For thousands of years, pigs have grunted, squealed and perished – butchered in back alleys, side yards and behind arched cellar doors, the cobbles, dirt, and grass running blood.
The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is the process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.
Lewis Mumford (1895 – 1990). Green Memories: The Story of Geddes Mumford. Harcourt, Brace & Company, (1947).
If your appetite or even all your life’s ills could be expiated by a rack of baby-backs, six pork tenderloin medallions or purification with the blood of a slaughtered swine, would you do the deed yourself?
Additional information:
- Billy Pilgrim tells us about Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death and his experiences and journeys through time as a soldier in WWII.
- Support Your Local Slaughterhouse – a dysfunctional industrialized food system incapable of producing safe meat.
- Exposing Animal Abuse: Undercover Investigations at mercyforanimals.org
- Humane farming, is it possible? The Humane Farming Association.
From the Porkopolis Archive:
- an excerpt from ‘A Technical Supplement’ by Thomas Kinsella
- Elizabeth Howard recounts ‘The Rendering’
- ‘Slaughtering pigs‘ illustrated by Richard Müller
- ‘Brueghel’s Pig‘ runs with a knife stuck through its hide
- ‘The Slaughtered Pig’ by Barent Fabritius