I killed a chicken before breakfast this morning.

We where on morning chores and our group was on moving cows and looking after the broiler chickens which are in the brooder. They are on their eighth day at the farm and get fed five times a day.
While our group was in the brooder the group that was on laying hens came back with a weak hen which had a paralysis on one side of its body and could not move. Gustavo and Richard hat noticed it not moving on the days before and Richard said the two options where to kill it or to keep it in quarantine. The group decided on killing it given the slim chances of recovery and having killed a few chickens before I spontaneously volunteered for showing the others.

I got a broom from the workshop and went over to the killing station next to the slaughtery which has a slab of concrete that can be cleaned easily. Then I took the chicken, put its head on one side of the broomstick which I had layed on the ground, stepped on both ends of the stick to pin it’s head to the ground and pulled hard on it’s feet with a yanking upward motion.
The chicken began to shake after I had broken it’s neck.

Unfortunately I did not do a very good job of killing it since it’s heart was still pumping for some seconds and I had to put it under the broomstick again to separate it’s neck bones from each other. After about half a minute to a minute in which I was in a sort of trace the chicken finally died and I kept apologizing to it for giving it unnecessary pain.
There is a fine line for how hard to yank on the feet of the chicken between ripping it’s head of and making a mess all over the floor and not breaking it’s neck clean through.

I felt traumatized by my mistake and the experience is very humbling my whole body responded with a weird feeling in my stomach and a sort of weakness in all my body parts. As if taking the chickens life took a little part of my life energy with it. I can still feel it in my bones while writing this.