Community Pig Killing

part one - description

Killing a pig is not a small thing. Doing it in community, doing more pigs with more help, doesn't make it possible or any less work, but it does make it a little easier and way more pleasant.

The families and neighbors getting together for this event confirmed Thursday that, yes, indeed, we were on for Saturday morning, not trying to get a real early start, we would convene around eight. We sharpened our knives and made our plans. We would get our pig near the back of our pickup, shoot him and stick him ("bleeding like a stuck pig" really does become picturesque after you've done this), then load him into said truck to ride the couple of miles down the road to our neighbor's place.


This is a photo of one of our neighbor's pigs being carried to the scalding tub from their lot nearby. Their pigs, although younger, were bigger than ours. Theirs had been finished for the past 60 days on high powered hog feed, their trough never allowed to be emptied. Our pig had been raised from a youngster on excess milk and scraps, and had some corn in the last few weeks to help finish him.




This is the scald. There is a platform on one side to work from, fire underneath to heat the water to 150 degrees (chimney pipe in back you can see). The chain link is a very ingenious way to handle them in the water, making it easy to jostle them back and forth and turn them over. They are scalded until the bristles come free easily. This happens first on the ears and last on the flanks, so that when you can pull on the flank hairs and they come loose, it is time to roll him onto the platform for the scraping.




The next generation learns about scraping. He's cleaned of hair from snout to toes. An enterprising person could make her paintbrushes out of the bristles no doubt.









This is the beginning of the gutting, holding the urethra so as not to cut it and not to let the urine drain from the bladder if you do cut it. It is precise and skilled work.
















More delicate work, this time with a hacksaw. The pelvis has already been sawed in two and now the breastbone. The urethra and anus are being held at the top -- the purity of the meat is guarded closely by those who are directly going to be eating it.












A wider shot of the whole scene. Six or seven hogs were processed in all in one morning by about 15 men in all.














This is the especially skillful man assigned to the butchering, and that is our pig he is cutting into various large pieces, like hams, shoulders, ribs, middlin's.















This was what the back of the truck of one of the participants looked like after his two hogs were butchered. His comment was, "It'll be a late night tonight and a long day tomorrow putting all this up."





And back at home, those are backbones ready to be wrapped and frozen, the bags are full of sliced tenderloin, and the bowl has scraps for stir-fry. We salted both hams and both shoulders, the entire middlin', and the jowls, which we decided to do because it preserves better and eats longer that way. We didn't make sausage at all, which lots of people we know grow one whole hog just to make sausage from.

We froze the heart from which to make soup later; cleaned, cooked and froze the feet for later adding to pots of beans (no part of the pig tastes like the feet they say and I'll see since I've never eaten them before); and the liver we ground, boiled, added our own corn meal and lots of spices, and made something called "liver mush" (mush being the old name for corn meal). It was delicious fresh but it was put into tubs where it will jell & be frozen, to later be sliced and seared for sandwiches.

And finally, my artsy-craftsy photo of the day:

There must be a weeks worth of blog entries gleaned from this day.