Legend has it that old chickens get so tough you can boil them until the bones disolve and the meat is still tough. This legend, I can say from first-hand experience, is no lie.

Friends asked me to bump off their last hen because it had stopped laying ("because there is no rooster"). Yeah, right, like that matters - they'd been sold hens so old they were just about out of eggs. Raccoons had managed to snag all the other hens and extrude them through a standard chicken wire mesh (very messy).

So I wacked this chicken and let it fly (very good flier), fished it out from under a car and took it home and peeled the feathers. I figured it was going to be tough, but boy was it tough! I only had a few hours of boiling before they were going to come over and have it for dinner and it certainly wasn't going to be presentable.

Anyway, I solved the problem by cutting their chicken up real fine, and going over the the grocery and buying another chicken to add to the recipe so dinner would actually be edible and look like chicken. They did remark though that the chicken stew was "a bit tough in spots".