Jonathan: A sad and difficult day.  Geese are a bit silly at times, a bit cussed, and can make a bit of mess. But they have individual characters, and are very social creatures. It is difficult to be indifferent to geese, unless I suppose one keeps them in very large numbers and on a strictly commercial basis. The numbers on our croft have peaked at 24 this year (ignoring losses of young goslings), and I know most of them well, certainly those that weren’t born this year. But even this modest number is too many to sustain over winter. The intention this year was to reduce this 24 down to nine, two established breeding trios of older birds, and the young male and two females born this year and raised initally in the walled garden. Those to be culled included the very noisy chinese geese and their two youngsters, an older female who appears to be infertile, and all of the ten geese born on the croft this year.

Yesterday afternoon I rounded them up into the sheep fank (with the help of the sheep dog from next door, who obviously thought I needed help!) and then had the heart-rending job of taking out geese one by one to kill.  Being separated from the others makes them desperate and the best way to quieten them is to tuck their heads under one’s arm so that they can’t see – they then go quiet.  I use a captive bolt gun to stun them and then cut their throats. Sorry to be detailed on this, but there’s no good comes from fudging and glossing.  Once they are dead, my emotional trial is over.  They are then raw food to be processed. Sounds heartless. So is eating a KFC meal without ever giving a thought to the animals that have died to make it.

A complication was that a lot of the geese had lost their coloured leg rings, which meant I couldn’t tell what age they were; and under the circumstances I couldn’t identify them from usual behaviour; so by the time I was down to 11 geese left, I had to stop, to avoid the risk of not having sufficient males or females. Not ideal, but next spring, when they start thinking about raising new families, I shall be able to identify who is who, and fit new leg rings accordingly.

Lacking any equipment to pluck the birds entirely (by hand that would be extremely time-consuming and difficult), we can’t yet roast geese whole, which is no doubt what most people would imagine. Insteady I pluck all the best quality curled feather and down for making pillows and cushions, and then cut out the breast meat, typically 8oz or so per breast, and a dark richly-flavoured meat it is.  It’s not getting all we could from them, but it’s all that’s practicable in the circumstances this year.  A few breasts have gone to neighbours as thank-you’s for this and that, but the rest in the freezer. Each breast will make Denise and I a meal.

Thankfully the trauma is one that I only have to deal with once a year.  For the rest of the year the geese are a real pleasure to keep – making very little work and costing nothing more than perhaps £1 per year of grain each bird. That’s good value.