Friday The Thirteenth

A few seed potatoes purchased at Potato Day in Bridport which I have begun to "chit"

Before dawn this morning of Friday 13th I inched the truck gently across the ice sheets that had formed on the concrete yard. Towed behind me in the large trailer were three pigs nestled in a thick carpet of straw where they had spent the night. This new day was certainly an inauspicious one for them. Our destination : the local abattoir.

I also had two humans but they chose to sit in with me in the truck. We hadn't been to this slaughterhouse before. Pilsdon normally uses one up by Chard Junction but that was booked up way into February and our pigs had reached the right weight. Any more and they'd be putting on too much fat.

This large veg bed we are slowly covering in semi-rotted manure/straw combo

An over-reliance on Google Maps led us to shoot straight past the abattoir as it had the nerve to be on the right not the left side of the lane. A mile or two further down we found a place that a large trailer could be reversed into, and we came right back. The pigs had had an extra few minutes of life, not that they were likely to be savouring them, bouncing around in an unlit box.


So we drove down into the complex which had parked vehicles everywhere but no people. The full moon sat just above the western horizon whilst the eastern sky glimmered. A lone man directed us to a ramp which I reversed the trailer up to. We were seemingly the only customers around. Where were the slaughter-people? Nobody in the little white office. No one in the large hall that the ramp led to, full of little fenced pens. We shouted our hello's to no avail.

A fellow volunteer wields her axe

Disconsolate we wandered outside again, to find a man approaching up the ramp. “Have you not met anyone?” he asked, mysteriously. “No”, we replied. His call brought someone else along. No more information was forthcoming though. “Tell us what to do” we pleaded and were told we could release the pigs. So release them we did, they came out and up the ramp slowly, grunting, a little unsteady from car-sickness. They were shoo'ed up into the echoing chamber, the door was shut and I was left to close up the trailer.


Cameron* went off to find someone to sign his official piece of paper recording the movement of the pigs from A to B. He was gone a long time, evidently because of an absence of any employees to deal with him. Eventually he returned with tales of witnessing live sheep being hauled up by a mechanical grabber two stories high by their hind leg, off to their deaths. Abattoirs are not fun places, especially on Friday 13th.


The bodies of our three pigs will be ready for collection on Monday, when we'll take them to a butcher in Dorchester to be miraculously converted into hundreds of sausages and rashers of bacon. People at Pilsdon who had fed and loved these pigs while they were alive, giving them scratches on their necks, even giving them names, do not seem to be squeamish about feeding themselves from their flesh. They were well looked after and led a pretty enjoyable, if short, life. I wish though that they could be slaughtered at home rather than taken to an unfamiliar and unpleasant place to die. Time to research mobile slaughterhouses that come to your farm...

And the pile is getting smaller. Honest it is!

* name changed