I now know two families who have voguishly taken to keeping chickens in their gardens. I am breakfasting on a delicious electric-orange hour-old yolk in one of these homes when I wonder casually – now that some of the older ladies are heading past their laying prime – whether the owners will do them in. Then I make a wringing gesture. My friends look nervous. “You know; roast ’em,” I say. “Going by the eggs, they’ll be delicious.”

“Oh, no,” they say. “We couldn’t. Too old. They would taste all stringy.” That’s code for “They have cute names” and “Although we have used the phrase ‘running around like a headless chicken’ for years, we don’t want to actually witness it.” I put the case for some wine, mushrooms, thyme and slow cooking, but it’s as though I have committed some awful transgression. Urban chicken farmers, it turns out, wear red Hunter wellies for fashion, not camouflage. There are limits to the principled organic life.

Sadly, I cannot join the urban farmers, much as I like a fresh egg and a nice bag of chicken manure for fertiliser. For although some allotments allow livestock, Cricklewood does not, and we have a tiny garden and a tiny terrier that only comes when you shout “chicken” or “sausage”. So that won’t work. I'm sure I’d be no less squeamish with the neck-wringing myself – even though I have been watching a lot of live heart surgery recently for professional purposes, am a serial slug killer, once had a job executing lobsters, and can gut a mackerel – but who knows how I’d feel about murdering Leona and Cheryl? (Why do people name their chickens after X Factor stars but still find it hard to give them the chop?)

Perhaps it is because these chickens have already been through a lot in their young lives. Following campaigns by Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, any right-on urban smallholder wants a “rescue chicken”, a reject from the egg production line, too old at a year. One family I know has a pair of £1 organic rescue chickens. When they arrived they looked like they’d been out for a hen night in Blackpool and had been brought home drunk by the police. Lovely layers, though.

My brother-in-law is setting up a smallholding in Somerset next year, and in preparation I have found him a copy of John Seymour’s The New Complete Book of Self Sufficiency. Under “Chicken killing”, it says: “Grab the legs with your left hand and the neck with your right hand… Stop as soon as you feel the backbone break, or you will pull the head off.” I expect he can hardly wait.

My guru in many matters, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver, discusses chicken killing in her self-sufficiency memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. With clinical detachment, she describes cutting off a rooster’s head, and the way the wings flap afterwards with its body spewing blood. “You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened,” she says, “or you can look it in the eye and know it. People do get emotional about killing animals, but less than 5 per cent of the population is vegetarian, which means 95 per cent of us eat animals, and we know somebody killed them.”

In these days of credit crunch, you’d think we would be able to make the small step from eating the egg to personally dispatching the chicken. Meat is murder, and not just a quick click on Ocado. So I appreciate the way Fearnley-Whittingstall is always itching for a cleaver on the telly; forcing smallholders to take their pigs, ever so gently, to slaughter and eating “foraged” squirrel ragu on pasta. But you can’t go around shooting squirrels in London parks, although it’s only a matter of time before my dog brings one in. Or as Hugh says: “There’s a lot of meat on those back legs!”

There is an attempt in America and Canada – following the flush of enthusiasm for Sarah Palin’s shooting, dressing and cooking of moose – to redefine hunting not as a murderous activity but, according to one Canadian newspaper, as “good exercise, a source of organic protein, and something that helps with conservation and fosters respect for nature”. The slogans are terrific: “Eat organic: hike and grocery shop at the same time,” and “Hunting: popular for the past three million years.” The title of the article? “Girls Just Want to Have Guns.”

I’m not arming up yet, even on holiday, but I feel the moment is coming closer. At our local gastropub, the Kilberry Inn in Argyll, they serve up fantastic braised belly of pork with garlic and celeriac purée. The pigs are raised a mile or so away in Tiretigan. “I’ll tell you his name when you’ve finished,” says the owner helpfully.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

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