Pulling together the material for our introduction to smallholding courses I knew that whatever else we couldn’t cram into the two days, leaving out the detail of t
he final journey to the abattoir wasn’t an option. I remember vividly that first trip two decades ago and how unprepared I was for taking those few nurtured lambs to slaughter. The paperwork and practicalities were in order, my mind was not. I was wracked with guilt and fear, slept little and fretted much; intimations of mortality and turning vegetarian haunted my dreams.
To reassure myself I attended a live to dead event run by EBLEX, held at a local abattoir; one of the most informative days I’ve ever spent. In the lairage we handled live lambs from a scrawny article to a rather fat beast and everything in between, to estimate their grades. Dressed in white boilersuits, hairnets and hard hats we moved to the processing area. The scale took my breath away: a continuous line of machinery, people and lambs, with everyone focussed on their task. Asked if we wanted to see the slaughter, no-one baulked. It was so calm and professional, with the layout designed to cause nil stress to the animal and the slaughterer. I watched several animals being stunned and throats cut. I wanted to make sure I saw the reality of where my animals are headed, and I felt huge relief that such an important role in the food chain was being so expertly undertaken.
We followed the line as skins were removed, guts discarded and offal inspected. We saw condemned livers ruined by tapeworm, fluke and other parasites and arthritic joints spurned as unfit for human consumption. We clocked the results of injecting in the wrong muscles, and that lambs were being sent both too thin and too fat to slaughter. We watched the grader determine the score of each lamb, the weighing, the tingling with electric current to reduce hanging time (hmm…not sure about that one), and then into the chiller, where the lambs we’d attempted to score were tagged with the official result.
So what have I learned over the years apart from how to stay calm? If you are using a small abattoir you need to book well in advance, sometimes many weeks beforehand in the lead up to Easter and Christmas. Do check that they take your type of livestock; not all of them do pigs. Make sure appropriate slaughter ear tags are in place. In winter your lambs will need to be bellied out the day before and all livestock need to be clean and empty (no food for 24 hours before you leave). When you get there don’t expect help unloading, so practice ‘til you are confident. Have your much pondered cutting list ready, with the movement licence and food chain information form. Decide if you want the skins and if so get them salted ready for the tannery. And finally, don’t ruin things by keeling over and fainting when you collect the offal and find that the oesophagus and lungs are still attached, or that you get a line of piggy nipples on your belly pork.
Published in The Landsman August/September 2010 Issue 21
