Halfway to the slaughterhouse, I started choking on a pork rind. As I swerved in and back out of the oncoming lane I had a horrible thought: maybe I deserved to meet my end veering off Highway 69, gasping on this nameless, faceless, adulterated scrap of commodity pig, carelessly purchased as an expedient snack for a long drive through Wisconsin. It could be the karmic penalty for the part I was playing in the public consumption of a very different animal.
Valerie loves her pigs. When a new litter of piglets is born, she moves them all into the barn, lays out her sleeping bag, and spends a few nights beside them in the straw.
We lifted a large wooden crate to the bed of Mark’s pickup truck, and he carefully backed the truck up to the top of the ramp. Valerie coaxed the first pig into the pen easily enough, with Linda standing guard at a gate jerry-rigged from a length of wire fencing. She and Mark lured a few more mulefoots up near the barn, and a couple males entered the pen, while the second female we’d hoped to catch trotted back down to the wallow.
Linda explained why we were taking them to the slaughterhouse a day early: “It’s stressful to be in a truck going to the market, and they’ll get there this afternoon and have a chance to overnight in a nice pen at the slaughterhouse where they can settle down. The meat will be in a better condition. They’ll settle down and be calm tomorrow when it’s time for the slaughter to happen.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“If you treat them like a zoo animal they’ll become zoo animals,” says Linda. “That won’t be enough to really keep the genetics and the vitality of the breed. Farmers aren’t going to raise zoo animals. There’s not enough zoos. And farmers have to be able to get some income from them, and that means putting them in the food stream.”
Last year author and farmer Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the moral necessity of watching, if not participating in, the slaughter of animals he raises for meat. “That’s part of the job,” he wrote. “It’s how we come to understand what the meat itself means. And to me, the word ‘meat’ is at the root of the contradictory feelings the pig-killing raises. You can add all the extra value you want—raising heritage breed pigs on pasture with organic grain, all of which we do—and yet somehow the fact that we are doing this for meat, some of which we keep, most of which we trade or sell, makes the whole thing sound like a bad bargain. And yet compared with the bargain most Americans make when they buy pork in the supermarket, this is beauty itself.”
