Fate of the carcass

Normally, I save the carcass from our Thanksgiving turkey to make turkey stock.  And by "normally" I mean, "for the last 3 or 4 years".  So, in other words, "normal" takes 3 or 4 times to become normal (the moral of the story?  Be careful what you do, especially if you don't want it to become normal).

Except there was that one year when we weren't at home for Thanksgiving, and I asked the hosts to save the turkey carcass for me, unless, of course, they wanted to use it, and they didn't think I was serious, because who would transport a turkey carcass 500 miles to make stock, and they threw it away.  We had to have turkey for Christmas that year, so I could make stock.

You probably guessed by my use of the word "normally" that we didn't save the turkey carcass this year.  I was all set to throw it away, because we still have a bunch of stock leftover from last year, when Hubby asked if I thought the chickens would like to have a go at it.  Sure, I said.  Why not?

You might be feeling slightly sick to your stomach right now, horrified that I would feed poultry to my poultry.  Truthfully, I'm feeling a little sick to my stomach right now (probably not because of turkey eating chickens, though).  The whole thing smacks of cannibalism, although I have to point out that cannibals eat the flesh of their own kind, and turkeys and chickens, while related, are not the same kind.

The thing is, chickens are omnivores, just like humans.  They eat both plants and animals.  And generally, the only animals chickens eat are the ones they can catch.  Like worms and bugs and the occasional frog.  They definitely might have eaten a mole last winter.  But if someone is going to offer up some other, already cooked, animal for them to eat, chickens are definitely going to eat it.

And so they did.  Those chickens devoured the leftover turkey meat on that carcass.  Hubby said it reminded him of those bugs they use to clean dinosaur bones.  Yeah.  I wasn't exactly sure what he was talking about either.  But I'm sure it's a thing.  The point is, there wasn't much left on those bones.

I was thinking about taking a picture to show you, but I thought that would be going too far, that y'all would not want to see that.  You probably didn't even want to read about it.

Instead, here is a picture of my favorite (and only) lap chicken.