Nick Bergus Thoughts on what media do, and can do better, and other things

This was written as part of my master’s project and included, in a modified version, in “A Pig in Three Parts.”

The first time I met Doug Havel, he was standing in a pool of blood. Lying on its right side on the floor next to him was the pig. Despite the .22-caliber bullet lodged in the pig’s cranium and its severed, still-gushing jugular, its hind legs twitched.

I was here as a meat eater. A meat eater who knew little more about the meat I ate than its price per pound and the color of its Styrofoam tray. A meat eater who needed to slaughter a pig to appreciate where my bacon had come from and what the animal had suffered for me to enjoy it.

My odyssey backward from pork to pig had started with a plan to make sausage and a subsequent trip to my supermarket’s meat counter. There I had asked the department’s night manager for a five-pound hunk of pork shoulder butt. The request received a blank stare. He wasn’t sure what I was talking about. He called his boss, who wasn’t any more helpful.

Since there are nearly 18 million pigs in Iowa, producer of about 30 percent of the nation’s pork supply and twice that of the second-ranked state, I was surprised that neither man knew much about the animals whose flesh he was selling. Meat arrives at most stores in boxes, broken at least into primals, the next smallest cuts after entire sides, and shrink-wrapped.

While it has become trendy for chefs to be have a hand in slaughtering animals with TV cameras pointed at them and for some consumers to seek out only locally raised and slaughtered meat, most of the 3,000 or so slaughterhouses in the United States are disassembly lines: operations that have broken butchery into a series of simple tasks that low-wage laborers continuously repeat. The largest mechanized slaughterhouses can process some 20,000 animals every day.

By contrast Havel’s ten-employee slaughterhouse is one of a decreasing number where a single butcher turns living tissue into meat. He personally butchers animals every weekday and has for more than two decades.

He is a butcher, not a meat cutter, a distinction meat workers make between those who actually kill and those who only work with the meat. Havel was someone who could show me how to kill a pig myself.

Havel slaughtered his first pig when he was 22. It was his father’s pet pig. Its name was Fred.

“After we shot it,” Havel says in the dry humor his job demands, “it was Dead Fred.”

Three decades later, his experience, most in this shop, built by his father in 1984, allows him to make butchering look easy. Then I watched him slaughter eight pigs that day. He had started slaughtering at six that morning.

Killing Fred didn’t bother Havel then as killing animals doesn’t bother him now. Except, just a little, the lambs. Alone in the slaughtering room, they bleat.

“It’s like they’re crying.”

Despite Havel’s admission, he showed no sign of weakness or hesitation in the slaughter room. He turned animals into meat the way I might turn flour into bread. And I felt the need to adopt a certain machismo while I was near this man. (At another small abattoir, the butcher offered me a freshly steamed brat to eat while I watched him carve up four pigs. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I ate the grey, intestine-wrapped meat.)

From his two years as a utility man on a kill line of a now-closed Rath Packing plant, from his father, and from his own trial and error, Havel learned to slaughter. Now he slaughters 25 hogs and 15 cattle — he always calls them beef to distinguish them from dairy cows — every week.

Havel supplies meat to the area’s natural-foods grocers, many restaurants and the new Riverside Casino and Golf Resort a mile down the road. His modest success forces Havel to buy and process boxed and shrink-wrapped meat from the major processors. His customers want chops from the pig’s back, not cuts of the shoulders or legs. Havel can’t keep killing pigs just for pork chops.

The messy part of Havel’s work takes place in a 15-foot-square room that smells of barnyard-animal excrement inside a white cinder-block building in Riverside, Iowa, a town of less than 1,000 best known as the future birthplace of Star Trek’s Capt. James T. Kirk.

A sign, “Try our famous beef jerky,” covers the building’s east side and is large enough to be read from the highway that passes nearby (he sells about 700 pounds of beef jerky every week in addition to sticks of dried elk meat). Across the street from Bud’s Custom Meats, named for his father, is, in an ironic twist, a cow pasture and St. Francis’ Veterinary Clinic.

Havel is a lean-muscled man with short hair and round, gold-rimmed glasses on his slender, pointed nose. He wears a white, short-sleeved button-down shirt, with his name embroidered on the right breast, tucked into white pants.
When he slaughters, Havel adds a faded-blue rubber apron that covers him from chest to ankle, and tucks his pants into knee-high, olive-green, rubber boots. Even though he uses equipment that’s sole purpose is to rip through flesh and bone, this is the extent of his protective gear; unlike laborers in large processing plants, where speed often trumps precision, he wears no chainmail gloves or torso armor.

The 45-year-old Havel doesn’t enjoy this part of his job; it’s physically exhausting and dirty. “An apron,” he says, “only covers so much.”

The deaths are part of a simple routine. Ushering in a 700-pound sow from a sheltered holding pen in the next room with a few slaps on her rear, Havel shuts her in a 4-by-10-foot pen in the slaughter room.

The sow had been raised by Havel’s brother about 15 miles south of the shop on the family farm. Pigs are optimally slaughtered when they are six months old and weigh around 250 pounds. This sow’s breeding career was finished and, though age has toughened her meat, she now has no value to her owner outside of the meat market.

I watched as Havel lifted the .22-caliber rifle from the rack that runs along the east wall above an assortment of meat hooks and walks towards her head. With a quiet, almost whispered, “pss-pss-pss,” Havel coaxed the animal’s eyes — and more importantly, forehead — towards him, he aimed and pulled the trigger.

A .22 round has enough power to penetrate the skull of the pigs, sheep, cattle, and farm-raised elk Havel slaughters, but not to exit. Instead, it rattles around inside, cutting the brain into ribbons.

The sound following the rifle’s hiss is like a heavy playground ball slapping wet cement. The animal just drops to the floor.

It doesn’t always happen this way. Occasionally the victim will move just as Havel pulls the trigger or the animal’s skull is too thick for the bullet to puncture. Sometimes a second, third or fourth shot is necessary.

But this time, a well-placed bullet, right into the center of the pig’s brain, sent the beast reeling. Her eyes rolled back into her head, her expression reminding me of Jim Carrey reacting to a swift kick to the balls, and blood started to trickle out of her nostrils. There was no squealing or screaming, but she did convulse, kicking the metal wall, scratched and dented from the thousands of others that had preceded her. Havel replaced the rifle in the rack and picked up a curved 7-inch knife and cut open the sow’s jugular, releasing a gush of bright red blood.

It had been just six seconds since he pulled the trigger.

The sooner the animal’s major bloodway is opened, the better. The heart continues to beat for several minutes, pushing blood from the body. If the pig isn’t completely drained, bloodspots will form in the meat. Sometimes the beast’s back leg muscles will be so tensed that the blood vessels will pop as if suffering a coronary. After two and a half minutes, the sow’s muscles relax and she ceases to move.

Havel wrapped a chain around the sow’s back legs, attached her to a winch and hoisted her until her head was suspended two feet above the ground. He slid a stretcher-like rack under her and lowered her until her back rests on it. Havel took his knife to an orange-handled honing steel, held the sow’s head back and cut out the tongue and put it in a bucket of water for later. He grabbed the sow’s right ear and cut off her head. He tossed it into a 50-gallon gray bucket marked “inedible.”

Feet quickly followed the head into the bucket, each limb being partially cut and then snapped off with the crunch of bone, cartilage and ligaments.

These gut- and blood-filled tubs will be collected by a meat by-products company in top-loading trucks that resemble enormous garbage trucks. The company converts this offal into pet food, livestock feed and rendered fat.

Without head or feet, the pig no longer looked like a pig. But as one large unskinned carcass, it didn’t look like pork, either. Over the next 20 minutes, Havel shaped the pig into something again recognizable, this time as food.

Havel ran a knife along the pig’s chest and, using a wide-bladed skinning knife, separated the pale pink hide from the creamy white lard. He’s particularly careful when he reaches the belly. While fat is trimmed off of most pork cuts, the belly is the source of bacon and a gouge here would lead to strip after strip of unsightly meat.

With the entire belly bare, Hovel used a saw that looks like an enlarged electric meat knife, to tear through the front of the ribcage and the back of the pelvis. The steaming guts and the rest of the skin are removed and the carcass is hung by its shanks and sawed in half down the backbone with an even larger saw.

And then it was done. What began as a nearly 700-pound animal was now two steaming 220-pound halves of pork. But even after Havel had shot, stuck, skinned and split the sow, her muscles continued to twitch.

At first, I thought the movement was an illusion, a combination of the light, water dripping down the hosed-off carcass and my own adrenaline. As I leaned in closer, I realized it was not. The twitching continued for about half an hour. After the meat has cooled, Havel or one of his employees will cut the carcass into primal cuts before breaking it down further into bacons and hams, chops and ribs.

And while Havel really enjoys that part of his job, he would like to stop slaughtering at his shop altogether.

Part of the problem is that he has a hard time finding someone else to do this dirty work.

These small slaughterhouses are often family operations, invariably sold from father to son. When Havel retires in two decades, his shop, like so many others, will probably close. His 20-year-old daughter, a student at Coe College 50 miles from the slaughterhouse, has no taste for the family trade.

And with the number of grocery stores that work even with primal cuts decreasing, he knows that the pool of potential employees and buyers is small. Only two of his current employees, one 28 years old and the other 73, have extensive meat experience; both came to the shop after the small plant they worked at ten miles away closed. Neither has an interest in slaughtering and Havel scoffs at the idea that just anyone could pick up the trade.

“It will take six months before they’re a butcher,” he said. “It’ll take them three months just to learn how to sharpen a knife.”

I didn’t wipe off the pig’s blood that sprayed onto my gray sneakers or the single spot on my right forearm. As I drove home, I felt like animal shit and barnyard grime coated my body and adhered to my nose hairs. No matter how many times or how hard I scrubbed, I sensed the scent of the slaughter surrounding me the rest of that day.

We’ve distanced ourselves for good reason. Yuri, the six-foot-two, wide-shouldered Russian wearing a white apron covered with maroon dried blood, was so disturbed by the witness of his first slaughter that he couldn’t understand why anyone would do it voluntarily.

“The first time I saw it, I couldn’t sleep. I saw blood in my dreams,” said the 28-year-old who wouldn’t give his last name because he was afraid future employers wouldn’t hire him if they knew how he’d paid his way through college. “And I didn’t kill it. I just saw it.”

I began to have second thoughts about killing my own pig. I’m neither a shooter nor killer. My only experience firing a gun was target practice with a bold-action .22-caliber rifle at summer camp as a 12-year-old. My only experience killing was shooting a sparrow with my younger brother’s BB gun while the bird sat in a poplar tree in my parent’s backyard. I was relieved when the family cat pounced on the flailing feathers.

Then came the day I woke up at 5:35 a.m. to kill a pig.

My night’s sleep had been short and I still felt exhausted when I awoke. How the pig slept, outside the abattoir, delivered for this fate a day and a half before, I don’t know. Frightened? Cold? Lonely?

I called Havel, the butcher, to confirm that we were still on for the slaughter. Yes, he said somewhat to my dismay and somewhat to my relief. Can you be here by 7:30?

The gray light of the rising sun through the clouds seemed appropriately ominous. So did the derailed freight train engine near the interchange onto highway that would take me to the slaughterhouse.

My muscles tightened and my heart rate rose when I turned off the highway and saw the white brick building. The drive was shorter than I remembered.

Inside it was a swirl of activity as the butcher’s ten employees broke down an entire side of beef; slashing, slicing, sawing. None acknowledged me as I stood by the cases of meat in the front, waiting while the another hog was finished in the slaughter room.

When it was my turn, I was waved back. Then Havel, in his olive-green boots and faded-purple apron, sauntered in. He handed me .22-caliber.

“It’s on safety.”

The bullet had to pierce the pig’s thick skull to stun it. The shot’s angle and position are everything. If you drew an X from each ear to the opposite eye, I was aiming for the small depression that lay in the middle.

Even at point-blank, getting in position to shoot a pig is a dance with an unwilling partner. I had the added trouble of working up the nerve to pull the trigger. You have to shoot the pig with it looking you in the eye.

Each time the pig looked at me, every time I had a shot, I was slow to act and the pig would look away.

“I know, I know,” I said, answering the pig’s imagined protests. “This is going to be hard on both of us.”

Admittedly, it would be harder on him.

I clicked my tongue to entice the pig to turn his gaze toward me. He obliged. I aimed. Deep breath. Safety off. I pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

Havel took the gun and ejected the misfired round and handed rifle back.

“It’s on safety.”

Again the dance. The pig turned around in his pen. I clicked my tongue. Havel reached in to push the pig back around to face me. He squealed in protest. Havel sprayed water on the ground and the pig turned, put his head down and drank. Aim. Safety off. Trigger.

Nothing.

Havel took the gun. I laughed at the ridiculousness of having worked up the nerve twice, and having failed twice. Havel cleared the misfire then opened the backdoor, aimed toward an open snow-covered farm field and fired. He closed the door and handed the gun back.

“It’s on safety.”

The pig seemed undisturbed by any of this. He just stood there. He looked at me. Aim, safety off, trigger.

Bang.

The pig’s face went brain-dead blank and he fell to the ground. Havel reached in and cut its throat. The pig thrashed, kicking the wall and gushing crimson. Its movements eventually slowed and its life was over.

Suspecting that I would, well, butcher the butchering, Havel skinned, eviscerated and split the hog.

I was disappointed that I didn’t feel a profound sadness or emptiness. But the disappointment was overwhelmed by a feeling of pride and accomplishment. It was an act necessary for the eating of meat but a part that I usually give little thought to while I am eating.

Maybe I’m heartless — a monster — for not feeling sadness. But this pig was destined from the day he was born to die so someone could eat him. By participating in his death and dismemberment, I was no longer in denial. The pig’s blood was on my hands.