To start, I want to make one thing very clear. You're all a bunch of hippies, and I have absolutely no interest in joining you in the middle of nowhere, scraping a living off the land and attempting to form some naive anarchist view of what a community is and should be. Nah-nah. Not happening. I prefer to use toilet paper over leaves, and if you think I'm giving up my warm comfy bed, indoor heating, and fresh running water any time soon, you've got another think coming. And you can prise my Clinique skincare regime out of my cold, dead hands.
But I will come and visit. I'll bring my own loo paper, and no one's allowed to touch me if they haven't bathed within the last 24hrs, but I will support your cause even if I won't join it. I expect my visits to be a source of celebration for the village / commune / settlement / shantytown (whatever it is you're going to call it), and I shall expect to be fed. And none of that tofu crap that you dropout beatniks seem so enamoured with. I'll want meat. And to that end, I suppose y'all better have a handy guide as to how you turn cute little Snuffles the pig into barbequed ribs. And don't think Daisy the cow or Mary's little lamb are getting off lightly neither.
First things first: you need the animals. I don't know the finer points of animal husbandry, and neither do I wish to. But I'm sure the sensible thing (in my head, at least) is that you go to some kind of market place where they sell farm animals, and you buy some. If it's any more complicated than that, I'm not sure it's worth bothering with; just steal some animals out of a field or something.
Some people seem to have a problem with the killing and eating of animals. They seem to think it's wrong that an animal should be fed up and cared for with the eventual aim of cutting it down in the prime of its life and serving it for dinner. Of course, it'd be far nicer to the poor sod if we didn't feed it at all, made no effort to care for it, and then let it die, diseased and rotting in a field somewhere. Everything dies in the end. It's worth remembering that it was (and is) inefficient, both in terms of finances and calories, to go about caring for and feeding an animal, without ever intending to eat it. So, logically, if we didn't eat them, animals wouldn't have been bred and domesticated. Your little... err.... group, if they indeed to keep animals, will have to be able to dispose of them cleanly and efficiently come fall. You only want to have to feed essential stock (i.e., the dairy cattle and immature beef cattle) during the winter months.
Butchering large animals
So back to Snuffles. Cute, pink, inquisitive, snuffley Snuffles. Damn, but he's going to look good being spitroasted. You can almost smell it while you're standing there, watching him root through the windfalls in the orchard. And Daisy. No more mooing for her! Slaughtering a large animal is no mean feat, and it can be considered a group activity. Take the kids along too; they need to be desensitised to this kind of shit if you want them to grow up to be proper living-off-the-land settler types. I say this, because I got to witness the butchering of a bull as a pre-teen, and it was a good experience to have. I got to feed Boris the Bull (as we called him, I don't know why we gave him a name, but there you go), then a couple of days later we slaughtered him, and then a month after that, we roasted a bit of him and had him for lunch. It's good that a person should see where the meat on their plate came from. Eating meat should be as conscious a decision as not eating it.
So, first things first. Separate the animal that you're going to be butchering away from the rest of its herd, and take it somewhere where you'll be able to suspend it off the ground, e.g., using a piece of rope thrown over a barn door. The animal needs to be mature enough that you're getting the maximum meat for the minimum amount of time that you've kept it as livestock. General guidelines would be when a pig has got jowly; sheep and goats should be under 9mths of age. Cattle are a little different; dairy cattle are bred purely to produce large amounts of milk, and haven't much on the way of meat on them. Beef cattle are bred for their meat, but they're a bit of a luxury; they require at least two years (preferable 3-4) to be able to mature. However, get yourself a hardy breed, give them sufficient grazing and hay, and they'll mostly look after themselves until they're ready for the dinner plate - and they'll be worth the wait. Now veal... that's another matter. Ethics and morality of veal eating can be dealt with in a different node, but remember, it may be more efficient in terms of resources to slaughter a 10-15mth old calf then to look after it over the winter period, and then the subsequent summer while you wait for the next fall to come around.
You're living off the land now. None of this namby-pamby love for all God's creatures; if you want to survive, you have to know how to kill and eat animals. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and if you want to be a part of nature, so should you have to be.
So, you've separated the animal off from the herd. You have a selection of people around to help with the job. You may or may not have wanted to starve the animal for the last 24hrs - by starving it, the innards will be easier to deal with. If you feel bad about starving it, fair enough, but if I were standing there in front of you, I'd give you a slap to the cheeks and tell you to stop being so soft. It's not Snuffles any more. It's sausages.
Necessary items
You'll also need a gun; a large, sharp knife; a short, sharp knife; a skinning knife; two lengths of rope with a gambrel (or hook) each to hang the carcass with; and a saw.
What to do
Yup, you guessed it. Shoot the animal in the head. This is the most humane way of killing the animal. Cattle, sheep and pigs should be shot in the middle of the forehead - in the midline, and halfway between the eyes and the ears. Goats should be shot in the back of the head. Quickly slit its throat by driving the larger knife point-first through the skin, and then slice through the skin from the inside, rather than trying to get through the hair on the outside. Make sure that you sever all the veins and arteries. Quickly use the small, sharp knife to remove the testicles (if the animal hasn't already been neutered) as these will spoil the meat; then make slits in the skin that lies between the animal's ankle bone and achilles tendon; insert a gambrel into each of these slits; then hoist the carcass into the air. If you wanted to be able to keep the animal's brain for food, if you're anti-gun, or if you're just super-hardcore (as they had to be in the days before they invented guns and had a more pragmatic view about livestock), you can just smack it soundly over the head to pacify it, and then just slit its throat and quickly suspend it to let the blood out while the heart's still beating. Don't let the blood just drain away though; that's a waste of vital calories; catch the rest of the blood in some buckets.
The head should be removed by continuing the slit made in the throat (still by cutting through the skin from the inside out), and then using the saw to saw through the spine. Similar to the blood, the head contains all kinds of goodness and should be put aside, not thrown away. The carcass, especially the feet or hooves, should be washed at this point.
To skin the animal, you start at the slits you made at the achilles tendon. Again, cutting from the inside to the outside, and being very careful not to cut the tendon itself, slip the small knife into the slit and cut all the way around each foot. Then slice down each leg to the belly, and where you join the two cuts to a single line down the centre of the belly to the neck. Now, using the skinning knife, starting in the centre where the hind leg meets the belly, begin to flay the skin off the meat. The key to doing this is tension - constantly pull the hide away from the meat and just run the (hopefully, very) sharp knife along the space between the two. Carry on for the belly, then over the crotch (the top portion of the 'Y'), which can be tricky; how carefully you do this is entirely dependant on whether you need to use the hide for anything. Everything, Kansas could probably do with the leather, I imagine, so do this as carefully as you can. Pull the tail vertebrae away from each other, and now continue flaying down the back... you get the idea, I'm sure. Put the hide aside to be tanned.
Now. The insides.
First off, the bowel contains a lot of nasty, that you don't want falling out over your meat, unless you fancy having food poisoning. So, using the small knife, make a circular incision around the anus, being careful not to pierce the rectum. Now tie off the anus to prevent leakage.
Here's the bit you've all been waiting for: grab your large knife and slice the belly open - carefully. You want to open it up without actually cutting into the contents of the abdomen. Again, working from inside out with the knife, and use your other hand inside the abdominal cavity to push the internal organs away from the blade and tip. Remove the penis, if the carcass is of the appropriate persuasion. I'll leave it up to you whether to keep or discard this bit. There's bound to be a use for it.
Place a container beneath the carcass to catch the guts, and carefully pull them out of the abdominal cavity - it is important to not to 'burst' anything, so take your time separating the innards from their various anatomical spaces within the cavity. Tie off and cut out the bladder; pull the kidneys out of the retroperitoneal fat; and cut the liver out. Open up the sternum and diaphragm, and remove the heart (squeeze the blood out), lungs, and windpipe. You should now have a innard-free carcass. Hose it down with water, and leave it somewhere cool (2-6ºC) and sheltered to hang for a varying period of time – about a day for pork, a week for goat and lamb, up to a month for beef. Hanging the meat allows it to mature and become more tender. Larger carcases, such as beef, will benefit from being sawn lengthwise (and depending on space requirements, maybe even into quarters) to help the hanging process.
So... what's next?
Well, there's now two things to consider. One is all the offal that you've now got on your hands (literally). To throw it away would be a waste, so attempts should be made to eat it in any of the various ways that meat would be eaten before refrigeration was invented. And when it comes to offal, there pretty much isn't anything that a true offal connoisseur wouldn't eat. As for the carcass itself; once you've hung your meat for the appropriate amount of time, you'll need to break it down into the appropriate cuts, joints, steaks and rolls. And there are so many, that to list them would take, not only a large amount of time, but a mastery of ascii art that transcends human ability. Although I'm willing to be surprised on this matter.
So, my advice for what's next:
Go here: this site reminded me of most of what I needed to be reminded of in writing this piece, AND it has the pictures of how to break a carcass up.
-OR-
Go here: and purchase Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's wonderful recipe book, "The River Cottage Meat Book". It's a complete bible to those who eat meat, and will tell you everything that you should do to both the carcasses and to the offal and meat cuts themselves.
So, enjoy yourselves while you're doing that Little House on the Prairie thing, I wish you good luck with it. When I do pop by, mine's a blue T-bone steak. Ta.
spiregrain says: great stuff. I seem to remember that a bull's cock can be tanned and used as a cosh. Someone's gotta keep order in this town.(He cites this as his source. I find the entire concept of beating someone to death with a bull's penis fascinating, and will be off to the butchers, first thing tomorrow.)
