Diary of a Transplant: Pig Day

  |  October 16, 2013

Writer and ex-Brooklynite Larissa Phillips’ musings from her country life.

diary.pigs

Well, we did it.

We slaughtered the pigs. On our own property, with our own hands. (And many, many helping hands; thank you, friends!) What has become of us, we who once considered harvesting a handful of basil from our South Slope backyard to be a momentous event? (Hey everyone, check out our PESTO pasta, made from our OWN BASIL!”)

Now we are killing pigs and preparing to make our own salami.

We started with two pink piglets back in May, keeping them in the stable until they were big enough to be outside and not get scooped up by a passing predator.

Sometime in June, we moved them out to their new pen in what we call the South Pasture. It had a roomy three-sided shelter and an electric fence around a lush chunk of pasture next to the creek. It all looked so lovely and pastoral; but being novice pig-farmers, we had forgotten something essential. We had not trained them to respect the electric fence.

By morning they were gone. An intensive pig search in the woods turned up one pig. The other pig never came back. We can only hope she survived and joined forces with the several other pigs that others farms we know of lost early in the summer.

That one returning pig free-ranged for about a month, becoming friendlier by the day. She would dash across the field to see us, flopping down for a belly rub. She’d graze with the ponies, and sniff noses with the dog.

She was so darn cute, except for how she also would root up the ground around the stable and in the chicken coop, destroying our drainage trenches and creating holes where none should be. Plus we were all kind of  falling in love with her. “Can’t we keep her?” the kids would ask.

Well, no. We can’t afford to feed a 400-pound pet, and besides… this is the deal, kids! We agreed on this, right? We all love bacon. Megan would happily exist almost entirely on salami sandwiches. We all love ham and sausage and prosciutto and Italian subs. So, we should be able to do this, right?

It was sort of an experiment, this whole foray in raising pigs. I figured if it was really upsetting and we all hated the endgame, we’d give up pork. But if we are going to eat pork, I felt we should be able to “own the process”, as a friend put it.

So in late June we bought another piglet — a Red Wattle pig from West Wind Acres — and put the two pigs into the pig pasture, inside the newly reinforced fencing. All summer we fed and watered them. We sprayed them with the hose, and made mud puddles for them. We brought home piggie bags from restaurants and dinner parties. We gathered bushels of apples for them and hurled the apples deep into their pasture so they could hunt for them. We petted them and talked to them and thoroughly enjoyed them.

We did not name them. They were the red pig and the pink pig. No capitals. No names.

In September, they reached slaughter weight, and we spent a the next few weeks trying to get them transported to a nearby slaughterhouse, encountering this and that hurdle. (Unlike lambs, pigs are not led so willingly to the slaughter.) In the middle of our protracted and convoluted efforts to lure the pigs up ramps, or to travel trailers over wet fields, our friends over in East Chatham offered to come over to our house and help us with the entire process — from bullet to bacon, essentially. They are restaurant people — perhaps you’ve eaten at applewood in Brooklyn? This is them. They’ve only been upstate for a short time, but they know how to do stuff.

We gratefully accepted their offer, and, on a sunny, gorgeous Columbus Day, with several friends on deck, we did it. A gun shot to the head is currently considered the quickest, most humane way to dispatch a pig. This was a concern for all of us. This was the reason to do it ourselves, without stressing the pigs with the transport to a new place. So that is what we did.

A gun shot to kill, a slash to bleed out, a dunk in a hot tub to loosen hair and skin, many hands to scrape, a winch to hoist up to a tree branch, a biology lesson to eviscerate, then a hack saw to create cuts of meat like you’d see in a butcher shop, or in a cartoon. Within seconds of the gunshot, they ceased to be pigs, and became pork. And over the course of a couple of hours, they became food.

My friend’s 13-year old daughter photographed the entire event. I wanted to put up her photos, but they belie the nature of the event. They look unreasonably gory. It’s not what it looked like at the time. (And I would put them up anyway, but I realize not everyone wants to see them.)

We now have two freezers full of meat. There are charcuterie cookbooks coming in the mail and a 50-lb bag of sea salt on order at the food coop in Albany. We will spend many weeks thawing, salting, brining, and smoking. I feel good about it. I feel we gave those pigs a fair life. I even feel okay about my vague feelings of unsettlement. I took two lives; I should feel concerned, and be thinking and rethinking the morning, to ensure we did the best we could.

The pig pasture is quiet and empty now, and will be that way until next spring, when we’ll bring home two new piglets.

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