This morning, I woke up, went out in the frigid cold in my pajamas and killed a turkey.  It wasn’t quite that simple, but that is the jist of what happened.  The dogs had excaped from their pen (This time, it took them almost a month to figure out how to escape!)  and I finally caught them, after they had ripped some feathers from a turkey.  Once the dogs were put back in their pen, I went to check on the tom and he was gone.  I looked everywhere for him, but could not find him.  I assumed that he was probably in shock and would eventually make his way back to the coop.  Time passed and he did not.  In fact, when I reluctantly closed up the coop in the evening, we still had several birds scattered up in trees, still afraid from the earlier attack.  I had no choice but to hope they’d make it through the night.  I had fortified the dog pen so they could not escape again, or so I thought.

Which leads us to this morning.  Every morning, the boys go out and feed and walk the dogs.  This morning when they went to the pen, they saw that the dogs were gone and the tom turkey was in front of the pen clinging to life.  Sadly, I had no choice but to end his life.  This became quite a problem, though because this bird is huge and as beat up as he was, I knew he would still put up a fight when I tried to cull him.  I called Brian, sobbing, as I told him about our one and only male turkey.  I felt angry with the dogs, anger with myself for failing to train them and fear and uncertainty about how I was actually going to kill this bird.  But most of all, I felt overwhelming sadness for this bird.  I wanted to start raising animals because I was disgusted by how animals are raised in industrial processing facilities.  And now my animal had suffered tremendously and was going to die for no reason.  And I’ve lost count of how many of our chickens have died this way.  It is my job to see to it that these animals are raised with dignity and honor, and I felt like I had failed. 

Brian, who is always there to talk me down when I get this way, calmed me and talked me through what I had to do.   And then I went and killed the bird because that is all that I could do. 

Brian and I jokingly refer to ourselves as rockstar farmers, but I couldn’t feel further away from that title today.   This is definitely one of those days where I long for an office job in the city, away from a life that is hard, complicated and often times so foreign to me.  In the end, I just do the best that I can do for myself, my family and my farm and I hope to one day look back and see more successes than failures.

~Kelly