Thoughts on Slaughter

Wooly Pigs is about to send our first pigs to market. Some of the first pigs are going to some famous American restaurants, including The French Laundry. This is a huge deal for everyone involved, and a bit stressful.

Restaurants can only serve USDA-inspected meat. Farmers trying to deliver high-quality meat have to work hard to control stress before slaughter. USDA slaughter typically involves things that naturally stress the pigs, so the farmer has to really work hard to keep things calm. As it is possible to ruin an entire animal's meat with stress, the farmer is looking at potentially throwing away entire animals.

The farmer can easily control breed, feed and how he raises the animal (important determinants of meat quality). But the law forbids the farmer from managing slaughter, except when someone buys a pig or half a pig, and has it slaughtered on farm. When the farmer slaughters on farm, he's in a position to deliver the highest quality meat.

Slaughter

Many people don't think much about slaughter, despite it being an integral part of eating meat. Few know that typical American slaughter really hurts meat quality. Almost nobody knows about alternatives to typical slaughter.

Slaughter is quite simple: the pig is stunned, typically by being hit on the head. While the pig is senseless, the butcher cuts an artery so that it quickly bleeds to death, without recovering consciousness. Here is a guide to the process.

Stress before slaughter is bad for the animal and the meat eventually made from it. Stress reduces meat quality.

Ideally the pig is going about his business when he falls unconscious, perhaps due to a blow to the head. He's dead soon after, without ever waking up. What we see may look messy, violent and bloody - but from the pig's point of view, he lost consciousness and that was it; he never felt anything bad. Imagine dying in one's sleep.

This no-stress method of slaughter is only possible with on-farm slaughter, as slaughtering a pig any other way only involves more stressors. Loading pigs used to living outside into a truck, and then taking them to a slaughterhouse, stresses them. If the pigs have to be herded somewhere, even into a mobile slaughter unit that visits their farm, there's typically some stress. Just smelling strange stuff can stress pigs.

A farmer who slaughters himself can waste fewer pigs by not killing the stressed ones. If a pig is stressed, he lives another day. Eventually he'll get slaughtered. Such careful selection isn't usually possible if animals go to a plant: all of them get slaughtered, relaxed or not, and the farmer has to sort it out later. That leads to a lot of waste: a producer determined to only sell the best meat has to discard the low-quality carcasses.


Comparison With Austria

Austria has a meat inspection law, but it is different enough to allow small farmers to consistently give their customers better meat.

In Austria, a farm can have a slaughterhouse. It gets inspected, and then the farm may slaughter on site. There's no inspector on the farm. The farmer is supposed to get the pigs into the slaughter room and do everything there. After he prepares the halves, the farmer takes the carcass to an off-site state inspector, who examines it. If it is OK, he gives it the necessary stamps, and the meat may be sold.

The interesting thing is that unlike in the USA, slaughter does not necessarily happen in view of the inspector. The farmer can bend the rules.

This leads to small farmers like Christoph Wiesner doing the following: they kill the pig in its pen, as with custom slaughter in America. They then drag the pig into their slaughter room and prepare the carcass (scald and evisceration) for inspection.

When the inspector gets the halves, he can't tell that the pig was slaughtered in a pen. He just sees the meat. If the meat is wholesome, it gets the stamps, at which point the meat is legal. It might even get sold in a very fancy restaurant like this one. In America, that would be a huge scandal.

Of course, the farmer is supposed to kill the pig on the kill floor - but getting the pigs to go into the room is tricky, and might alarm them. It is easier and more humane to slaughter them in their pens. The farmers who do this argue that the meat is just as safe: whether the animal dies in its pen or in a clean room, it is the same.


Foodies

Individual consumers are strongly advised to do custom
slaughter. There are numerous reasons:

• More humane for animals, better meat quality
• Buying a half or whole is cheaper per pound. Just buy a freezer to hold the meat, or share with friends and family.
  
• Custom butchers are motivated to process your meat how you want it. They are usually good at what they do.

Advice for the Savvy Customer

• Visit the farm before you buy. Make sure they are finishing the hogs on good stuff, like acorns or barley. Continental Europeans have a system they use to produce good meat. If you follow the system, you get the desired results.
  
• Freezers are cheap to buy and run. You can buy a lot of meat and eat it over several months.
  
• If you buy between January and July, you might get a discount - it is slow then.
  
• If you can stomach it, go watch them slaughter your pig. If they screw it up, tell them you want one killed properly. You are going to eat it - you might as well watch.
• If you are there when they kill the pigs, take the one that has the carcass you want. E.g. take the leaner or fatter pig. Most people don't care, so if they are killing a few, you get the one you want. If you want the heads or organs of the other pigs, you can probably get those too, for free.
  
• If you buy an older pig, make sure it hangs in the cooler long enough. E.g. 5-7 days for a year-old pig. Your custom butcher will probably be OK with this. But your local USDA plant may be too busy to allow your meat to rest; they'll want the meat in and out. Yet another reason to do custom slaughter.