If you raise meat birds you eventually reach the day nobody teaches you about. Adam Danforth won a James Beard Award for Butchering Poultry, Rabbit, Lamb, Goat, and Pork, trained at the professional meat processing program at SUNY Cobleskill and worked at Marlow and Daughters in Brooklyn, and this is that day handled properly, in photographs, one step at a time.

It covers the whole process rather than the squeamish middle of it: the tools and equipment the job actually needs, choosing and maintaining knives, the food safety measures that are not optional, how to prepare for slaughter and take the bird quickly and humanely, how to break the carcass into cuts, and how to package and freeze those cuts so the meat you worked for does not come out of the freezer ruined.

Chickens need less space and less equipment than any other livestock, which is exactly why so many small producers start there and then have nowhere to look this up. A 176 page Storey trade paperback, written for backyard keepers and small farms.