How to skin a chicken

After Mark killed our Plymouth Rocks, I set to work dressing the birds.  We kill so few chickens per year that we pluck by hand rather than springing for a Whiz-bang Chicken Plucker, and our unskilled fingers definitely spend more time removing feathers than on any other part of the dressing process.

I've read that a lot of small-scale chicken-keepers save time by skinning their birds rather than plucking but I usually like to keep the skin on so we can roast our birds to perfection.  Since our Plymouth Rocks were slated to be ground into sausage, though, I figured this was a good chance to try my hand at skinning.  Unfortunately, my first, unskilled attempt took as long as plucking the bird.  Oops.

I've included a drawing from this very useful article in hopes your first skinning operation will go more smoothly than mine did.  But don't fall into the trap of skinning all of your chickens --- honor your birds by eating as much of their body as you can.