A Photographer's Journey to Find Chicken, Chicken and Dead Chicken

The 69 bus doesn't run this early. Five thirty on a cool Friday morning, and I was biking down Cambridge Street to get some primo pics of a chicken slaughter.

And I have to admit that I was a little excited. The prospect of seeing what really happens to chickens when they get their heads cut off--do they continue to run around?--had gotten my adrenaline flowing. No touchyfeely vegetarian am I, and I was proving it by volunteering to go and document this early morning fowl massacre.

I pictured a man with blood running down his smock and a sadistic glint in his eye as he lifted up his cleaver again and again, hacking the heads off of bird after bird...it was a good way to start the day, I thought.

But, as ever, fantasy and reality had little to do with each other. No sadistic butchers. No hacked-off heads. Not even a bloodied smock.

Instead, Richard C. Silver, propreitor of the Mayflower Poultry Company, grabbed six birds and strung them upside down. One by one, he slit their throats. The chickens struggled a bit, and then inevitably stopped their thrashings as the blood flowed freely out of their necks and they bled to death.

I tried to get some close-ups of their bulging eyes as they drew their last breaths through their severed throats. But I felt a little queasy. And when Silver came back in the slaughter room, he spoke to me for the first time all morning: "You don't need any pictures of that----."

I didn't have the stomach to argue. "Alright, you got enough? That's enough," he said.

But I wanted pictures of the hundreds of chickens in crates in the back, I wanted pictures of chicken parts and chicken eggs. But I hurried out back anyway, abandoning years of the tried-and-true Crimson ethic: get the story at any cost. I couldn't shoot any more. I didn't even have the stomach to try.

I only dry-heaved for a couple of minutes, and then biked home as slowly as I could. It was 7:30, and I had a breakfast appointment.

My friend had been up all night, and although he wouldn't admit it, I can't help thinking that this is an all too common experience for him.

But not for me. Donuts, muffins, coffee, and juice: I had a ravenous appetite.

The kill had made me hungry. And my thesis no longer seemed so daunting.

Not a bad way to start the day.