When I was 12, I decided to stop eating meat. My parents weren’t vegetarians, nor were any of my friends, I was just a shy, sensitive kid who loved animals and didn’t particularly like the idea of eating them. In high school I became a bit radicalized – watching PETA videos and doing presentations about the horrors of factory farming for my classmates. I ate lots of soy protein and felt that my conscience was clear. Then, at age 23, I gently lowered a grassfed ribeye steak from a local Maine farmer onto a charcoal grill, and proceeded to savor the entire thing. I haven’t looked back since. There was quite a bit of soul-searching and education leading up to that moment, but it’s the knowledge I’ve gained since that first bite of meat that is the point of this piece.

I like to think I’m a conscious carnivore – I eat meat, but only when I know, and feel good about, where it came from, how it was raised, and how it died. The actual meaning of that statement, though, has changed quite significantly in my years since that ribeye steak. When I ate that first bite, it was enough to know the name of the farmer who had raised the cow, that it spent its life on pasture and met its end at a local slaughterhouse. Two years later, I decided I felt better about eating a cut of pork if the farmers were my friends and I knew their philosophy. I began spending time on farms, having lengthy discussions with farmers about pasture-raised meats and on-farm slaughter. And the more I learned about the process of raising, slaughtering and butchering an animal, the more I felt it was important that I bear witness. It was the next step, I suppose, in my evolution (some might argue devolution) as a meat eater.

I began to attend, and assist at, on-farm slaughters of pigs, cows and chickens. More than once I shed tears, and each time I came away feeling even clearer in my choices. Never, though, did I wield the knife in that defining, life-ending moment. And so this summer I decided I needed to take the plunge. Killing an animal myself, I began to believe, was a necessary and responsible step in my journey. Because I spent so many years as a vegetarian for ethical reasons, it’s profoundly important to me that I enter into the relationship with an animal I’m going to eat with respect, understanding and gratitude. It was no longer enough to simply bear witness. And so one hot Saturday morning in August, I drove north to my friends’ farm to help “process” chickens.

When I arrived, five or six birds had been dispatched, plucked and eviscerated, and 10 more waited in plastic crates. My friend, already in full-on work mode, said he’d walk me through the process. He lifted a bird out of the crate gently, carried it to a station with 4 upside-down metal cones positioned over a large sink and lowered the bird headfirst into one of them. “We always say thank you,” he said. And he did, addressing the chicken aloud, quickly thanking it for feeding his family and customers. He showed me how to pull the head down through the bottom of the cone, and where to place the knife, and in one quick cut the deed was done. Brilliant red blood drained into the sink below. He explained the next few steps (scalding and plucking), handed me a knife and walked away.

I killed 5 chickens that morning. I hope that I was calm and that my knife was quick and sure. To each chicken, I said “Thank you for giving your life so that I may be sustained in mine.” I won’t say it was easy, or that it got easier after the first, or second, or third. I found my hands shaking as I waited for the blood to drain from each chicken, but I did not feel regret. There was a sense of humble gratitude tinged, I admit, with some sadness.

Most of all, my experience strengthened my convictions. Vegetarians argue that what an animal experiences comes through in its flesh, in what you eat, and I couldn’t agree more. The chickens I killed spent their lives out on lush pasture, eating bugs and grass, supplemented with locally grown, organic grain. Each bird was killed quickly and respectfully by people who were truly grateful. If I’m going to eat meat, that is the meat I want to eat.

It might be surprising to some, but the slaughter experience also brought home to me the pleasures of the table. If you’re going to take the life of an animal, one way to honor it is to use every bit that you can, prepare it beautifully and savor it with friends and family. Or, as the case may be, with the folks who have stood beside you during a slaughter, spattered in blood and feathers.

One of my friends is Colombian, and a few weeks earlier she’d related from memory a recipe of her mother’s. “My mom would collect fresh blood,” she said. “Then mix it with rice and stuff it into the neck skin and sew it up and cook it.” If you’ve ever had blood sausage, or picked crispy skin off a roasted chicken, I think you’ll understand why I became obsessed with the idea. The trick is, you’ve got to be doing the slaughter yourself. Have you ever seen chicken blood or neck skin for sale? I doubt it. Blood congeals within minutes, becoming essentially un-useable, and most Americans aren’t interested in chicken skin. I, however, am. And so were the folks I was with.

We collected the blood from six of the chickens in a little bowl as we slaughtered them. Another friend had brought real wild rice from Minnesota, and we mixed it with the fresh blood, and a bit of salt and pepper, and stuffed it into six neck skins. They roasted, like little sausages, along with one whole fresh chicken, while we cleaned up. An hour later we hiked up the Shawangunk Ridge to a waterfall where we went swimming and sat in the sun and then unwrapped perhaps the most unlikely, and most delicious, mountaintop picnic ever made. The neck blood sausages (which really need a nicer name) were unreal – moist, richly flavored, crispy on the outside and unlike anything I’d ever eaten.

Not everyone who reads this will be able to have the experience I did, and many will not want to. Decisions about whether or not to eat meat, where to source it and what degree of involvement you want to have are deeply personal. Back when most of us raised our own food, or knew intimately those who did, the kind of feast I enjoyed, and the slaughter leading up to it, would have been commonplace. Today it’s rare, for many reasons, and I consider myself lucky to have been able to partake in such a deeply powerful, connected and delicious experience.

Anne Dailey is a writer and locavore who grew up in Maine and now lives in the Hudson Valley where she writes about food and farms, grows a little garden and runs a small farmer-to-consumer food co-op. She maintains a blog, Raw Milk & Liver and loves doing yoga by the Hudson River. Her previous articles for Last Exit examined farm stands, heirloom tomatoes, forgotten foods, homemade saurkraut and raw milk.