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12th December, 2008 - Farewell To Dick For the past 6 months, our 2 pigs - Dick & Dom - have enjoyed the luxury of roaming around their large enclosure, troughing up grubs, roots and generally having a good time.
However, their fate was always pre-determined and today it was time for Dick to be slaughtered.
This has been our 3rd year of keeping pigs and so we are familiar with the process and Dan spent the morning get everything ready and to hand.
Just after lunch, Dan seperated the 2 pigs and gave them each some blackcurrant scraps that our friend Andrew had left over from his cassis making session.
At 2pm, Francis, our butcher and our friend Mark arrived to begin the process.
The first stage was to attach a rope to Dick's back leg so that he could be tied to the leg of the climbing frame while he was actually being killed.
It is important to keep the animal calm throughout the process as if they have "an adrenaline rush", the meat becomes tainted.
As a result, with his head in a bucket of food, Dick is led towards the climbing frame.
In the past, the butcher we've used would then hit the pig over the head with a sledgehammer, stunning it and then cut the throat to kill it.
Francis though, had a different method - he used a "captive bolt" gun. So while the pig was still eating from the bucket, Francis placed the gun on his head and with a small squeeze of the trigger, the pig was killed instantly.
Not stunned, but killed outright within a fraction of a second.
The only disadvantage of this method is that the blood letting has to be done manually as the pig's heart is no longer beating.
We feel it is only right to use every part of the pig and so the blood is collected straight away in order to make black pudding.
With the blood now drained, it's time to clean the carcass.
First off, the top layer of skin and hair is actually burnt off using a blow torch. At the same time, the scorched areas are then scraped using a wire brush, which is a lot harder than it looks.
After scorching and scrubbing both sides of the carcass, it is then washed using a pressure washer - this then leaves a pure white carcass.
The only part of the pig that is not used is the toe-nails and so these are removed.
The next step is to remove the intestines and inards - this is much easier when the pig is suspended vertically and as we didn't have the luxury of a tractor, we improvised by using the climbing frame.
With everything removed from inside the body, the final task is to simply split the carcass in 2.
These 2 halves were then hung up inside our shed to firm up overnight, before the butchering and cooking the following day.
While all this was happening, our other pig, Dom, was far too busy troughing and rooting around in the mud to notice what was going on and despite the occassional grunt when he found a worm, he did not appear distressed or concerned in any way...
...he may feel differently next week, when it's his turn though! View The Blog Read All Pig Stories |
