The Day Every Hutterite Woman Dreads

Twice a year this colony kills several thousand birds in a day, and the women do it. It starts before four in the morning and it finishes after dark, and every woman here between about fifteen and seventy is in one building, in one line, doing one of six jobs. It is the hardest day of the year and it is not close. And it is nearly gone. In this one I take you through it. The night before, when the building is set up and lit and silent and nobody is in it. The walk over in the dark. The ten seconds after the door opens, when the room is full of women and completely still. The six stations, how you are put on one, and how you move up without anybody ever telling you. The cleaning station, which is a trade, worked by the oldest women in the building, and which nobody here has a word for. My first one, at fifteen, which nobody prepared me for, and what I did to my own daughter four years ago. The geese, which are worse. The pigs, which are the men's day. What happens to every part of a bird, which is more complete than you will picture. And the sausage, which is the one thing on this colony that arrives rather than disappears, and which is carried in the heads of women who married in from somewhere else. Then the part I did not expect to be saying. What happened when the machines came for this, and what I noticed about myself afterwards, which is not nostalgia and which I am still turning over. My husband keeps the books on this colony and has his own channel. SOURCES Karl Peter, The Dynamics of Hutterite Society, University of Alberta Press, 1987 — the line recording that the cleaning and killing of chickens, geese and ducks had by then become largely mechanised. It is written in passing, as an example of something else. NOTE ON HONESTY Almost everything else in this video is my own account of my own colony. There is no study of a Hutterite butchering day that I have been able to find, and nobody has written down the six stations or the order people move through them or what the building is like at four in the morning. So this is one woman describing a building she has stood in since she was fifteen. It is not evidence and I would rather say so than let you think it was. The argument at the end about what went when the work changed is mine, and it is the second time I have made that argument on this channel about a different subject, and I notice that. This channel is narrated by a composite character. The voice and image are AI-generated. Everything factual about Hutterite life in it is sourced above or flagged as my own observation.