04.11.04

Finally watched the goat butchering this evening.

Events:
Three men and a goat walked over to the far wall. They called for us to come if we wanted to. Andy scrambled on his shoes and scrammed over, calling, "go fast Joh, go fast, you're gonna miss it, this is your chance, grab the camera." When I got over there, the goat was on its back with the two young men, Nego and Abera, each holding a pair of legs, up and tight in the air. The goat was lying there pretty serenely--didn't seem to be struggling, didn't seem to be wild-eyed or desperate the way the sheep at the Barn were that time we tried to load them into a truck to go be shorn. His funny little goat eye and his whole body waited.

The next part, in the end, I turned away for and didn't actually even watch after all this. The older man, also the entrance guard, leaned over the neck and with no fanfare, only a few words in Amharic--"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,"--slit open the soft skin with his big sickle knife. Then his part was finished and he went back to the hotel
entrance.

There was a wide gaping slit between the chin and the chest now where you could see the vertebrae of the goat's neck. Nego and Abera let go of the legs. The goat was on it side and its legs kicked and ran. The blood pumped out of the carotid arteries in wide orangish belches and sank into the grass. The eye looked a little more desperate now, and its mouth opened and closed though no sound came out.

When it looked like the goat had pretty much stopped moving, Abera grabbed one of the rear hooves and slit the skin inside the leg down across the rear. He did the same with the other rear hoof, meeting in the middle. Please oh please oh please let it really be dead by now. With a slice across the anus area, he had a beginning peeling point. He started a slit from the
rear end towards the throat, separating the skin tissues from the muscle tissues with quick practiced whacks of the curved knife. When the skin was off the stomach so that the two hindlegs were just bare meat, (he had already sliced and broken off the hooves at the ankles) he strung them up on a rope and he and Nego carried it over to the tree by the laundry shed. They threw the rope over one of the branches and hoisted it up. With the back legs and stomach free, all they had to do was turn it around and give a yank and the skin came off the back. "It is a coat," said Nadew, who had joined us later. Only tricky part left was cutting around the ears.

Skin was off. Next they cut off the head. It sat on the cement block beside the skin and metal kitchen pan. Then they cut open the stomach to get the innards out, which they left in a pile, except for the stomach, for the birds and cats to eat--"It is their dinner, you know? It is like a gift." After they gave us an anatomy lesson. The stomach was HUGE. Seems like most
of the goat was stomach. There's just not much meat on these things. (I guess. I mean, what do I know? I only see meat in lumps.)

The lungs they threw up on the wall for the cats who had shown up, along with two pearlescent testicles the size of large roma tomatoes. Off came all the different parts till all that was left was a long, not-so-meaty, spine. The last thing to do was to disconnect the stomach and clean it out. Its just this big stretchy bag, so Abera flipped it inside out and dumped the contents--lots and lots of chewed up grass--and then took it over to the
water barrel spout to rinse, scrubbing and squeezing and juicing all the green out. On the inside, it is a grey-brown color with all these little knobby pills, like the inside of an old cotton sock. It looks very much like a stained old cotton sock on the inside. The outside is smooth white skin looking. It's very very stretchy. This is what tripe is. They cook it with peppers and spices.

And then that was it. The pan of meat went inside, the head I don't know what happened with it (though they assured me they don't eat it--they only do that in villages), and the skin gets sold. Finished.


Thoughts:
The guys were confused why we were so excited to see this. Haven't you ever seen an animal butchered before? We tried to explain that in our country, you just don't see farm animals the way you do here, and that all our butchering is done in factories. Factories, you know, like the places where they make clothes. I think it might have translated. "But what about in rural areas?" With limited language, it is impossible to explain to them what a Western grocery store is like and what "rural" means in most of America. Though there are exceptions, it doesn't mean self-sufficient/kill your own meat. Andy says this is actually a pretty cruel way to kill an animal--sure the blood may be drained, but the brainstem is still intact the whole time. You don't know what the animal is still feeling or thinking the
whole time.

Funny how quickly something goes from being an animal to being meat. When I said this only confirms my disinterest in meat, Andy said I should be excited about this; this is my dream meat. If I'm going to eat meat anywhere it should be here: this the freshest I'll ever see it, it's locally grown, range-fed, and free of antibiotics and growth hormones. True. I suspect
there would be a way to prepare it that would make it worth eating it. But with so many other things tasting so much better, why?

I've been making my first effort at reading the Old Testament while we've been here, and seeing a goat actually be killed makes much of the incomprehensible Mosaic law and symbolism throughout it a little more real. Suddenly, blood sacrifice is not an abstract. Makes me respect and like the fact that someone says something over the animal as it is being
killed--shows respect for the animal, for life. Add that to my list of musts for perfect slow-food meat: Fresh, locally grown, range-fed, free of antibiotics and growth hormones, and killed in a properly appreciative spirit.