door to door castration of cockerels service

when we lived in a kampong and reared chickens, my mother would reserve the largest cockerels as offerings to the sky god (tnee kong) on the 9th day of the lunar new year.

to ensure that the prized birds grew to the desired size, she had them castrated when the cocks reached a certain age/size. no, she did not and could not do the job herself. you needed skill, knowledge and experience to perform the delicate operation successfully. there was this man - he carried his tools in a deep cane basket - who would move from kampong to kampong to do the caponization.

i had watched him doing his work often enough to know how it was done. first, he would grab the wings of the cockerel and with a swift twist locked them together. to immobolise the bird further, he would step on their legs. the bird had to be stretched out to its full length to expose the rib cage area. feathers in this rib cage area were removed and the skin disinfected.

using a sharp scalpel or knife, an incision was made. he had to make sure the incision was deep enough to expose the abdominal air sac covering the intestines and the other organs. he would use two rust-proof clips, one on each side of the opening, to stretch the incision and keep it open.

with a thin fishing line attached to the end of a rod, he would insert it into the hole and skilfully worked on dislodging the testes, one at a time. another of his tool was a scoop which he used to fish out the testes. he would drop the removed teste into a container of water. the testes were yellowish in colour and each, the size of a peanut.

not all operations,however, were successful. once in a while, one of the cockerels would succumb to infection and die.