ability to eat and drink vast quantities. But at least these birds were able to live the life of a truly free range chicken until they reached slaughter weight. I would genuinely say that it wasn't overly cruel, though they were abnormally big-breasted and by ten weeks old some were quite waddly. None went off their legs, though they would have if left to grow even heavier. A couple spent some time apparently gasping as they got older. Maybe this was indicative of heart problems or being just too big and misshapen.

Anyway, my conclusion was that provided they were slaughtered before they got too heavy, although their life would be short we could offer them a reasonable life. But I did feel that genetic 'improvement' had gone a little too far.

Our next meat birds, the ones we have just slaughtered, came to us as one day old commercial broiler chicks. They come through a friend and don't even have a breed name. In fact they are a bit of a mish-mash. Most pure white with thick yellow legs and bright red combs, but some clearly mixed with traditional brown hens and a couple specked with rogue black feathers.
They grew much quicker than I had anticipated and took me unawares as they suddenly reached a good weight. I had to hurriedly take them off growers pellets and put them onto finishers (for growers pellets contain medication so require a withdrawal period). They were ready for slaughter at 12 weeks or 84 days. I was very happy with these birds. They did not seem out of proportion. They were healthy birds, it's just that they grew much more quickly than the traditional breeds we had previously tried to rear for meat.

And so I feel we have found our meat chickens. Their short life is nevertheless a good one, far removed from most of their cousins in intensive systems (and I include minimum standard so-called free-range in that).
There are some big benefits to them having a short life too. Feed costs are lower, there is less demand on housing and the ground can be rested more. But there are limits.
The European organic standard gives a minimum slaughter age of 81 days, which I would say is about right for today's fast growing birds. Anything which reaches table weight considerably before that is probably too genetically manipulated to have a comfortable life, not to mention the conditions it is kept in to maximise profit and the expense of welfare and taste.

Keeping Chickens for Meat

29th March 2018
I am keeping a diary of the progress of Ewe 0004 and her lamb, but I am going to publish it all at once when I know what the outcome will be. As you can tell, we still have her but her future is unclear.

For now, meat chickens.

Ixworths
We have a trio of Ixworth chickens from which we have been hatching eggs for the last couple of years. We have a conveyor belt going, 18 eggs into the incubator, from which typically 12 have been hatching. We rear them for the first four weeks indoors in an old hamster cage under an electric hen, a heat pad under which the chicks can take shelter.
After four weeks, the next batch of eggs are hatching and need the electric hen. So they go into the garage in a brooder ring, a giant Correx circle. Heat comes from an overhead heat lamp.
When they are ready, they go down to the main chicken pen, but in their own small compound until the other chickens have got used to them and they are big enough to go free range.

This has been pretty successful for the last couple of years, but to be honest we have been getting a lot more leg meat than breast. Now I like legs, but I like a bit of breast too!

This left us in a quandary. Perhaps the only way to get a bird with a decent breast is to be cruel and raise something that is so inbred that it has heart problems and can't stand on its own two legs.
If this were the case, then maybe we should accept the Ixworths as the best option or stick to Muscovy ducks for meat instead.

Industrial Chickens
I refuse to call these anything else. Chicken production is not farming, it is an industrial process and it is not pretty.
Four months ago we took on a dozen chicks which had come from a unit. These birds are bought in as day olds and reared 50000 at a time until about four weeks old, then they go off somewhere else to be further fattened up. But they are not destined for roast chickens, they are for processing. They are given as much food and water as possible and as little exercise as possible. High mortality is an accepted part of this.

The birds we got did not profit the unit they came from. They were taken into a school to show the children and then could not go back into the unit because of biosecurity.
I was curious as to how they would fare if reared alongside our other free range chickens.
They are now 18 weeks old and getting big. So far there has been nothing cruel about keeping them. Yes, they eat a lot and drink a lot, but as long as they are encouraged to roam and look for their food then they don't just sit there. They have legs like tree trunks and are clearly very big-breasted. Their growth has been much quicker than the Ixworths too.
In fact, they look ready to go now. If they get much heavier they do look like they might struggle, so we will probably cull a couple of them quite soon and see just how much meat is hiding under those feathers.

'Commercial' chickens
With our industrial chickens almost ready to go in the freezer and with spring upon us (though you wouldn't know it), we needed to think about 2018's plan for meat chickens.
Friends of ours have been going through a similar process of trying to find the right meat birds and each year buy in day old chicks. These are of no specific breed, but instead have a number assigned to their strain.
Our friends have been happy with these 'commercial' chickens so far, so we asked them to get some in for us this year.
And so today they arrived. Here they are.

For the next four weeks we will have a noisy and occasionally smelly front hallway.

Valentine's Day Massacre

Wednesday 14th February 2018
Valentine's Day
What more romantic activity for Valentine's Day can there be than killing and plucking five Muscovy Ducks!

Dispatch complete, now just hanging around waiting to be plucked.

These were this year's birds which survived the last cull as they had a bit more growing to do. I wasn't looking forward to the job, as ducks are the most difficult to dispatch. They have strong necks and a strong will to live!

The weather was pretty foul again. A strong southerly wind at this time of year does not bring warm winds. We caught the ducks one at a time while they were still in their houses and the dispatch went very smoothly indeed, which was a relief.

We took a break while the birds hung around for a bit. This lets the blood drain into the neck cavity. Then it was time for plucking. Sue heated up a large cauldron of hot water and dipped each bird for 220 seconds at 163 degrees F. This proved perfect for loosening the feathers without damaging the skin. Ducks need a lot more soaking time to penetrate the three layers of feathers. They are after all designed to keep out water!

We managed to get five ducks plucked remarkable quickly, in half the time we usually take. We must be getting good at this now. It only took just over an hour for five.

Plucked in record time. As we will be jointed them rather than roasting whole,

some bits can be left unplucked.

Boris gets a shock
With no change in the weather, we huddled up in the warm house. Late afternoon I went to feed the chickens and collect eggs. Seven eggs today which is an upturn.
Then a quick yomp around the perimeter walk with the dogs. It was on the way back that Boris and Arthur raced ahead and not long after this I heard a yelp and saw Boris heading off toward the house. The strong winds had blown some dead weed stems across the path and Boris had come into contact with the electric fence as he skirted round them. Arthur had a very close call too.
Boris spent the next couple of hours literally in shock, his back legs shaking and panting. We were worried for him, but he eventually calmed down after receiving huge doses of attention.
Our dogs are lovely, but they are not the bravest.

A New Year Clear Out

Saturday 30th December 2017
Poultry thinning
The Muscovy ducks are so big now that, despite recently waving goodbye to four of them, there is barely room in the poultry houses at night. They are eating me out of house and home too. They are now 20 weeks old, they have had a good life, but it is time for them to go.
The final batch of Ixworth chickens which we breed and raise for meat are going too. Ideally they would have grown a little more, but we really need to thin down our stock levels for winter.

So today was operation catch. We tried to take them out of their houses in the morning, but several escaped past us. Most were successfully transferred up to the stables though and the last few we caught when they went to bed in the evening.

Tomorrow we are demonstrating how to dispatch and process the chickens and Muscovy ducks (and probably a turkey too). When we began smallholding we really didn't know how to do these things and there is only so much you can learn from YouTube. None of the smallholders in Fenland Smallholders Club (FSC) seemed confident enough to demonstrate, though they should all know how to humanely dispatch a chicken as you never know when you will need to do this.

In the end it was Mick from Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group (CSSG) who showed us 'the broomstick method'. (Don't worry, it does not involve chasing a bird around and clobbering it with a broom handle!)
Anyway, we were very grateful to Mick for sharing his experience. It turns out he used to be active in FSC before a rift and that it was he who had previously shown many of our club members how to do the deed. What a shame they weren't so willing to share their knowledge with the newest batch of novices.

So this is precisely why I offered the opportunity for people to come along and join in on our poultry dispatch day. We plan to teach them humane dispatch, wet and dry plucking, gutting, skinning and jointing. How much we have learned since those days when we knew nothing!

In preparation for the day we needed to have some 'here's one I prepared earlier' birds, so four chooks and four ducks got their marching orders today. It was good to run through how we will demonstrate and explain tomorrow.
Plucking the ducks was, as ever, the task which took the longest. They have endless feathers in endless layers.

We finished plucking the ducks just as darkness began to shroud the stables. Then it was inside to make a couple of loaves of bread for our guests to dip in their soup tomorrow.





Sunday 31st December 2017
What better way to end the year than a good communal activity. We had four people come along to our poultry processing day, which was a good number. Everybody got to have a go but nobody had to wait too long.
Hopefully they all learned loads and will be more confident chicken keepers because of it.

Sue explains dunking for wet plucking

A bit messy this one.

We are drying the chicken and duck feet. Apparently the dogs will love them. Waste not, want not.

And that, as far as 2017 is concerned, is that.

I have big plans for 2018.
We at Swallow Farm wish you a Happy and Fulfilling New Year.

Pheasants for the Peasants - vacuum packed

There is much I disagree with about the activities of the shooting and hunting fraternity. There is also much I disagree with about those who want their food neatly packaged and don't care where it comes from or how it was produced.
So I am probably about to upset everybody I know, except, maybe, the smallholders.

If I want to kill an animal for food there is, quite rightly, a whole system of rules and regs to ensure that the animal does not suffer during its last moments.
So how would the public feel if their mass produced chickens , instead of being killed quickly and efficiently (I'm sure none of them really want to know about this either) were turned out into a field one morning so that they could be scared back out into the open and blasted from the air (if they could fly). Would this be considered the most humane way of killing them? Would this be acceptable?

Don't get me wrong, I actually don't have a problem with someone shooting a wild bird, but with provisos.
Firstly, it must be to eat.
Secondly, it must not put the general population of the bird at risk.
Thirdly, it must not cause stress to other wild species or important habitats.

In fact I would much rather that everybody ate animals and birds which had lived a fulfilling, natural life in the wild. Of course, this would not remotely be sustainable.

But here's the thing. On these organised shoots, virtually nobody wants to take the birds home to eat! After all, they need preparation and besides, they'll have shot pellets in them. So 90% of the birds get left. Forget the conservation issues. Forget the welfare issues. Forget all of what I said above. How, in a world where people are starving, in a country where people rely on food banks, how can this happen?

So here's where my friend the beater comes in. I wouldn't do what he does, but he was brought up with it and it is part of his life which I respect. But at least he takes the unwanted birds and uses them. And some of them he very kindly passes on to me.

A fridge drawer full of partridges - 'French'.
I would decline English grey partridges.

Should I take these birds, given my views? Yes. And I am very grateful for them. When I grew up we never got to eat game. Pheasant is a very tasty meat and I'm only making the most of what other people are carelessly discarding.
I also gratefully accept the occasional wild mallard or woodpigeon from my friend and for the reasons given above I have no problem with this. If only I could find a source of rabbit or deer too!

And so it is that I spent most of Monday processing birds for the freezer. I never thought I'd be doing this five years ago.
I got to use my new vacuum sealer too. It's the cheap one from Lidl so I wasn't expecting a perfect performance but I was pretty impressed with the results. The packaged meat (for that's what the birds now are) is snugly and professionally bagged. It takes up less space in the freezer and won't get freezer burn. The labels won't fall off either.

For now, I'm off to bed as I'm up early, taking my friend's three pigs into the abattoir. Then I'll be straight back to plant some fruit trees he picked up for me from the auctions. Apricots, quinces and Mirabelle plums. I'm excited.


The views expressed in this blog are purely my own. If you disagree, I'm sorry but you're wrong! Feel free to leave troll-like comments. I may just delete them. After all, it's my blog and you don't have to read it!

The killing month

November is the killing month. Animals have fed on the summer's bounty and the land won't sustain them all through the winter. It's time to thin down to breeding stock and anything which needs to grow for a second season. It's part of the cycle of seasons which rules our lives since we have chosen to live off the land.
So, in the last month I have sent a pig to the abattoir and helped butcher it, sent 4 Shetland sheep off, prepared 20 pheasants and 6 partridges, learned to dispatch, skin, gut and butcher a rabbit, been to a smallholders meeting about preparing chicken and curing bacon and hams and today I helped kill two of my sheep. Now, to many all this will seem unthinkable.
I always knew that I would reach this stage but it has been a journey which I would like to explain. And don't worry. I'm not going for shock tactics with the photos, though there will be some images near the end. If you're feeling uncomfortable with what you're reading then probably best not go any further! You don't need to come on the whole journey with me, but hopefully it will be interesting for anybody starting out in smallholding or thinking about it.
After all, it is all too easy to breed stock and end up with too many animals. Right from the outset you need to be clear what the animals are for and have a clear plan for 'the end' - that means waving goodbye to them, selecting an abattoir if appropriate, transporting them, filling in the paperwork, cutting the meat and having a plan for what happens to all the meat in the end. If your plan is vague, it's best not to let your animals breed, for you will end up with either a farm full of pet animals growing all too large and consuming a lot of expensive food or you will end up with freezers full of meat which you cannot possibly consume. Believe me, I speak from experience.

They may look cute at this stage,
but don't lose sight of why you're breeding your animals.
Otherwise you'll get more stock than you can look after, which is not fair on anybody.

Someone I know says that you should either keep and kill your own animals or you should be a vegan and that anything in between is not a viable position. I don't 100% agree but  do see where they are coming from. It may surprise you that I did actually used to be a vegan. I do believe that if you are going to eat meat then you need to face up to where it comes from and how it is reared. You need to reject mass production methods.

Smallholding and self-sufficiency sounds very idealistic and maybe idyllic. But it is hard work, not that I mind, and the smallholding side is not about keeping pets.
Even with something as cosy as keeping chickens, you soon come across the harsh realities of life and death. However well you care for birds, sooner or later one will become ill and you need to know what to do with it - and we're not talking an expensive visit to the vets here!
Then comes the point when you just can't resist allowing one of your broody hens to hatch out a clutch of eggs. It's all very cute until the chicks grow up and half of them (sod's law actually means it's normally more than half) turn into violent young cockerels fighting for alpha male position. The number of Facebook posts I see from people wanting 'loving homes' for unwanted cockerels, usually with names.

There comes a point when the cockerels have to be dealt with.

As a smallholder, I like to think that I raise my animals more humanely and more naturally than mass-produced livestock. But at the end of the day my guinea fowl, turkeys, geese, chickens, sheep and pigs are there for a reason and most of them will end up as meat.

And this is where we get to the nitty gritty of smallholding, the hard facts.
A pig or a sheep is fairly straightforward. You load it into the trailer one morning and drive it off to the abattoir, where you lead it into quite a nice little pen and then drive off. You don't need to know what happens next. It just gets returned to you neatly cut and packaged into joints. The most stressful part is probably getting it into the trailer in the first place, especially with pigs. My only advice it to come up with some sort of plan, give yourself time, be patient and, most importantly, be prepared to see the funny side of it when all goes wrong!

One of our Shetlands returned from the butcher.

The next step up the ladder, for most, comes with learning how to dispatch poultry. The killing, plucking and eviscerating (gutting) is the bit you don't have to do when you buy a chicken from the supermarket. You don't have to see the head or feet either. But most people are quite quick to get used to this, in the knowledge that their chickens have had a good life. You can still opt to send the chickens off to be 'dealt with', but this becomes a significant cost compared to the cost of rearing the bird. Probably only worth it for a turkey or a goose, or if you're selling the meat.
But there comes a stage when you end up with something which approximates the whole chicken you would buy in a supermarket or at a butchers. After that, most meat eaters would not baulk at what might be classed as the first steps in butchery, jointing the chicken.

The next step in our journey dealing with meat came with a friend offering us game birds left over from a shoot. A couple of weeks ago I was kindly given ten brace of pheasants. I was going to write a blog post called pheasants for the peasants, but I never quite got round to it!
Sue and I learned how to skin the pheasants from YouTube a couple of years ago. It's surprisingly easy. You don't even need to pluck the birds and you can get the breast and legs off without going anywhere near the insides. To be honest there's virtually no other useful meat anyway. This method is so quick that I managed to process all 20 pheasants I was given the other day in just a couple of hours.

From chickens and game birds, the next step up was last year's Christmas turkey - well, we actually ate it about February! I don't really do Christmas.
The broomstick method of poultry dispatch (no, we don't chase them round and round the yard with a broomstick) has made Sue and I very confident in dong the deed. Once you can do a chicken, there's not a lot different doing other birds. They're just slightly larger or slightly smaller.

So the journey so far has taken us from sending off our sheep and pigs to actually doing the deed and all the subsequent preparation ourselves with poultry.

But for me the biggest step is when it comes to dealing with mammals rather than birds. I sort of did these in the wrong order. I started by going on a pig butchery day a couple of years back. It was way too complicated, not helped by being led by a good butcher, but not  a good teacher.
A step backwards came last year when I picked up Daisy's carcass from the abattoir and drove it over to the good people at Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group to be used for a sausage making demonstration.

Fond memories of Daisy... but the sausages were lovely too

I spent a day helping (aka getting in the way) Paul cut up and package our pig. I've never really struggled with sending animals to the abattoir. No tears have been shed, however much I respect the animals during their lives. I didn't struggle with picking up our sow either, even though she was very friendly to me and was still recognisable when the carcass came back.
You may think me heartless, or perhaps think I've become desensitised to all this. Yes, I've gradually got used to it, but I have never lost my care or respect for the animals. I am just matter of fact about it. Sue and I still say sorry to the animals before they go.

The next step was when our sheep went off last year. They made very disappointing weights, but we learned lessons and this year we were delighted with the weights which our Shetlands made.
Anyway, we had volunteered a couple of last year's sheep for a Fenland Smallholders Club lamb butchery day. Unfortunately in the end the carcass was somewhat overchilled and chances for us to have a go were limited. However, it was another step in my learning. It seemed a lot less complicated than a pig and, with the help of Youtube to refresh my memory, I would be happy to have a go in the future.

This year's pork when it still had a bit of growing left to do

And so to this year's pig. We didn't raise it ourselves, as we've formed a co-op with a couple of other smallholders. This means that the pigs, sociable animals, can be reared in a group without us having mountains of meat on our hands. The butcher we used to use went downhill quite rapidly last year with the loss of a couple of staff members. We were no longer happy with their service. However, if you get the abattoir butchers to cut your animals, the sausages are made from all the pigs which go through the establishment that week. This kind of destroys the point of rearing your own rare-breeed animals.
And so we went back to the services of Paul, a private butcher. This meant taking the carcass over to his and helping with the butchery again. We have been very happy with the meat and the sausages. I learned a lot more this time. Even better, Paul was able to turn half of our pig into smoked bacon and hams which have proved absolutely irresistible.

Thus far, as far as mammals are concerned, I had managed to stay well away from the killing part of things (and the skinning and gutting).
But last week another smallholder was sending a litter of rabbits on their final journey and had volunteered to show other interested parties how to do it.
(This is the point where you may want to stop looking at the pictures if you're sensitive about this subject matter)

The transition from feathers to fur
certainly makes a difference
to how it feels

So we headed down to Prickwillow in the heart of The Fens. Four furry rabbits were meeting their maker. I didn't actually do the deed on any of them. Sue tried but needed help. However, we did discover that the broomstick method worked even better on rabbits than it does on poultry! A karate chop to the back of the neck is another quick and efficient way.

Saddle of rabbit x4

The rabbits were large-breed and it really did feel different to killing a bird. However, when it came to the skinning and preparation, I was surprised by how very similar it was to skinning a pheasant. The skinned and eviscerated carcass was remarkably similar to a large bird, just with an elongated section in the middle. The jointing was very simple too. In fact, rearing rabbits for meat is a strong possibility in the future. The meat is not as 'rustic' as wild rabbit and is very lean and low in cholesterol.





And so to today. A couple of my older Shetland sheep had served me well but needed to go now before the winter. For the first time I was planning on not sending them to the abattoir. Instead I was going to home kill. Well, to be more precise, Paul was going to home kill them for me. There are rules about this. Firstly the meat has to be solely for the consumption of the owner. Also they still need to be dispatched humanely, stunned first.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect and approached the day with some degree of trepidation. But I felt that I owed it to my livestock to at least see what happens to them in their final moments. I feel this actually increases my respect for them when they are alive.

The ewe on the left and the wether below.
Both photos taken a while back.

Without going into too much gory detail, the whole process was not as traumatic or as messy as I had imagined. I'm sure some of this came down to Paul's careful handling of the animals, both while alive and once dead.

Bleeding out our Shetland wether

Obviously the most shocking part is the stun gun, which is basically a bolt to the top of the head. This is quick, humane and all totally above board and within the rules. I was surprised by how instant it was. It actually pretty much always kills the animal outright anyway. The next bit which I was dreading was the slitting of the throat to drain the blood. However, Paul was quick with a knife through the neck and the animals just slowly bled. The most disconcerting thing was that, just as with a bird (and the rabbits did this too) the muscles still keep on twitching so the animal is still kicking and twitching for quite a while. But rest assured, it absolutely is 100% dead.

The skinning was fascinating. This is the part where the walking, living animal which you once looked after suddenly starts to look much more like meat. Again, the process was remarkably similar to skinning a bird. It just needed a bit more effort. Paul was remarkably skilled at this and left virtually no residue on the skins.
Finally we were on to the gutting. If you've ever experienced the smell when a chicken is gutted, you'll understand just how little my nose was looking forward to this! However, Paul's careful knife work ensured that there was no leakage and the intestines and other bits came out remarkably cleanly. They went into a bin bag for disposal (more rules).

And that was that. The carcasses, as they most definitely were by now, were left to hang overnight. It would have been easier for me to get Paul to cut the meat on the same day and take it away, but I hadn't realised that before the fat 'sets' the whole carcass is remarkable wobbly. This means that any attempts at preparing the meat inevitably end up with difficult, messy cuts.
So I returned on Monday morning. Paul had already pretty much finished one sheep and had the pair of them finished in no time at all. I was really pleased with the finished product. One of the sheep had been an old girl who, although appearing very healthy, had steadfastly refused to put on any weight. I thought we'd just get a few scraps of mutton off her, but in the end she gave us some very nice cuts of meat.
The good thing about getting Paul to butcher our animals s that you get everything back. The bones can be used for the dogs, or for stock. The spare fat can be rendered down for the wild birds (with a pig, the flare fat makes a wonderful product called leaf lard). The liver, fresh as fresh can be, makes for a delicious treat. I am learning how to make tasty treats out of some of the other offal too. Again, I feel that out of respect for our animals we should use every part of the body if we possibly can.

So this time I planned to make proper use of the hearts -I have eaten these before, but just fried them up to see what they were like. This time I followed a YouTube recipe by the wonderful Scott Rae.
Here is the link and, despite our doubts, it really did make a tasty, nutritious meal.
As a little side dish, we had crispy lamb's tongue. You wouldn't usually get this back form the butchers, so I was keen to give it a try. To be honest, it wasn't too bad but I wouldn't call it a delicacy. I'll try it again though, or I'm quite sure that Boris and Arthur would not turn their noses up!

As for the skins, I would have loved to have turned them into sheepskin rugs for us but Sue and I just don't have enough time for this at the moment. It's quite a lengthy process. You also need a licence to do this, so of course we would not have tried it even if we did have the time. But we knew a friend who was very keen to take them off our hands. It will be fascinating to see the finished product.

Salting a sheepskin

So that's it. My journey from vegan to butcher! Well done if you've stayed with me the whole time and good luck if you're thinking about embarking on a similar journey. My best advice would be to find someone who can show you how to do everything properly and to never lose respect for your livestock.