My dad is 93 and still won’t eat chicken after helping his mom butcher when he was a kid.
Unless it is nearly unrecognizable as in KFC or chicken tenders.
As for us ... we take ours to a regular butcher. The birds leave the farm in crates in the back of the truck and come home cut up in plastic bags. It’s a great plan.
A neighbor and I did meat birds one year, Red Rangers. Planned it wrong and hunting season got in the way because there was no way my neighbor was going to take a day out of hunting season. He doesn’t hunt but gets tags and swaps them for deer because some people that come down from the city are more interested in the hunt than the deer.
Birds ended up a little overgrown. In hindsight, it would have been best to take the males one day and take the females a week or so later. I got the less messy job if killing them, scolding and running through the plucker. He got to yank the innards out. He wasn’t interested in killing them and I made the plucker so that’s how it worked out.
I didn’t have a problem eating them. Day old chicks are so expensive now, it’s hardly worth the effort. Even the ones we did ended up being close to $6 per bird though they were close to 6 lbs too.
Out of the 25 Red Rangers, one had different coloring so my daughter claimed it as hers. Almost Buckeye chicken coloring. I had ordered 24 birds so I saved that one back and stuck her in with the laying hens. She had grown as fast as the meat birds but ended up laying a big pinkish brown egg every other day. Could have been a good start of my own custom breed but coons got my laying hens.
The guy at Sandhill Preservation Center at one time said he wanted to work on breeding Delaware chickens for their original purpose. They almost became the standard meat bird but then the Cornish Cross was developed. Latest is that he’s just breeding them as dual purpose but there are plenty of heritage dual purpose breeds already. The all take several months to get to butcher weight as opposed to the 42 day Cornish Cross.