Post-Mortem Laments

The pigs have been gone a week now.  Their squeals and their presence are missed.  Their empty pen remains unchanged like a child's room after she has left for college (only filled with more dung). The pen looks forlorn now.

It is easier now with just the chickens and the lambs but the pigs were the animals that gave us farm-cred.  Everyone has chickens but two fat pigs?  Not where we live.  Everyone who knew of our pig pursuit found it amusing that we would choose to raise an animal that was so visceral.  We received our share of pessimist comments like, "Oh you will grow to love those pigs so much that you will never be able to kill them".

Oh Squiggy, we hardly knew thee.

It is true that we grew to love them.  But our love was not just for their industriousness and their personalities but also because they represented an earnest attempt to raise our own food and by extension an attempt to connect with our most base requirements of existence.  Indeed, when our four-year old witnessed the pigs slaughter he wanted to know why the men were taking the pigs away after they were skinned and gutted.  (Answer: the butchering was done at their shop after at least a day of hanging in a refrigerator).

The men were able to kill, skin, gut and saw in half the two pigs in under an hour.  It was numbing the speed at which the men were able to process Lenny and Squiggy.  All the while, I watched and felt like a useless voyeur.  After all,  these were the same little pigs that we personally selected and raised over four months with nothing but the finest kitchen scraps.

It's just a flesh wound.

We owed it to them, no to ourselves, to take the time and love to kill and butcher them.  Nothing says love like a .22 to the head.  The industrial speed of the slaughter raises the question of whether raising pigs in this manner was only a small step removed from buying flesh at Costco.  The point to raising our own food was not simply to enjoy the fruit of our labor but also to learn and benefit from the process itself.

Going completely off the gird is no mean feat but that was never our goal.  There must be limits to hobby farming lest we start making plans to breed pigs and build a castration shed to barrow our hogs.  It is tough to balance true diy farming with working a job full-time.  Next year, the pigs will get slaughtered by hand and with much love.