Eating Animals

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I'm going to get even. You're already going to kill the hog, but that's not enough. It has to suffer....You go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be looking up at me and I'd be sticking, and I would just take my knife and - eerk - cut its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream. One time I took my knife - it's sharp enough - and I sliced off the end of the hog's nose, just like a bologna. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into his nose. Now that hog really went nuts, pushing its nose all over the place. I still had a bunch of salt left on my hand - I was wearing a rubber glove - and I stuck the salt right up the hog's ass. The poor hog didn't know whether to shit or go blind....I wasn't the only guy doing this kind of stuff. One guy I work with actually chases hogs into the scalding tank. And everybody - hog drivers, shacklers, utility men - uses lead pipes on hogs. Everybody knows of, all of it.

s. 253-254 Jonathan Safran Foer - Eating Animals