Brian Cassidy

134, 16

10/18/04

The Butcher Shop

 

 

            Around noon on Thursday, my roommate and I walked drearily to the local Cal Poly slaughterhouse, or abattoir, where we would see a pig slaughter.  The building we arrived at looked eerie on the schoolÕs campus.  The abattoir stood alone, next to the bullpen and at the end of a dirt road.  We walked in and a female student greeted us and told us to put on an apron, a hairnet, and a hardhat.  The room smelled of warm blood.  There were five people in yellow aprons and white hardhats amiably working together butchering  a pig, which was currently hanging by its feet, bleeding from its neck.  I felt disappointed when I realized we were late, and had missed the pigÕs death.  I felt my stomach jump into my throat as my visual and nasal senses were overcome with blood. 

            Having been bled, the pig was lowered into a large basin full of water heated to 140 degrees Fahrenheit.  Unconscious, the pig didnÕt scream or move as it was lowered into the scalding water.  The boiling bath loosens up the pigÕs hair and nails, which are removed before the pig is butchered.  After the bath, two butchers used levers to heave the pig from the water onto the ÒCincinnation.Ó  Resting on the wedge above a giant egg-beater on its side, the pig upon the Cincinnation was the most surreal part of the process.  The pig spun around awkwardly and violently while the amiable foreman  sprayed it with a high pressure hose causing chunks of pig hair to fly through the air.  Stepping away from the jettisoning hair clumps, yet not taking our eyes off of the spinning pig, the whole room seemed to shrink as our focus did upon the pig.

            My stomachÕs queasiness was slowly subsiding as the pig was taken off of the menacing Cincinnation and onto a metal stretcher.  As the butchers pulled off the pigÕs toe nails and began scraping the pig, the head butcher explained that the pig weighed 250 pounds, while the platform it was resting on was made to sustain up to 180 pounds.  He remarked, ÒAs with all things at the university, you have to be flexible.Ó  I chuckled, the uneasy feelings melted away, and my stomach returned to its regular position.  Once its toes were off, the pig was hung by its feet in the middle of the room in order to be further scraped.  The skinning gets rid of the hair and the upper layer of dead skin.  It calmed me to listen to the head butcher talk about the process and even make a few jokes. 

            An assistant to the foreman handed me a large plastic bag and a piece of string, and then walked towards the doorway, where they brought in another pig.  I was happy to see another, because I had missed the initial process of killing the pig.  The pig could smell the blood of its own species, and began to scream scarily loud, echoing off the walls of the old building.  The FDA inspector informed me that newer butchering facilities use an air circulation system in order to prevent that exact problem.  The pig started squirming and trying to fight the impending doom .  The first attempted shock gun didnÕt make the pig unconscious, so a man grabbed another shock bolt gun to hit the skull and render the pig unconscious.  The screaming ended with a disquieting silence.  They then hung the pig by its feet and cut the pigÕs jugular open.  Blood began to spew out of its neck, splattering on the floor below where another man hosed the blood towards a grate in the floor.  I turned back to the lifeless corpse of the first pig, which became a comfort for my eyes.  When all was calm the foreman asked me for the plastic bag that I held in a vice grip.

            He cut the first pigÕs rectum up to the tail, put the bag around the end of the large intestine, and ask me to come over and tie it off.  At this point, part of me wanted to inform him that I was an English major, present only to watch.  My curiosity drove me to the pig, where I tied two knots around the rectum, tighter than I had tied anything before.  He told me that they tie off the rectum so that when they gut the pig no innards splatter on the floor.  Next, They chopped the pigÕs head off.  I felt the uppermost vertebrae, smoother than a stone found along the banks of a river.  They gutted the pig, letting its stomach, intestines, heart, lungs, and liver fall into a tray below.  The tray oozed red and green from the blood and bile.  As this pig was gutted and moved into a corner to be sawed in half, a third pig was brought in, filling in the assembly line.

            The friendly foreman sawed the pig in half, separating the vertebrae, a really delicate process.  The leaf fat was then discarded, and the FDA regulator inspected the pig.  After passing inspection, the workers in yellow aprons moved the carcass into a huge refrigerator.  Inside an amiable man told us all about Cal Poly meat.  The meat produced on campus is choice meat, sold at a good price right here in a building next to campus market.  The animals on campus are all used for butcher, sale, or research.  He had more work to do, but told us he could talk about their work all day.

            Having witnessed what goes on to provide us our meat, I felt even more comfortable with what I eat.  The camaraderie amongst the butchers extended towards all inside the room .  Seeing people work on something that means so much to them with such passion was as much of a rare experience as seeing pigs slaughtered.   The butchersÕ confidence and excitement made for an unforgettable spectacle, visually stimulating and oddly heart-warming.