Pre-trip scramble

We took our family to Disney World the first full week of December. We had heard a winter storm could occur during that time so we needed to move our 7 pregnant goats to better accommodations. To say the least, we were under prepared.

I'm learning that hungry goats are easy to move. My father-in-law skipped a feeding the night before we moved the goats so they would eagerly follow our buckets. After getting past their initial fear of walking into the electric fence, which we had disabled, they attacked the buckets we held in our hands. We crossed the gravel road and led them straight into their new holding area; the East end of the family's barn.

We moved a feeder into the area, a water tank, and filled racks with hay. After showing my brother-in-law what he needed to do within this area and with the remaining hens (more below) and 4 doelings, we headed to Disney.

The weekend before we left for Disney we culled our roosters. In total we have 23 chickens culled. Now we're probably not going to end up eating the first 2 or 3 because I have zero confidence that I cleaned them enough. The first bird I killed I tried to pluck it's feathers and clean. After 6 hours fighting weather conditions, etc., I had one bird done. One!

Though I froze it I'm not sure I'm confident enough in my work to eat that one. Because of the enormous time required, we decided to skin the chickens instead of plucking feathers. This was tremendously faster. Over the course of a few days I got much better at it and am much happier with the end product. Looking forward to eating those later chickens!