Feathers are a necessary evil.

I grew up in the city. Not all my memories are about city living. Almost like a farm kid I lived in a 3 room house with a sink and a water heater electricity and outhouse. We had a large 1/4 acre garden. One side was corn and potatoes. The other side was tomatoes green beans beets and onions. I remember digging up beets and mixing them in mud pies after cutting them into slices jiust like my mother. I made my little brother eat them. I told him they were good for him and he would grow up big and tall. He hated me.

We had a couple of chickens and I had a favorite red hen I named Penny. We moved when I was five to a brand new house with all the modern conveniences and smaller back yard. We still had a garden of mostly tomatoes and green beans.

Fast forward to my teen years. My grandmother would buy old laying hens from a local egg farm. We averaged butchering a 100 birds or more every school spring break. We had a system. My uncles had the scalding job after one of them removed their heads. They plucked most of the feathers and then I got them. I had the fun job of removing the pin feathers and singeing the too small bits. Then I would gut them. The giblets in one bowl and the guts stuff in the bucket.
I had a big container of unlaid eggs after all those chickens were done and in the freezer. Some were used to make the best noodles ever. I took a small covered bowl of them to school for the biology teacher and got extra credit. We froze several small containers for later meals.

There is one memory that I can never forget. The smell of those singeing pin feathers. My clothes smelled like them even after they were washed. I had a feather pillow on my bed until I was able to buy my own foam pillow. To this day I hate feathers and their smell. I have no feathers in my house. None. If it isn't attached to a live bird it is not allowed.