If another 15 minutes had passed, Jo Ann would not have lived. A sow and her entire litter had escaped their crate and gathered in the hallway. Pigs display a similar impulse toward collaboration in the wild. Highly social animals, pigs in nature live in small, matriarchal groups called sounders, typically composed of sows and their young.
Siblings also form close relationships, and often maintain these bonds into adulthood. People who care for pigs on sanctuaries, or who live with pigs as companions, know they are identical to dogs in their love of giving and receiving affection. In healthy environments, pigs form deep and lifelong friendships not only with other pigs, but with individuals of other species, including dogs , rabbits, and humans.
Pigs are very expressive, and greet one another enthusiastically by touching snouts and vocalizing. Pigs employ more than 20 different sounds with additional subtypes of some sounds to communicate during feeding, courtship, exploring, and other social activities. In a natural habitat, a few days before birth pregnant sows leave the group and begin to search for a safe, secluded site in which to build a nest. Sows are very particular about the nest environment and may travel for miles before finding a spot that feels sufficiently private and protected.
Once the site has been chosen, the sow constructs a soft, comfortable nest by digging a hollow in the earth, filling it with grass, leaves and twigs, and lining it with branches. But on factory farms, the lives of mother pigs and their piglets are a living hell. Smithfield Foods, the largest pig producer in the United States and in the world, keeps more than 1. Others go insane from boredom and despair, constantly biting the bars of their crates and banging their heads against the metal doors.
Inevitably these floors, on which sows nurse, sleep and stand, are covered in accumulated layers of waste, which is demoralizing for the sows; pigs are extremely fastidious animals and, when permitted, always establish separate toilet areas far from their nests. Slatted flooring also causes severe leg problems for sows and piglets. The deeply rooted drive in sows to express natural nesting and mothering behaviors is completely thwarted in the cruel confines of a farrowing crate.
Though sows spend hours lining their secluded nests with soft materials in nature, in farrowing crates they receive no bedding whatsoever. Sows may even wear down their front hooves and suffer from abrasions on their snouts from performing this behavior in contact with the concrete floor.
Follow the leg to the center of the carcass. Open the skin down the middle of the carcass. Note: If the pig was male, you will need to remove the pizzle penis at this step. Consult step 10 for instructions on this. Once the skin has been opened, work from the legs to the center of the body by cutting between the skin and the fat until all the skin is removed. Some people prefer to loosen the skin around the hind legs and from the belly and then pull the skin off. This method can be faster, but it increases your chance of pulling the fat off the carcass, which can negatively impact the quality of the meat.
If you do not want to keep the head, you do not need to skin it. Once you have the skin removed down to the head, move on to Step 9. Locate the base of the skull and make a cut slightly above the skull that exposes the vertebrae. You can use a saw to sever the backbone or insert your knife between the skull and the first vertebrae to separate the skull from the backbone. Using your knife takes a little bit of skill and patience.
Once the backbone is severed, slowly continue to cut around the head until only the trachea windpipe and esophagus are attached.
The trachea feels like a rigid structure with cartilage rings. This is a large, hard structure where the esophagus and trachea fuse together.
This will make the removal of the internal organs much easier. Lower the carcass so you can reach the point where the back legs meet.
Place your knife where the back legs meet slightly off center, and using light pressure, cut the skin open moving towards the navel. If you cut exactly down the center, you chance cutting into the pizzle and contaminating the carcass with urine.
That is the pizzle. Once you get close to the navel, carefully pull the pizzle towards you and use your knife to cut behind it to separate it from the body wall. Continue this cut down to the navel using caution to not cut into the body wall or the pizzle and separate the end of the pizzle from the carcass. Then, using the same technique, move towards the tail separating the pizzle as you go. Once you reach the point between the back legs near the anus, cut the pizzle off the carcass.
The first step in evisceration is called bunging. Stand behind the carcass so the tail is close to you. Use your knife to carefully cut around the anus. You should not be cutting into the muscles of the ham, but right next to them. Once you have loosened the anus, you can grab it to move it side to side to continue cutting the connective tissues holding the bung in place. Next, move to the belly side of the carcass. Starting where the back legs meet and hold your knife parallel to the length of the carcass, using light pressure, score the skin from between the back legs to the sternum.
Then, holding your knife in the same starting position, slowly open the body cavity. Do not stab into the carcass to prevent puncturing the intestines and bladder. Once you have opened a large enough hole to insert your hand, place your hand that is holding the knife inside the carcass so the blade of the knife is outside the carcass at a 90 degree angle and the handle is inside the carcass and pressed against the inside of the body wall.
In one swift motion, open the carcass down to the sternum. It is critical to not remove your hand until you have made the full cut. Opening the carcass with your knife handle inside will prevent you from puncturing any organs and contaminating the carcass.
Stopping before you have reached the sternum and trying to start again drastically increases your changes of contamination. Once you have opened the carcass, use your hands to pull the bung downwards and out of the carcass. You can use string or a zip tie to close off the anus to prevent fecal contamination. Then working slowly, continue to pull the organs forward and out of the body. You may need to use a knife to cut the ureters or heavy connective tissue.
Be careful not to cut the intestines or stomach. When most of the organs are removed, you will see the diaphragm muscle with associated white-colored connective tissue separating the digestive organs from the heart and lungs. Once you pull the esophagus free, the digestive organs should be easily separated from the carcass.
Place the organs into a tote or other container. Next, cut the connective tissue of the diaphragm. Use your knife to cut the large vein that runs along the backbone. Place your finger into the vein as a handle and cut between the vein and the backbone towards head of the carcass.
Then, loosen the connective tissue around the heart to remove the heart, lungs, and trachea together. The abdominal cavity is lined with a large amount of fat known as leaf fat. Use your hand to separate the fat from the muscle using caution to not put your hand under the thin layer of muscle along the belly. Leaf fat can be used to make lard if desired, otherwise it can be disposed of with the other organs. Take a moment to inspect the organs for any signs of illness or infection.
This is your pig, the ideal weight is whatever you want to feed the pig up to in order to get the results you are looking for.
There is no magic to the pound finishing weight. That is just a pork industry average number for most hogs in the U. Most of this information will be for finishing hogs at the higher end of usual, more like pounds.
This is the range we are aiming for with ours. We like bigger cuts and more meat. One of the easiest methods to figure out when your pigs are ready to butcher is to simply keep track of their age. Most pigs will reach butchering size and weight at 5.
This is for a pound pig. The only catch here is you need to know when they were born. If you buy your feeder pigs directly from a farmer, all of this is easy. Just ask! If you purchased your feeder pigs at an auction, then you will have to make an educated guess as to their age when you bought them.
Feeder pigs at the lighter end, more like pounds are closer to two months old. Feeder pigs at the heavier end, around 60 pounds are closer to three months old. Once you have a guess as to their farrowing birth date just count days on the calendar and pick a butchering date. Go longer if you want a bigger, fatter pig and shorter if you are wanting leaner cuts and a bit smaller carcass. This is a second way to figure a butchering date for your pigs is with another counting method.
Most people would just use the first way. This time you count the amount of feed consumed by your pigs. The person who is to do the sticking should locate the tip of the swine's breastbone at the throat, and make a 2- to 4-inch incision from that point forward along the exact center of the neck. The knife is then inserted deeply into this cut at a 45 degree angle pointing toward the tail , forced down and back to a point about 6 inches below the front of the sternum, and twisted slightly before it is withdrawn see Figure 3.
The thrust should not be made too far back into the body, though, because the blade could penetrate the chest cavity and cause internal bleeding and blood clots. The purpose of twisting the knife before withdrawing it is to be certain of severing the large branching vein and artery that lie beneath the point of the breastbone and thus insuring a proper bleed.
Some butchers advise against this motion, because they say it mutilates a portion of the shoulder meat. Though an animal will usually drain adequately while lying on its side, hanging the carcass upside down is a surer method.
Either way, when the flow of blood has slowed to an occasional driblet, your swine will be ready for the next step. Once the animal has been thoroughly bled, remove the carcass to the scalding vat, lowering it into the hot water head first. Gently rock the pig's body back and forth to prevent overscalding — which can cause the bristles to set — and soak it for 3 to 6 minutes, occasionally testing the looseness of the hair by twisting and trying to pull out small tufts with your fingers.
Because of the problems caused by leaving the swine in the pot too long the meat could even begin to cook , it's best to err on the side of caution. Next, hoist the scalded hog onto the table and use a bell scraper to begin stripping the hair and scurf from the body simple skinning with a knife would result in a tremendous waste of lard. This is most easily accomplished by tilting the tool away from yourself so that it rests on its far edge, then drawing it toward you along the carcass.
Apply enough pressure to remove the hair, but not so much that you cut or otherwise damage the underlying skin. You'll want to scrape the head and feet first — since those parts tend to cool most quickly — and to make your strokes follow the natural lay of the animal's hair. As soon as all the bristles have been scoured away, pour some hot water over the body and place the bell scraper flat against the porker's skin, moving the tool in a rotating motion.
This will massage out the dirt and remaining scurf from the hide. When all of the hair and scurf have been removed, even a formerly black hog will be white. Next, use a large hook a bale shifter from the haymow works fine to pull off the dewclaws and toes.
Finally, clean up the carcass with a stiff bristle brush, and remove any stray tufts of hair with a sharp knife. If your scalding tub is too small to accommodate the whole hog, simply soak and scrape the front end first, and then tackle the hindquarters.
This isn't meant to be considered a hard and fast rule, but since the head is one of the most difficult parts to clean, I prefer to get it out of the way early, when the water is closest to the correct temperature. If you encounter especially stubborn patches of hair but don't want to risk overscalding the carcass, you can cover the tough spots with a burlap sack and then pour hot water over the fabric before working on the hide again.
Really difficult tufts of bristle can be singed off with a blowtorch, if necessary. After the scalding and scraping process is complete, the hog is ready to be hung and gutted. A slaughtered pig should be strung up by the hind-leg sinews that are known as gambrel tendons. Cut through the skin on the backs of the rear limbs between foot and hock being careful not to sever the tendons themselves , and gently pull the fibrous connective tissue loose from the surrounding flesh.
To hang the carcass, you can insert a sturdy wooden dowel, an axe handle, a metal pipe, or the hooks of a short singletree under the gambrel tendons see Figure 4.
Then attach a line to your pole the stick is called a gambrel , and use it to hoist the corpus and suspend it from your butchering structure. The swine's rear legs should be spread at least 14 inches apart, and neither the animal's head nor its forelegs should touch the ground.
A final scrub-down of the body after hoisting will insure that you have a clean hide to work on. The object of gutting the hog is to remove all of the internal organs, the leaf fat the layers of built-up adipose tissue around the pig's kidneys, which is used in making lard , and the head.
It's a good idea to work slowly when eviscerating an animal especially if you're new to the job , because mistakes can be costly. Should you rupture the viscera, for instance, a great deal of meat could become contaminated. If, despite your best efforts, you do puncture the intestines or organs, wash the meat off thoroughly with cool, clean water as quickly as you can. It's a good idea to start by cutting of the head, because doing so will permit the draining of any residual blood which isn't trapped in the body cavity.
To accomplish this, first make a cut all the way across the back of the neck, just above the ears and at the backbone's initial joint. Then sever the gullet and windpipe so that the head can drop forward, and continue cutting around the ears. If you intend to use the head, it should be cleaned, trimmed, and chilled as soon as possible. Next, score the belly downward along its midline, from a point between the hams to the incision made when the pig was stuck, being careful not to cut through the stomach wall.
Then place your knife deep in the neck wound — its point against the backbone — and cut upward, using the blade to split the breastbone and divide the first set of ribs. If you're butchering an animal that's older or heavier than is usual for a table-bound hog, you may need a saw or cleaver to split the sternum.
At this point you'll be able to see whether you did a good job of sticking the pig. If your animal is a male, go on to remove the penis, or "pizzle". First, slash through the skin and fatty layers on either side of the organ, then lift the member up and cut underneath it. Continue carving while pulling the penis back towards where it attaches between the hams, then slice it off.
Now, make a small cut in the abdominal wall at a point high up between the hind legs. Your fist will crowd the intestines aside and lessen the danger of puncturing the viscera. When the wall of the belly is cut through, the innards will fall forward, though they'll still be attached to the body by muscle fiber and the digestive tract. The next step is to cut into the lean meat between the two hams until you hit the "aitch", or pelvic, bone.
Place your knife's point against the center seam of the bone and strike the blade's haft with the palm of your hand. The pelvic girdle should split easily, although in butchering older hogs it's sometimes necessary to use a saw to separate the halves.
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