I read a post on the River Cottage Forum that I found interesting, and I have asked the poster if I can copy it to here. I'm sure you'll find it interesting too!
So thank you Jenny for your kind permission to cut and paste!!!!!
I am no expert and I do not keep chickens, but I would love to have egg layers when my circumstances improve to accommadate them (I'm still a student). However, I have a piece of information some of you may find interesting.
When I went with a few others on a World Challenge expedition to Belize to do project work and help the people out there, one of the aims of the trip was to buy livestock, kill and cook it ourselves. We decided chickens was the best option and the easiest to obtain in the local market and we had an ex-army guy there to help us. He taught us the strangest thing:
Do you know you can put chickens to sleep before killing them?
Its really easy to do - put their head under a wing and hold the round their body and turn them in a big circle - like on a ferris wheel. Clockwize/anti-clockwze it didn't seem to matter, but after a few turns at arms length they were fast asleep.
This had a few benefits:
1. our army guy could take time to show us how to break their neck carefully and humanely, without the bird flapping to much and causing chaos
2. It died quietly and asleep - this especially made us feel better about doing it.
3. it didn't make any noise and there was relatively little flapping afterwards which meant the rest that were to be done didn't go crazy, and we didn't get upset with the spasms afterwards
I guess you could also use the technique if you need to examine a bird of yours and it doesn't want to know.
I would be interested to hear from anyone who knew about this technique already or those that have given it a try because I watched the 'Chicken out' series (Well done Hugh!) and it wasn't mentioned and it might have helped - especially the Milway gang in the future when they can't use Hugh's mobile dispatching unit (Sorry, I don't know what it is really called) anymore.