Missouri lawmaker explains chicken beheading video

If he could do it again, Missouri state Rep. Mike Moon figures he’d find another way to express his dismay with Missouri’s legislative process than beheading and processing a chicken on camera.

“I was just frustrated,” the Ash Grove Republican told The Star on Monday.

The legislator’s top priority this summer is getting an anti-abortion bill passed, and he wanted to convey that, as a farmer, he has work to do and he wants Gov. Eric Greitens and fellow legislators to get into a higher gear.

But reaction to his video on Facebook went wild, many commenters angry, many of them accusing Moon of trying to equate the processing of a chicken to the act of abortion.

Online petitions seeking Moon’s ouster gained steam at the close of last week. One on the Care2 website asked, “What does slaughtering a chicken have to do with banning abortion?”

A Change.org petition called the video “frightening and sociopathic.”

Moon says he only meant to show himself at work, doing chores of his farm. He had 50 chickens to process on that Monday earlier in June, and he didn’t like it when Greitens referred to state legislators as career politicians.

“I do have a job outside of the legislature,” Moon said. “My intent was to take a jab at the government.”

In the video, while he talks about the legislative session, he grips the head of a chicken that is suspended from a tree and then slices it off. He continues to show the process, clipping off legs and clipping wings. When the chicken is sliced open, he pulls out its heart and says, “We need to get to the heart of the matter…” and asks for support for his legislation.

Moon had filed House Bill 14, but that has been replaced by Senate Bill 5, which currently is waiting for the Senate to consider the House version of the bill, he said.

Moon says what he showed on the video was the proper method of preparing a chicken for processing.

“If I were to think through it again,” he said, “I’d probably do something different.”

This story was originally published June 26, 2017 at 4:25 PM with the headline "Missouri lawmaker explains chicken beheading video."