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Slaughter The slaughterhouse sits
on top of the highest hill around. Both entrances,
people's and animal's, face the view across a meadow rich with fall colors:
green and gold grasses broken occasionally by fallen, weathered tree trunks
and studded here and there with brown boulders. A white cow grazes, and
beyond her the meadow tumbles down into an iridescent valley of foliage. It
is a day to be grateful just for being alive. The two pigs I have
brought to slaughter are in the back of the pickup, lying on a bed of straw
under a camper top. They have no names because everyone agreed naming them
would strengthen any attachment we might develop with them. They have made
the 45-minute trip with little fussing.
Last spring, raising pigs
seemed like a nearly perfect idea. They would eat the poison ivy that
prevented us from cultivating a patch of ground. They would eat our leftovers
and spoiled food, becoming the ultimate composters.
We would have meat without contributing to the worldwide crisis of
grain-to-meat nutrition loss. We would join the historical circle of farmers
who've raised a yearly pig, among them the eminently sensible E.B. White. We
would enhance our self-sufficiency. But most of all, I said, we
would force ourselves into awareness of the real relationship we've always
had, but never felt, with the animals we have eaten.
Never before had I looked in the eye of the animals I consumed. I joked about
getting the pigs, "We'll either eat them or we'll become
vegetarians." *
* * I go inside to make my
arrangements. I'm in a small butcher shop next to a cooler full of steaks and
hot dogs and other cuts, and a few local cheeses. At the end is a small counter and a cash register. For a moment I'm
buoyed by the evidence of smallness of scale. The animals that gave this meat
were fed by people, not machines. They were no doubt kept in pens large
enough to move in. Their meat will be eaten by the same people who raised
them, implying a level of awareness inaccessible to customers in a
supermarket. I place my order with a
woman in a bloodstained butcher's apron: cut the hams in half, cut the pork
chops an inch thick, slice the bacon, save the fatback for soap. I pay my
$120 and the woman tells me to take the pigs around to the holding pen. *
* * When the pigs arrived in
June, none of us were prepared for dealing with personalities. The first
proof that these were sentient beings was their fear. They cowered against
the back of the little pen I'd built them for a temporary home. Their tails
were straight, which Cynthia said was a sign of distress. We worried and
asked our farmer friend Dan about it, but he said they were just getting used
to their new surroundings. They were small, no more
than 24 inches long, a female and a male. The male had been castrated, said
Dan, which shocked me. No one had told me this would happen, but why would
they? I hadn't known even what gender the pigs would be or how old. All I
knew was that I'd given Dan a check for $90 for two pigs. After their fear, the
piglets revealed their determination. They spent nearly every waking minute
digging up the ground of their pen with their snouts. Who knew their snouts
were so strong? It took them just one day to turn up their four-by-eight
patch of lawn to cratered dirt. Day by day they moved up the fence line
eating our poison ivy and ruining their strip of lawn. Next I encountered their
love of freedom. One morning on my way to feed them before work, they were
gone. I thought they'd buried themselves under the straw again, but they
hadn't - they just weren't there. Then I heard a snort on the other side of
the fence. They sauntered sleepily from under the tall grass and skunk
cabbage where they'd apparently spent the night and walked through the gate I
held open for them. Now that they had the run
of the enclosed lawn, they made the most of it. Cyn and I, dressed in our
fancy work suits, and she in heels, chased them around the lawn for a few
minutes while the kids whooped on the deck watching us. We were late for
work, but this was fun for the piglets. Like children, they kept it up until
the adults' refusal to play got boring, and they moped into the pen. They got out often after
that, even after we moved them to the big pen on the other side of the lawn
fence, even after they were huge, no matter how many extra stakes I drove to
secure the hog fencing. One day they stopped traffic on the road in front of
our house. *
* * The holding pen is a
concrete room at the other end of the building. Several animals wait there
already, separated into a few enclosures by tubular livestock gates tied
together at the corners. The animals make no sound. They are still. I can
feel their disorientation. A man comes through the holding pen from the
slaughterhouse to help. He wears tall rubber boots. I think he's the one who
will kill them. I've been told this
place could mistreat animals, and I have agonized over this for days. I'm
anxious to make contact with this man, to evoke kindness for my pigs.
"How's it going?" I ask. He looks at me, a little surprised and a
little open. "I've had better days," he says, clearly wanting to
say more. This is a man in deep depression. "It's just …" he
falters and shrugs, "… it's just life, I guess." He is
sharing his pain - a good sign, I feel, and I try to commiserate, "It's
tougher than ever to make it these days." I wonder if he is depressed
because to make his living he kills his fellow creatures. *
* * When the piglets had been
with us for only a couple of days they began to greet us whenever we
appeared. They barked and jumped around their pen like dogs. Even with food
in their bucket, they greeted us this way. When Cynthia and the children
returned home each noontime and walked onto the back deck to check on the
pigs, they got the same reception. In October, when the pigs
weighed more than 150 pounds each and seemed too big to run, they still
careened around the pen in greeting. The person they knew best was probably
our next-door neighbor. She visited them often and they loved to touch noses
through the fence with her dogs. She showed me one day how she could scratch
one of them behind the ear until he swooned and plopped his rump to the
ground, holding his head up for more. "I'm so sorry they have to
go," she said. In their last few days, I
kept trying to achieve the relationship with them I'd hoped for all along. I
wanted to emulate the native peoples I'd heard about, to thank the pigs for
feeding me and my family, to show them respect and understand our roles as
sacrifice and survivor. I wanted communion. But it didn't happen. I felt only
separation, guilt, and dread. "They're giving up their lives,"
I said to Cynthia one night as we went to bed. *
* * Don and I open the
tailgate to unload the pigs. They cower against the front of the truck bed. I
grab one of their front legs and pull. He wrenches away. I grab an ear.
Desperate to get it over with, I pull and then I'm shocked that I'm willing
to hurt him in this of all moments, so I let go of his ear. I grab both front
legs. He moves far enough for me to wrap my arms around his neck in a kind of
embrace. I pull him the rest of the way to the tailgate and ease him onto the
loading dock. The second pig follows with only a little coaxing. The man opens the stock
gate a bit, and the first pig walks calmly toward the opening. I hear an
animal scream briefly inside the building. The man takes an oversized stick
of orange chalk and scrawls my initials onto the back of the first pig.
Reading from behind the animal, I watch him draw a large fluorescent
"L" just behind the shoulders and then a "B" just below
it towards the rump. I feel like he's making an entry in the Akashic record. The pig makes his way into the pen,
touches noses through a stock gate with the other pigs in there. The man
scrawls "LB" on the second pig, and suddenly both pigs are inside.
There's no time to say goodbye -a foolish thought, I tell myself. I hadn't
been able to connect with them before, how could I possibly now. And this is
no place to grieve - my business is done here, it's time to go. *
* * Cynthia and I returned to
the slaughterhouse a week later to pick up the frozen meat. She wouldn't get
out of the car, the place frightened her so. We rode home without a word
about the pigs. It has been three weeks
since I delivered the pigs, and I'm still sickened at the thought of eating
meat. Cynthia too, though we've both had chicken a couple of times. The pork
is still in our freezer but we've made arrangements to sell it on consignment
through Brookfield Farm, the community-supported farm we belong to. The other day I needed to
work through lunch, and I asked a co-worker to bring me a sandwich when she
returned from the restaurant she was going to. After she left, I realized I
had reflexively asked her for a ham and cheese sandwich. By the time she
returned, I was famished and I ate it. It made me nauseous. Lee
Barstow, November 1997 |