The Big Food Fight The compassionate carnivore

Date Published:

14/01/2008

We need to love the animals we eat and stop making their lives hell, argues Tom Hodgkinson. Tom raised, killed and ate his own pigs, and discovered that meat is not murder, it's justifiable homicide

Hard decisions - killing our pigs

Can you kill with love? This is the question that faced this novice pig farmer last autumn. We bought two Saddleback weaners in the spring, and now it was killing time. We did consider the standard option, which is to have the animals taken to the slaughterhouse and then cut up by the butcher, but finally decided that it would be easier to have them killed at home and cut them up ourselves, or rather, watch as a chef friend cut them up.

The adrenalin ran high on pig killing day. This was all completely new to us, so we didn't really know what to expect. Our pig killing neighbours came round with a tractor, and dear Gnasher and Rasher were enticed into a trailer. We drove them into our yard and gave them some food. Then they were shot in the head with a pistol, while the man with the gun stroked their heads. One squealed for a few seconds before dying, the other simply dropped to the ground. Then each animal was tied by its back legs to the tractor and hoisted into the air. There was quite a bit of kicking. I was struck by the calm gentleness of the whole operation.

We cut the pigs' throats and drained off the blood, which we immediately stirred to make blood pudding. Thus began the enormous job of processing the pigs: they say that every part of the pig can put to good use apart from the squeak, and we certainly used most of the beasts over the next couple of weeks. It was a lot of work, but before too long we had a houseful of pork products: giant hams resting in cures of beer and molasses, flitches of bacon hanging in the dairy, a freezer full of joints and spare ribs, two huge pork liver patés, 25 chorizos hanging in the barn, pounds and pounds of the most delicious sausages and blood puddings. The quantities were huge. I calculated that if sold at retail prices, the meat would go for over £1,000. That makes good economic sense: the pigs cost £30 each and we spent only £100 on feed. I'd be surprised if we have any need to buy any pork or bacon over the next twelve months, and we also had a lot of meat to give away to friends and neighbours.

"How could you eat your own pigs?"

What was surprising was the amount of tenderness that we felt towards the animals when they were killed. We did not sob in a sentimental way as we did, for example, when the bunny died. But we experienced an emotion that was a sort of mix of sadness and gratitude: you wanted to say, thank you, noble pig.

Now, one of the surprising things about killing your own pigs is the responses you get from friends. People who have exhibited not a trace of concern for animal welfare and have happily bought foul water-injected bacon from the supermarket suddenly turn all compassionate. "Oh, I could never do that," they say. "How could you eat your own pigs?"

When you describe your method of killing, a humane and painless method - one moment the pig is eating away, and the next moment it is dead - they look horrified. "Oh, it's cruel," they say. But then, as my son points out, if we weren't going to eat them, they wouldn't have existed in the first place. However, when they taste the meat that comes from your happy pigs, they change their minds. The flavour is simply so much better than anything that you could buy in the supermarkets.