Slaughter party - Oreo

Until this weekend we had only slaughtered animals who had turned into jerks, but Oreo was a fabulous pig who had completed his mission. The day started off with getting the pig drunk on a mixture of really cheap vodka and sweet grains, being that Oreo was in the neighborhood of 500lbs to 700lbs this took about a gallon of vodka. After he sucked down his liquor ration we gave everything a few moments to set in. Due to the size of Oreo we chose to use a 410 slug rather than our usual 22 caliber. The initial shot had perfect placement and was nearly point blank, unfortunately it was not a fatal shot and Jed had to reload (single shot shotgun) and fire a second shot. This follow up shot dropped him and then Jed used a large knife that he forged in his shop to slit the throat, cutting the carotid arteries and finishing the job. Neither Jed or I was happy about having to use a second shot, we don't want to have any animals suffer on our farm but at times these things happen. On the plus side Jed was able to place the second shot threw the same hole as the first shot (on a moving target from a distance, not an easy shot) limiting further damage to the carcass. Then with 5 people pulling we where able to drag the carcass onto a working platform to begin dressing the carcass. With the weight and length of Oreo there was no possibility of hanging the carcass to dress it out, we had neither the strength of material or height of tower required to hang a 700lb 9ft long pig. Dressing on the ground was not easy and given the choice we would rather hang a pig to dress them. Really it was not fun. We attempted once more to scald the pig, buy turning up our hot water heater and running a hose from the washer hot line to a hose. The temp of the water was fine and mostly did its job but we tried to use a pressure washer to do the scraping and this did not work well at all. While the pressure washer did take off the outer layer of skin it did not remove the hair so scraping was required in any case. Also our hot water tank did not have the capacity to scald an entire 700lb pig so we ran out of hot water before we could finish, over all a scalding failure. As we knew that dressing that much pork would be a huge undertaking we elected to skin the carcass and go from there. With the amazing help of our work staff; Holly, Guy, Sharron, Sam, Brigid, Melody, Crystal and Rosie's Mom we where able to part out and package the meat in around 6 hours after 4 hours of slaughter and dressing. All in all it was around a 16 hour day for Rosie and I. But we where able to power threw it in no small part by the AMAZING Birria the Rosie's mom made for every one in our work party, really if you did not make it you really missed a great meal.

I don't know the total weight of meat we got from Oreo we don't have a scale in the house that goes that high and frankly there was not time to weigh it all but we did weigh a few pieces and the lay out was as follows:

Hams : 60 lbs each
Pork Belly (bacon) : 65 lbs
Forelegs (estimate) : 40 lbs each

and an untold amount of stew meat, roasts and ribs. In the end we ran out of space in our chest freezer and our house freezer and had to send our work force home with a nice selection of cuts (they deserved it after all the work they put in!) and then I was able to lean on the door of the freezer to get it to close. In all it was an amazing day and the help of our work force was in the finest traditions of community, we literally could not have done it with out them.

Some lessons we learned:

700 lbs is way too big for a pig slaughter weight, 200 lbs would be better.

We need a meat/bone saw

Your first shot may not drop your animal be ready for follow up shot (we where, Jed always keeps a second round in his pocket for just that reason).

We need better preparation for scalding; more hot water and a better scraping method.

Make sure your vacuum sealer works before you are ready to package (thank you Sam for running to the store for us).

Just like with Macaroon, slaughtering in the rain is a real pain.

Have more buckets on hand.

Over all the day was a success and above that it was fun for all involved, our night ended with laughter and jokes and meat for every one. Thank you to all who could make it and to any who could not, we will be doing more of this in the future so while you may have missed out this fall next fall there will be more pigs to slaughter and more help needed. Oh and sorry about the changes in tense in this post both of us helped to write it. We will see about posting images from the slaughter party in the near future.