The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
It is a large, clean, new brick building, with extensive yards adjoining
it, filled with hogs from the forests and farms of Ohio, Indiana, and
Kentucky. From these yards to the third story of the house there is an
inclined plane, up which a procession of the animals march slowly to
their doom from morning until evening. Here is the first economy. The
thing to be done is, to transfer the pigs from those yards to the
basement of the building, and, on the way, convert them into salt pork.
They walk to the scene of massacre at the top of the building, and the
descent to the cellar accomplishes itself by the natural law which
causes everything to seek the centre of the earth. Arrived at the
summit, the fifteen foremost find themselves in "a tight
place,"--squeezed into a pen, in which they must remain standing from
lack of room to lie down. There are two of these pens, and two "pen
men"; so that the moment one pen is empty, there is another ready
filled, and the work thus goes on without interruption. The fifteen
animals which stand compressed, with their heads thrust upward, awaiting
the stroke of fate, express their emotions in the language natural to
them, and the noise is great. The executioner, armed with a
long-handled, slender hammer, and sitting astride of the fence, gives to
each of these yelling creatures his quietus by a blow upon the head. The
pig does not fall when he is struck; he cannot; he only stares and
becomes silent. The stranger who is unable to witness the execution has
an awful sense of the progress of the fell work by the gradual cessation
of the noise. We mention here, for the benefit of political economists,
that this knocker-down, who does the most disagreeable and laborious
part of the work, has the lowest wages paid to any man in the house. He
does not rank as an artist at all, but only as a laborer. Readers of
Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill know why. When silence within the pen
announces the surrender of its occupants, a door is opened, and the
senseless hogs are laid in a row up an inclined plane, at the bottom of
which is a long trough of hot water. One of the artists, called "the
Sticker," now appears, provided with a long, thin, pointed knife, and
approaches the pig nearest the steaming trough, gently lifts its fore
leg, and gives it one easy, delicate, and graceful thrust in the throat.
Along the trough, on each side of it, is a row of men, each with an
instrument in his hand, waiting to begin; and apart from them stands the
Head-Scalder, who ranks second in the corps, having a task of all but
the greatest difficulty to perform. Scald a pig ten seconds too long, or
in water twenty degrees too hot, and he comes out as red as a lobster;
let the water be too cool, or keep the animal in it too short a time,
and the labor of scraping is trebled. Into the hot water the hogs are
soused at intervals of twenty seconds, and the Scalder stands, watching
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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