Eating a fox-mauled chicken?

sam_uk · Post by **sam_uk** » 03 Apr 2014, 13:26

One of our chickens got caught by a fox this morning. I scared the fox away but a quick assessment of the chicken was that it was in pain, couldn't walk and had a few deep bite marks on it's back.

I dispatched the chicken to put it out of it's misery.

In order not to waste it I'm thinking of making it into a well boiled soup/stock, but i'm wondering what horrible bacteria and diseases the foxes teeth will have embedded in the flesh.

What does the panel think? Stockpot or bin?

Thanks

Sam

vtsnowedin · Post by **vtsnowedin** » 03 Apr 2014, 13:42

Stockpot. Boiling will kill anything that might have been transmitted by a healthy fox.

Post by **adam2** » 03 Apr 2014, 14:16

I would think twice about eating the chicken, whilst thoroughly boiling SHOULD render it safe, I would not feel happy eating it.

In emergency if food be be very short I might eat it, but not whilst times are normal.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 03 Apr 2014, 14:26

'The bin' sounds, well, pretty much a last resort.

Another answer is to compost it. Providing the heap reaches around 44-45°C for a week (easily reached in our humanure heaps) or it's left for 18 months after closing, you'll find little in the heap when you come to spread the compost.

We put a goose in ours; a few bones (which break down in the soil nice and slowly anyway) and a few quills but nothing else was recognisable. It meant that, as vegans, we ate the goose...

featherstick · Post by **featherstick** » 03 Apr 2014, 15:35

We kept turkeys when I was a kid. One Christmas we killed and plucked them and hung them in a shed. Rats got in and ate a good part of one of them. Now these were Xmas presents to family members and we had no money to buy more conventional presents, so my mother trimmed and jointed the nibbled turkey and gave it to her parents "already jointed so you can cook it separately and not have to eat the whole thing at once". No ill effects reported.

I'd throw the chicken in the pressure cooker and make stock for a noodle soup.

Catweazle · Post by **Catweazle** » 03 Apr 2014, 22:16

Use it as bait and shoot the fox.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 03 Apr 2014, 23:08

Boiling kills everything worth killing, except "rogue prion"-type things such as CJD, BSE and the like. Even then, given the fox-mauling probably didn't give the disease enough time to lodge in the chicken's brain or spine, you're sorted.

vtsnowedin · Post by **vtsnowedin** » 04 Apr 2014, 01:47

adam2 wrote:I would think twice about eating the chicken, whilst thoroughly boiling SHOULD render it safe, I would not feel happy eating it.

In emergency if food be be very short I might eat it, but not whilst times are normal.

I see little logic in this. Either it is safe to eat or it isn't . Eating tainted food during an emergency would put you in the victims column just when there was no one there to treat your mistake. Better to spend the day staving then to spend it puking you guts out.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 05 Apr 2014, 09:29

In 1978 a fox killed a couple of our chickens. All who ate the following meal are still alive today.

sam_uk · Post by **sam_uk** » 05 Apr 2014, 20:40

Well one very tasty Coq-au-vin later and I still seem to be alive too

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 05 Apr 2014, 20:46

Alcohol, heck why didn't I think of that?? Kills everything that the cooking might have missed

You know, they should carry out research as to whether it kills (or de-activates or whatever) prion-type things if you cook them in alcohol. This would be extremely useful, but you'd stand no chance of getting a grant for it unless you could convince people that it constitutes an important step on the road to A Cure For Cancer...