Warning: Contains some moderately gory pictures; during most of the awesome gory action I was too involved to take pictures, but be aware that there are pictures of dead pigs and their insides in this post.

Last weekend I had the extraordinary privilege of helping out with the slaughter and initial butchery of two Tamworth hogs. I would rank this as one of the best experiences of my life -- I learned so much and, yes, I had a great time. I would like to tell that story here. I have tried where possible to highlight similarities and differences between our methods and those utilized historically; most of my historical information is drawn from analysis of archeological evidence, and you can read my notes from reading a particularly complete article here.

Doctor Mike, whose pigs these were, planned to harvest two, a boar and a sow. I'm not positive, but I assume they were roughly a year old (they were siblings and I think they were last year's piglets); definitely not full-grown, but also not too small either. In period hogs were typically slaughtered at around a year and a half old, with the previous spring's pigs killed early in the next year's winter. Slaughtering in June like this would have been virtually unheard of -- these pigs would have been allowed to fatten up now while food is abundant then killed just when food starts to get scarce, plus in a world without refrigeration a large animal like a pig is best to kill when the weather is cold enough to allow you plenty of time to get it all preserved.

Before getting started we spent a long time preparing our work area and our tools, particularly sharpening knives. The experts on hand (remember that through much of this I was basically a bystander) had some lively discussion about which knife to use for the actual slaughter; the ideal I guess is a knife that is very sharp, comes to a great point, made of strong steel, easy to grip, and... probably some other factors which now escape me. Here are some pictures of the work area and tools:

Bell scraper. Used for de-hairing.

Interior of bell scraper.

Knives and such

Organ receiving buckets

Sharpened tools ready to deploy

Torches for removing stubborn fur

Work table with convenient drain

This is the rig for hoisting the pig

Propane-powered scalding pot, a huge drum of water that's heated up and the pig lowered into it to loosen the hair.

 The actual slaughter was done by knife. Two people hopped into the pen with the pigs, one with a "critter catcher" (a retractable and lockable loop of cable with a sturdy handle) and one with the knife. The pigs got a tasty snack which was used to lure them to put their snouts into the the cable loop, which was then locked tight just behind the tusks. The person with the knife then severed the carotid artery and the pig would bleed out in a very short period of time. It was very respectful and care was taken to minimize suffering. The other pigs weren't phased in the slightest, in fact the only sign that they even noticed one of their number was missing was that they ate the blood-soaked straw (and dirt) left behind (we didn't catch the blood in anything).

Comparing this to actual period practice, it's broadly similar. There are plenty of period images related to pig slaughter and butchery, of which here is a sampling:


Here is a great detailed image of a slaughter (grabbing the image has been disabled) by knife.

These images suggest that some pigs were slaughtered with a blow to the head (it's also possible that this was a stunning blow and not a killing blow, much like how some animals now are stunned with electricity prior to being killed), some were killed via axe, and some were killed in much the same way we did, namely by immobilizing the animal and slitting its throat with a knife, with the most noticeable difference being that we did not keep the blood. You will also notice if you compare these period images to the pictures of Tamworth hogs that this breed is extraordinarily similar to medieval pigs, which is pretty awesome.

Here are some pictures of the hogs immediately after slaughter:

Hosing off the boar

Tusks!

More hosing off the boar

The sow

You can see the sow's tusks are smaller.

Once each pig had bled out (we did them start to finish one at a time), a tractor was used to lift the carcass out of the pen and then to transport it from the pen to the processing area. We hosed off as much dirt as possible, then attached the pig to the block-and-tackle pictured above. This was used to hoist the pig up and then lower it (half at a time as the barrel wasn't big enough to hold the whole pig) into hot water. The water needs to be between 150 and 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and you've got to keep the pig moving while it's in the water (we found that leaving it in around 5 minutes was ideal). Without the block and tackle, lifting the pig in and out of the water would have been totally impossible, and it was still a hard job even with the assistance. Moving the pig around in the water was also very physical. It's a good reminder of how much labor feeding yourself is really supposed to take.

The scalding loosens the hair enough to scrape it off using the bell scrapers. Once a "test pull" revealed the pig had soaked long enough for the hair to start coming out, we'd hoist the pig back up out of the water and transfer it to the table for scraping. With four people we got the scraping done pretty quickly -- the most difficult areas to remove hair from were the trotters and the face. The bell scraper is a really cool tool, you can sharpen it by swirling it around a wetstone, as the edge that needs to be sharpened is the one around the rim of the bell. Then you simply hold the handle and scrape the hide of the pig, scraping away from yourself and against the grain of the hair, ideally. Once basically all of the hair is scraped off you can singe off any remaining hair with propane torches. These are also used to singe around the outer casing of hooves, which then pop off easily to leave clean trotters.

In period, as you can see in the images above, flame was used to remove the hair. In fact, Valdormir and Doctor Mike explained that they used to do this with the pigs; they would heap hay around the freshly slaughtered pig and light it on fire, replenishing the hay as needed, to singe off all the hair. This method is apparently significantly more time consuming, and I imagine more smelly (although I'll be honest, a freshly killed pig in a barrel of hot water makes a memorable smell, especially when the nose of the pig is down in the barrel, you're hugging it to keep it moving around, and its rear is right by your nose; that was pretty spectacular) but I don't know if there are other advantages or disadvantages.

Here's the boar after being scraped:



The next part was the most fun (for me) and the most active, so I don't have any pictures. You can actually see the start of the next phase, dressing the pig, in the picture above -- the body is propped up on its back and held in place with some heavy boards, and an incision has been made all the way around the bung, which has then been pulled out and tied off. After this, you make a shallow ventral incision from chin to anus; in the case of the boar, we cut around his penis (which was thrown to the dogs) and between the testicles. Once you've cut down to the peritoneum, you switch the knife from slicing "out to in" to slicing "in to out", putting your hand underneath the knife inside the body cavity. This keeps you from piercing any organs, specifically the full-of-poo guts. The ribs have to be sawed apart, and you also need to sever the esophagus and trachea. You can tie off the esophagus, too, to further keep the digestive tract totally sealed off.

After this we tied the pig to the block and tackle again and lifted it up by its front feet, then sliced away the hangar steak (the diaphragm) to allow all of the organs to simply fall out of the body cavity and onto our work table. This is why the organs are also called the "pluck" -- you pluck them out! Period images seem to show pigs being hung snout down for this; I wonder why this would be, as every example I know of now is done nose-up (I assume to keep the bacteria-laden intestines at the bottom of the whole shebang). Next we went through the organs and carefully separated the delicious from the rest. I know that every part of a pig can be used, but let's get real: some parts are more worth using than others. Cleaning out the intestines is a huge undertaking and carries some risks (mostly parasites). We used a combination of hands and tiny knives to do the organ separation and I found the whole process totally awesome and much better than any fetal pig dissection I ever did in school. Here's the breakdown of what we did with the organs of both pigs:

Removed to package up for dog food: pancreas, lungs and trachea, stomachs, uterus, penis, ears? (I can't remember what we did with the ears), tail, thymus (I think; again, I don't actually remember).

Carefully separated out and packaged up individually for human consumption: hearts, livers, kidneys, testicles, caul fat (when we opened up the boar, I said "Oh! The caul is even more beautiful when it's still inside the pig!" because I am a caul enthusiast!), any leaf lard not left attached to the carcass, trotters, tongues, jowls, hangar steak. Some of these were put into brine to cure for later smoking.

Set aside to bury: Intestines, bladders, gall bladders (removed very carefully so as to not to taint the liver), etc. -- all the tail end (ha ha) of the digestive system.

The organs were put into basins of cold water:


We did not fully "break" these pigs down into individual cuts. Once the organs were out we removed the head then rinsed off and split the body. The head was further broken down (see above -- I got to take off the jowls!) but other than putting away the organs that was the end of our pig adventure. Here's what the split sides looked like:


These halves were transported to cold storage to be fully dealt with in a couple of days.

As I write this I'm eating the part of the pigs I was blessed with taking home: the caul. I ground some pork shoulder (not from these pigs, sadly!) and made crepinettes, which are basically fresh sausages. You season the meat, form it into balls or patties, wrap it in caul, and then either pan-sear or roast it (or grill it). They were yummy.

So I helped kill and clean two animals. It was an amazing experience and not remotely traumatizing. I was surprised at how much my pig-roasting, organ-eating, and science-doing background helped. I sort of worried that I'd turn out to be a soft and useless city girl, and was proud that I wasn't just a watcher but that I actually got to be helpful. I learned so much and I think I might be hooked. I really hope I get a chance to do this again; I'm likely to buy a pig from this farmer so that I can slaughter, dress, and butcher my own pig but this will have to wait until we have a chest freezer. In my dream world, I'd love to commission a pig to be raised following all period practices, then slaughter and process it according to period techniques, including historical preservation methods. That's a little beyond my resources right now I think, but it is awesome to consider.

My desire for a pig-based tattoo is growing.