When you buy chickens or ducks in a supermarket, their hair is ripped clean for you already and you just need to cook them.
However, if you have a farm raising chickens or ducks, you need to pull out their hair before cooking them.
I say "pull out" because their hair and its root must be removed, so I don't think people "scraped a chicken's hair before cooking" because the root of the hair is still in the chicken and it won't be nice eating it with a bit of hair in its skin.
Do we have a verb to express "pulling hair of chickens/ ducks/ birds etc before cooking them" in everyday English?
For example, I pulled out/ plucked the chicken's feathers before cooking it
Best Answer
Whether you are talking about hair or feathers—do birds even have hair?—the correct verb is to pluck, exactly as you used in your example at the end.
This is true in the context of mammals as well, even humans. People often refer to "plucking one's eyebrow hairs" for example, or nose hairs. Plucking a wide area of skin using hot wax is referred to as waxing but has the same effect as removing each hair individually.