Last month we "gave death" to three chickens at RavenCroft. This place (RC) is not where I live but where I study herbal nutrition and wholeness. What I'm really learning is about the gifts these lives (plants and animals) give me, how they are a part of my community and how I am a steward in this community. They are such amazing teachers. I chose the role of "she who holds the knife" as i felt I "had" to do this since i recently started eating chicken for the first time in my life. This decision alone was unbelievably laden with ancient tuggings of guilt from three prior generations of animal activists. This beautiful young rooster taught me that I will never again make a decision out of guilt. I would have benefited far more from a role such as "she who supports" or "she who holds the space". It was emotionally quite difficult for me. It was ALSO reverent, loving (although i will choose a different method of giving death than a knife in the future) and oh so full of gratitude to these teachers. Physically it was a LOT more difficult than I imagined. I have been soul searching since and, for a while, quit eating chicken to try and sort it all out. I want to take in salvia or some other form of herbal goddess connection to try to have my OWN conversation with chicken and learn more. What a fascinating journey we are on.

We had chickens, turkeys, ducks, and rabbits too. It was always my job to be 'he who shoots the rabbit' which I didn't like much. Also rabbit was the least among my preferred dishes. It was much easier for me to be 'he who decapitates the chicken'; probably because it wasn't also my job to butcher them.
If you are raising chickens for food, consider a few things. You will want to get what we call 'short-term' chickens; you feed them and they buff up quickly (as opposed to egg-laying chickens). Also you will want to keep them in an environment where they are walking on chicken wire that is off the ground; otherwise they doodie all over their feet, walk in their doodie, peck at their doodie, etc.

That is true. But there are those who would argue that we are not even supposed to cook all this meat that we're supposed to be eating due to the length of our gut (vis a vis the 'caveman diet').

I think they are fools, in the same way that I think vegans / macrobiotics are(and I have tried both ways, mind you). I think that we are in the process of evolving not just in our minds but in the length and absorptive capabilities of our intestines; i.e. it's true that we aren't meant to eat tree bark because our gut is too short, but then again we aren't supposed to take a bite out of a hyena on the run because our gut is too long and the meat hangs around and gives us diseases while it rots (think about that next time you want to go to mcdonald's).