The night and a mail from a friend clarified my thoughts, so here it is:
 Raising my own animals bring lots of turmoil.  I think it is easier for a woman to be a nurturer. Taking life, even for sustainance, is difficult.  Cutting the thread f life is, I think, one of the hardest lessons of womanhood. Even just accompanying the dying is difficult.   I even hate thinning the vegetable patch, playing God with which will survive, and which will be culled.  I can see myself wintering with my 80 chicken become 600 chicken in my living room. See what I mean?  

I see what you mean. I disagree with you though Marie. I had a farm when I was younger and the man I was with said to me, be careful making friends with the animals. He was right. They aren't four-legged versions of humans. The chickens I had would often get caught underfoot of the cattle and I'd come out in the morning to find one dead every so often. By the squashed condition of the hen I could see that the cows were not unhinged by this, they didn't tip-toe around her after squashing, or tsk-tsk the cow responsible for the initial squash, or come to her aid prior to being squashed. They'd mindlessly step on her over and over, and when her life was done they did what cows do: they'd wander around and smash stuff under their hooves in the farmyard until she was a postage stamp of feathers.
 
In the way that I had to take to thinning weeds in my garden so the corn could grow, I would sometimes have to kill the baby chicks after they were born because they were too many. I felt sad for the mother about this until the man also reminded me that hens do not know how to count.
 
We raised beef cattle for friends and took them to the processor one afternoon. The charolais that I had named T-Bone was in the line and she started to pull away from it to come to me as a familiar like she usually did. The man who was keeping them in line to move them into the slaughter barn caned her hard in the snout to move along, and she looked back at me with a bloody-nose. I could have cried but I knew she was meant to be food for families. I didn't name another cow again.
 
I'm sure that I don't have to make the point that no culling cuts down the life span of all the plantings, but I'll go ahead anyhow. I chose not to do that once as an experiment. I wanted to see what would happen to a row of onions that were thinned and to ones that weren't. Ofcourse, you know the result.
 
It is hardly playing God though since for all of us our day will come to be culled. If we are capable then we simply have to choose the best course of action for our lives and those lives around us. It would be irresponsible not to, and evenutally even, the ultimate cruelty.
 
I will add one more thing that will probably cause some recoiling. When my husband was a boy he lived in the country and the family was very, very poor. A neighbor, a local farmer, asked Royce and his brothers to run trapline to keep the animals out of his fields. They used legholds and would trap fox, coon, mink, musrat... . The legholds as you know held the animal sometimes all day until the boys could get out of school to check the traps. They would go out in the evenings with a club and kill the animals, clean them, and the deal was that anything they caught they could keep and sell the hides. It was not a lot of money but it often bought groceries or kept their home (which was a double wide trailer) in fuel oil over the winter.
 
It is a fortunate person who can toy with the idea of keeping 600 chickens in her living room.
 
 

Hi Marie,  
 
And I saw that you did buy some chickens too which is wonderful. I hope you will post photos.
I used to go to a swappers day in a rural town close to me to find the most unusual chickens to keep in the barnyard, even then I was interested in having a creative space.  
 
Legholds are cruel, I hate them. But I understand their purpose for farmers. Fur farms are another ball to toss around, just senseless. Along with lab animal testing.  But regarding fur, I saw a report on CNN recently where many people are wearing dogs and cats imported from Asia and don't even realize it.