Meet your meat.

Well, I have another new experience for y'all.  This morning I went along with Farmer P and one of the other interns to help slaughter a pig down the road in preparation for our harvest party pig roast tomorrow.  It was a gorgeous fall morning, and she was big and lovely with white eyelashes and happy mud all over her back, munching on veggies in her pen.  We got the hose and knives and buckets all laid out, brought the skidloader around to the side of her pen.  The farmer approached, gun in hand, and she came right up to the fence looking up at him and he shot her in the forehead. 

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You know?...there are worse ways to go.  I don't think I'd mind it myself one day when I'm very old and very very tired... There was not even a second of fear or anxiety...she had no hint that anything was wrong since people and machines go by her pen every day.  She'd had some extra helpings of compost the night before and seemed cheerful and content... and then it was over.  Farmer P hopped over the fence and cut her throat on each side, and she laid down and bled out.  When she was done twitching, they poked holes behind the tendons in her back heels, stuck the hooks through and chained the hooks to the skidloader, lifted her up and over the fence where we started to "dress" her (is anyone else weirded out by this term?).  The mood lightened a bit after the skinning began...as he says, he doesn't like to kill and nothing likes to die...I did cry for a moment...it's hard to see life leave a living thing.  You must feel it sometimes...even seeing a mosquito twitching on my arm after I've slapped it gives me a twinge of something...you know? 

It was an absolutely fascinating process...made me wonder why I didn't go to med school (organs are SO AMAZING!), but so thankful I discovered this work...  It also made me even more horrified by the idea of raising a bunch of animals indoors with so little room, only to ship them off to a slaughterhouse in a matter of months...but I won't get into that...or how this is recalibrating my thoughts on being vegetarian.  Everything about the process this morning felt...good...or at least how it should be if you choose to take an animal's life.  I feel like it's something we should have to work for and invest ourselves in if we're going to take advantage of the benefits... like I shouldn't eat what I can't bring myself to kill and clean myself.  Anyways... I'll need to do some more thinking before I write more on this. 

I am so totally completely in love with fall.  The whole farm is still sighing a huge sigh of relief from August, and things are slowing down...We're still working hard, but the mood has shifted...patience has more or less returned along with our senses of humor and interest in actually spending non-work time together.  It's nice.  I give farming in the fall two thumbs up...maybe even three.

I'm heading home in two weeks to take a job with the Iowa Farmers Union for the winter.  I'm looking forward to several months of learning through reading and conversation instead of through callous-and-bicep-building. 

Here are some photos. Sorry for the disjointed entry.