Can I slaughter my own pig?

This is a question that I get every couple of weeks in email, so I think it's worth a blog entry.

"I'm interested in knowing more about where my food comes from, and towards that I'd like to slaughter my own pig and butcher it. Can I do that on your farm?"

For my farm, the answer is a qualified yes. But there's a simpler option at the bottom of this posting that you might want to look at.

1) you'll have to kill it in a legal way that I approve of. This post talks about slaughter issues and has a link to the humane slaughter laws in Washington state.

2) You'll have to spend the time it takes to finish the task in a day; you will probably need a couple of friends to make the work go faster.

3) If you want to scrape your pig, you'll have to bring at least a 3 gallon propane bottle to heat water. If you want to skin it you don't need the propane.

4) I can supply the tools and space to do the work, but you have to do the work; I cannot legally slaughter your animal. I will give you advice and general direction, but you must approach it with the mindset that you'll be doing all the processing.

That's the summary. Now lets talk about what it really means in detail

Start early
A pig is a bigger project than a chicken, or a turkey, but smaller than a cow. Because I'd prefer not to work on things after dark, I'd like you to start the process early in the morning. Preferably at 8am. That means we shoot the animal at 8am. You're at the farm gate at 7:30.
This gives you plenty of daylight to get the pig broken down and gives you an ample margin for error.

Skin or Scrape
Scraping
It takes three people about 90 minutes to scrape the hair off a pig. You do this so that you can keep the skin on the finished product. If you want to make prosciutto out of the hams you'll want to leave the skin on, or if you're going to BBQ the whole pig, or you have some other plan to eat the skin (which is quite tasty, by the way).

If you're going to scrape the pig you'll need 3 gallons of propane to heat 15-20 gallons of water to near boiling. I use a 35 gallon galvanized trash can and a crab cooker to heat the water. Once the water is boiling you ladle it onto the dead pig. As the skin is scalded the hair rubs off. We use flat metal bars to rub the hair off. It comes off pretty easily. It takes 90 minutes to do this because you want to get every single hair off the pig. When we're almost done you use a small propane torch to scorch the hair off the ears and face, both place that are hard to scrape.

Skinning
Skinning is faster, and if you're going to do a traditional ham cure you don't need the skin on it. But skinning an animal like a pig is a craft, and it's going to take some time as well. it's just faster than scraping. The goal is to leave as much of the fat on the animal as you can. It's not complicated; you cut off the trotters, and then skin each leg down to the torso, and then make a shallow cut along the belly, and slowly work the skin down either side of the pig until it's only attached at the back. Then you hoist the pig and pull the skin of the back. Done property, only the skin will be dirty, the meat will be clean and hanging.

Gutting (aka "field dressing")
I've posted pictures of this process on the blog.
The basic task here is to get the guts out of the animal while minimizing the chances of contamination. Basically it means you take care to not puncture the guts and get the whole mass out of the animal.

Halving
You split the animal into two 'halves' to make the subsequent cutting easier. You can do this with a power saw or a hand saw, taking care to split the vertebra evenly. You usually start from the rear of the pigs and then split the head with an axe or cleaver.

At this point you'll end up with a half or whole pig that can be delivered to a meat cutter and they'll cut it up further for you.

You can do all of the above OR
we can schedule in a farm slaughter guy, who will shoot, stick, gut and halve the pig and transport the halves to a meat cutting shop were they'll cut it into the retail cuts per your instructions for $.60/lb, or roughly $70, for a total cost of $85 per half.

I may be able to get the meat shop to let you be there during the cutting of your pig if you'd like to watch or participate. I haven't approached one of these guys with that request before, but I'm pretty sure we can arrange it.

Further breakdown
You'll find links at the bottom of my blog for websites that have pictorial step-by-step instructions on how to break a pig down from a half a pig into the various retail cuts. They do a much better job than I can do here, and I'm glad they're there. I'd estimate that breaking a half a pig will take you about 4 hours the first time you do it, provided you have all of the tools, but you make your own call.

Slaughter and the farm

Killing on the premises
One of the things that varies from farm to farm is whether the farmer is OK with you killing the animal on premise. I've run across this several times in my own experience, but most of that centers around particular cultural practices with respect to slaughtering pigs.

Sometimes this is covered by the farmer just taking care of the job for you; and selling you the cleaned animal. But theres a segment of the population that wants to slaughter their own animal, for cultural, religious or culinary reasons. For instance, if your culture places a high value on a part of the animal that is difficult to get in a traditional store, like the blood or the lungs, a doing your own farm kill is a good way to procure that.

Each culture seems to have its own way of killing an animal. Some of them are based in practicality (we don't have a gun, so we use a sledgehammer) , some in religion (our religious text says it has to be done this way), some are cultural (we've always done it this way).

Killed by surprise
Basically I'd prefer that the animal be killed by surprise. I try hard to mimic the actions on the animals last day on every day previous, so there's no real change in routine on the day it has to go. But when it does go, I want the animal to OUT as fast as I can do it or have it arranged to be done. In Washington, even the method of slaughter is regulated. There are only 4 legal ways to kill an animal.

Religious restriction on slaughter
I was buying some turkey breeding stock from another local farmer and while we were loading the turkeys we talked a bit about the other livestock he had, and he mentioned that he was a Jehovah's Witness, and that he was prohibited from eating the blood or using the blood. I asked how he handled that when people wanted to collect the blood for their cultural or religious reasons? His solution was to sell the whole, live animal and tell them to take it off the premises before they did anything. That's an example of a religious based slaughter restriction. He seemed to be OK with the idea of discarding the blood, and you could kill there if you did not collect it.

I'll sell you a goat, but...
Mark, a local farmer who runs a couple of hundred goats, doesn't want the kill on his farm. Goats are particularly problematic because the cultures that eat a lot of goat have a preferred kill method that seems slow to most americans. So his solution is to require the animal purchaser to leave the premises. Some of his customers kill their goats on the road in front of his farm. I really don't see a difference myself.

It's their religion, but I sure do hate holding the animal when...
Ed, a fellow who raises sheep, told me that while he's tolerant of other religions he hates the chore of holding a sheep for the customer to slaughter. Many of the farms are really one man or one family operations, and when it comes down to doing the deed, you might have to help.

Humane slaughter law
The state of Washington is interested in regulating slaughter methods. You cannot, for instance, legally kill an animal with a sledgehammer or a regular hammer. But apparently if your religion prescribes a particular way of killing an animal, that's exempted.

There's an argument that having these sorts of broad exemptions actually results in the unequal protection of law.

Washington state law regarding slaughter of non-poultry
The law that seems to control most of the slaughter in Washington state, with respect to uninspected meat, can be found here.

My opinion on that is that you can slaughter animals you own for your own consumption, you can slaughter animals you've purchased either at your own premises, or at the producers premise. You can slaughter 4h animals lots of places (special exemption for animals purchased from 4h auctions). So farms that want you to carry the animals off their premises aren't legally required to do that, but do so by farmers preference.

Washington state law regarding slaughter of poultry
Washington state law regulating the permit for slaughtering 1,000 chickens or less per year.
Handbook to help you apply for that permit.

None of this applies to sale of individual cuts, or less than the half of an animal
All of what I've said is related to the sale of whole poultry or whole or half meat (beef, lamb, pork, goat, etc) . I do not cover what you have to do to sell cuts of meat to the public; that's USDA slaughter, and that's a different set of laws and standards.

DISCLAIMER I am not an attorney. This entry talks about my opinions only regarding laws related to slaughter and points you to the actual text of the laws I'm referring to. You should consult an attorney if you have questions about the law.

Beef for dinner

Sometimes you have to roll with the punches. The steer wasn't any better this morning, and was going into shock -- eyes rolling back, gums pale, etc. The goal of my farm is to grow food for people, and if I let the cow go any longer there's a good chance I'll lose it as human food, so it has to go now.

These are the parts I used to assemble a singletree. This is some tackle that allows you to hoist a large animal in the air to make the slaughtering process easier. I guessed at the measurements from pictures in "basic butchering of livestock and game", link below, and assembled it on a 4x4 doug fir timber that I milled last year.




I measured between the legs of the steer that I'm butchering today, and got a basic measurement of 24". The parts cost a total of $70 -- $17 each for the S hooks (they rotate in the center so that they're easier to attach to the animal) and I chose stainless steel eye bolts as well, to make sure that the metal touching the meat doesn't discolor or add a taste to it. Stainless steel is a pretty standard meat handling material. The four eye bolts are 3/8" stainless, the main eye bolt is 3/4" galvanized steel.



Here the singletree is hanging from the chain hook on the tractor. Now that it's ready, it's time for the steer to go.

I'm going to skip shooting the cow with a .22, cutting the throat, and go directly to the hoist. the singletree works as it should. For this cow I used the inner set of hooks. For a bigger animal I might use the outer set. The 4x4 is 40" long, the center eye bolt is set at 20", the inner eye bolt is 12" from the center, and the outer eye bolt is 18" from the center. To insert the hooks into the steer I used a knife to make a hole, and then hooked it, and pulled the hook over to the single tree to attach it. With S hooks I was a bit worried about the cow bouncing off as we moved it with the tractor, but it wasn't a problem.

Sorry about the picture. it was snowing a whole bunch at the time, and it was cold, and I was lazy.

After the cow has been killed the basic butchering begins. Because I was limited on daylight I tied off the bung, skinned the animal and field-dressed it -- removed the internal organs and then propped it open to cool. I blocked the front loader so the beef wouldn't hit the ground during the night, and called it a day. Total elapsed time from the shot to here is 2 hours. An hour of that was my very slow skinning of the animal. This is the first cow I've ever butchered, so I was extra careful to take the hide off in one piece. There's a tannery local to me that will tan the hide with the hair on. I think I'll try that.