[strict9]

This is exactly it. When my grandmother had fried chicken growing up it was a result of "going to the back yard and shooting it (the chicken) between the eyes, plucking its feathers off, and frying it in fatback."

If today's fried chicken arrived on a plate the same way it did for my grandmother, I probably wouldn't have made the decision to eschew meat about 10 years ago.

[war1025]

I doubt you would shoot the chicken though, as that would basically blow its head off. More likely she would have just wrung its neck or chopped the head off.

In modern small-scale processing, they put the chicken upside-down in a cone and slit the neck to let the chicken bleed out.