We got 23 chicks when we got our first chickens a couple of years ago. We wanted about a dozen permanent residents, and we knew we'd be culling all but one of the roosters. I read up on methods, and watched videos, and generally agonized about it for way too long. I'd planned to cull in late October. Finally, in February, I got my act together and did the cull. I learned a couple of things:
1) It was actually not a kindness to put off the cull. There were too many males in too little space with too few hens. Poor dears were bald from overbreeding, everyone was stressed, and our poor lawn was bald too!
2) After trying pithing and chopping and cutting and breaking their necks, I wanted a sure fire, foolproof method of execution. I settled on large pair of Fiskars garden loppers. It is the perfect size, is quick and complete and almost impossible to screw up. (
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PwXfNO1kL._SL1280_.jpg). I think of it as my chicken guillotine and it seems, to me, a very humane way of dispatching them, especially compared to the others. Calm them, place their neck in, close the levers, hold the neck until the body is done realising it's dead. If only the plucking and cleaning went as easily
We've just got a 'humane chicken dispatcher" (
) though the supplier recommends using them to hold the head while you stretch the neck, rather than using it to break the neck with a guillotine motion as shown in the video. We've got a 40 bird cull that's coming up next week, and I'm going to use it then, but the lopper will be right there in reserve.
You must be confident in your actions and secure in your method. You want to dispatch them as humanely as possible and fumbling during execution just sucks (he says with the voice of experience and regret). I do not know how used to it I will ever become. I have a real awareness that I am taking the life of critter with personality and awareness. So I am conscious of that and try to be respectful when I must do the deed. I want them to feel as little stress, fear, and pain as I can manage. I'd want someone to do the same for me. The corollary to that is that culls are a reality of the keeping of chickens. Play nature's game and ya gotta play nature's rules - to a degree.
Hope it goes well for you.
