I am sitting on a coach bus heading to Belo Horizante as I'm writing this. It’s around 8:00pm and we are scheduled to arrive at 5:30am tomorrow. Today's the beginning of a month of touring around the northeast and down the coast of Brazil with aboot 60 other exchange students. Life is getting extra good here.
After I get back from this trip, I will change host families since I’ve been with my current one for three and a half months now. My family decided for last weekend to invite all of their relatives who I’ve met out to their cottage for the weekend. We planned on barbequing all weekend so Edmilson, my host dad, invited me to go with him to his farms and slaughter a few animals. I figured if I can cook a lobster, I could kill a cow.
We left for the farm at about 5:30am and I slept the entire way there. In fact, he didn’t wake me up when we got to the farm and I woke up to see an axe come down on the back of the cow’s neck. I quickly got out of our truck and ran over to watch what was happening. They then stabbed the cow in the heart and blood gushed out onto the field where it laid. We then used a pulley system to hang the cow up in a tree by its back legs. Edmilson and a pro butcher he hired began skinning the cow, degutting it (this turned nasty as, unknown to them, the cow was about two months pregnant and had a fetus chilling inside of it), and fully butchering it. All this happening in the middle of a field while it hung from a tree, quite different from how I would have imagined the process in Canada. After this we moved on to slaughtering lamb. This is where it got a bit gnarly. They started off by going into a pen and tackling the chosen lamb. They then carried it by its legs over to a tree and hung it upside down by its back legs. I had the role here of keeping it still while the pro butcher, in one motion, broke its neck and slit its throat. Then, he decapitated the lamb. As its nerves were shutting down, the lamb started jerking around, spewing blood everywhere. For the male we killed, we also had to castrate it. I have a video of all of this for anyone sick enough to be interested. We killed two other female sheep, one of which was pregnant. Two fetuses in one day, a record for me. After the day at the farm we headed up to the cottage and had a great weekend. We had some great food and some very fresh beef and lamb. In two days, we finished off a full lamb.
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| local PETA meeting |
Since I’ll be doing so much on this trip, I’ll make an effort to blog regularly. This is going to be the trip of a lifetime so I imagine I’ll have some good things to say.
