I never got around to reporting back on our meat birds so here it is.
TLDR,
Amazon product ASIN B09XX4SMDQ
this little fucker was the key. My son who helped me throughout the process said it looked like cutting a cake, because you could see the layers of feathers, meat, bone, etc in one clean cut.
bonus points when you get the head to drop directly in the bucket for the plunk sound effect.
I was present for some chicken slaughtering as a kid but never did it myself. This summer we raised a bunch of meat birds and gave it a shot. We ended up selling a bunch of the hens to people who wanted laying hens, because we were always pressed for time and this shit was a project. But we slaughtered and processed a dozen or so roosters.
Out of the whole process - slaughter, hang, scald, pluck, gut, cool, seal in bags - I found two steps took the most troubleshooting: slaughter and gutting.
I don't like the cut the throat and bleed them method, I prefer to remove the head. I initially used a hatchet because yes I am retarded. Its ok if you learn from it maybe? For our second round I bought the beautiful axe linked above. This thing is no shit on my apocolypse bug out bag list now, its such a great little knife/axe hybrid. I put a nice edge on it and it was cutting through the whole thing effortlessly in one clean swipe, from feathers to bones.
Gutting. You don't want to pop the intestines, cause there's shit in there. *second pro-tip, for round 2 we starved the birds for 2 days only making sure to give them lots of water. MUCH cleaner.
But either way, guts are messy, and it takes some figuring out where to cut. What ended up working for me was freeing everything from both ends then reaching in from the posterior and grabbing the gizzard, a large muscular thing that can take some force. Thats my handle to pull the whole thing out.
Then secondly there is a trick hard to describe for removing the lungs, which are really packed into the ribs. Once you find the right angle, you can scrape under with your fingers and free them from the ribs in one motion, then pull them out. Half the time it turned into a mess while I was figuring it out.
The other steps were trivial in that it was easy to read about them or watch a video and follow the instructions.
We've eaten a couple now. Good meat, smaller than the usual grocery store birds. Its not the difference between homegrown vs storebought tomatoes, but its noticable, the dark meat is much darker, the gravy is more flavorful. The skin is extra fatty and yellow.
But of course the best part is raising chickens from chicks with my family, then slaughtering them with my wife and son, and watching them eat chicken legs. A++, will do again next year.
