How To Write Special Feature Articles, page 369 by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
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About the eighth to tenth day force the feeding--see to it that the chicken gets all it will eat three times a day.
By keeping an accurate account of the costs of meal, milk, and so on, I find that I can put a pound of fat on a coop-fed chicken for seven cents. When one considers that this same pound brings twenty cents, and that milk feeding in coops raises the per pound value of the chicken from twelve to twenty cents, one must admit that feeding chickens is more profitable than feeding cattle.
Do not feed your chicken anything for twenty-four hours before killing it. Do not worry about loss in weight. The only weight it will lose will be the weight of the feed in its crop and gizzard, and the offal in its intestines--and you are going to lose that anyway when you dress and draw it. If you will keep the bird off feed for twenty-four hours you will find that it will draw much more easily and cleanly.
Hang the chicken up by the feet and kill it by bleeding it away back in the mouth. Let it bleed to death. Grasp the chicken's head in your left hand, the back of its head against the palm of your hand. Do not hold it by the neck, but grasp it by the bony part of its head and jaws. Reach into the throat with a three-inch, narrow, sharp knife and cut toward the top and front of the head.
You will sever the big cross vein that connects the two "jugular" veins in the neck, and the blood will pour out of the mouth. If you know how to dry-pick you will not need to be told anything by me; if you do not know it will do you no good to have me tell you, because I do not believe a person can learn to dry-pick chickens by following printed instructions. At any rate, I could not. I never learned until I hired a professional picker to come out from town to teach me.
So far as I can judge, it makes no difference to the consumer in the city whether the chicken is scalded or dry-picked. There is this to be said for the scalded chicken--that it is a more cleanly picked chicken than the dry-pic