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Mark Kessenich is a regular customer at the small slaughterhouse where we brought his mulefoot hogs Cong and Cherry earlier this month. They’re the first swine he’s raised to slaughter, but he’s brought plenty of sheep and a few Highland cattle there before. He’s on friendly terms with with the USDA inspector that normally works on the killing floor, looking for signs of disease in the organs and carcasses of the animals that pass through, and purple-stamping her approval if they’re healthy. Mark makes it a practice to watch the inspection and butchery of his animals, because it gives him a measure of how well his husbandry techniques are working. And as his wife Linda Derrickson puts it, it’s part of their “spiritual journey” with the animals. “We have given them a good life which includes our love and respect,” she says. “They are not just hunks of meat being processed. They are individually valued, and we thank and bless them for sustaining us and our farm with their meat.”
Just before we’d arrived they’d dispatched Cong and Cherry with a pneumatic bolt, after which the hogs were hung up to bleed out. Cong was laid out on his back, and a pair of workers opened his hide from his breast to his belly, slowly separating it from his fat, which was relatively scant, as is typical of boars. He was hauled into the air by a pulley, and another chain was attached to the back of his thick, black-haired hide to pull it away from the carcass. The hide, along with his hooves, was then discarded.
Then it was Cherry’s turn. Her carcass was covered with a thick layer of back fat, and compared to Cong, she had almost twice as much leaf lard, the precious deposit of fat located around the kidneys. Like Cong, Cherry’s liver showed signs of infection and was discarded, but her heart passed as well.
