My first flying pig. See my creative abilities? |
I was having a discussion with a friend of mine the
other day about wild game and the danger of contracting various parasites. In
the past eating undercooked pork was a major culprit in contracting Trichinella spp., so
it is understandable why there were religious mandates excluding pork from the
diet. There are less than a dozen reported trichinosis cases in the US per
year, so the danger is virtually non-existent because people generally cook
wild game well and those who do raise their own pigs probably do not feed them
raw meat.
I recently read a book called “Mountain Fever” by Tom Alexander, and he
mentions how mountain people would capture hogs during the winter to eat. Feral
pigs are a huge problem for the environment and there are people employed by
the national park whose job it is to track and shoot them year-round. I worked
with a young woman, who grew up very impoverished, and her family still
practices the fattening a wild hog for two weeks before butchering it. I can’t
imagine how much work it would be to find, capture and slaughter a hog.
According to the book:
In those
days, many of the hardy mountain folk “raised” half-wild razorback hogs for
their meat, their livelihood, their sport, and as an excuse to get away from
home. The razorbacks ranged the mountains, including by permit, the national
forests under my care, and one of my duties was to issue permits, collect fees,
and check on ranges to avoid overgrazing. There were hundreds of these
permittees.
I found it interesting that a hog’s “owner” would cut a certain pattern
in a young pig’s ear to be able to recognize it later when it would be found
and butchered.
The
razorback never saw the home of its owner until the fall he was led out of the
mountains with a rope tied to one leg, fattened for a couple of weeks on corn,
and slaughtered. The rest of his life, he sought his own living from the
forest.
By late
December, the nuts were gone, and the man went out yet again and drove, let, or
tolled in one or more candidates for killing. The killing was accomplished by
the blow of an axe to the head. Then, the carcass was immersed in a barrel of
water brought to the boil by means of large rocks heated in a fire.
It is a brutal way to die, but at least the animal didn’t suffer for
long. Imagine how many more vegetarians there would be if people had to see where their ham sandwiches actually come from.
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