There’s some complicated temporality going on in this sentence, from a comment by (kuro5hin.org founder) rusty in a metafilter thread today about homeless folks stealth-camping in Heathrow airport: 

“I swear the last time I was there someone was killing and plucking a (formerly) live chicken, in preparation for roasting it over an impromptu mid-terminal campfire.”

Emphasis mine.  It’s important to clarify that the chicken was formerly live because it had been killed a few words earlier in the sentence.  Very breaking news, that; has a weird charm to it.

The easy nitpick, if I had to pick nits (though that wasn’t really my motivation here): if you drop the “live”, you can drop the “(formerly)” too.  After all, if you’re killing a chicken, it’s pretty clearly alive to start with.  Though I suppose rusty’s rendering makes it explicit that the plucking happens post-killing, so there’s a distinction in meaning in its favor.