Yorkie and Hampie went off to the processing house this morning. We were able to watch them both die, and stayed to watch the initial steps of Yorkie’s butchering: skinning, removal of feet, removal of internal organs, and halving. In about a week, we’ll have most of the meat, except for the bacon and hams, which will take 6 weeks (bacon) and 4 months (hams) to smoke and cure.

The whole thing is really packed, emotionally, for me. What we’ve done, Issa and I,  feels like an incredibly meaningful, powerful, and intimate act. It really feels dysfunctional in some way that I’ve gone this far into my life without participating in raising and killing my own meat. I feel like I’ve been missing out on some really fundamental aspect of life, as if at the age of 35, someone had said, “Oh hey, did we forget to tell you where babies come from? Yeah, sex and childbirth and raising kids is pretty awesome. You should try it.” I realize that to people who grew up around livestock, this might sound pretty silly, but if you grew up around jetpacks and hovercars, you probably wouldn’t think much of them either.

Here’s one of the last photos of Yorkie and Hampie alive. They’ve been loaded in the back of the truck and have been secured with straps to prevent them from climbing out, which they proved amply capable of doing. Mental note: pigs are more agile than their weight and stockiness would suggest.

Here’s a post from Issa’s blog from when we first got them.

They were so tiny, but they got big fast.

Here’s a post from Issa from April, when they were a little bigger.

Finally, here’s one of my favorite videos of them, in what I think of as one of their most contented times.