Grampa and Uncle Milo!
they kill the pig, dump into barrel of boiling water and scape off the bristles - then sled it up past the house to the work shop - hang er up to gut and bleed out and then came to butchering - and grammie would make the sausage.
I stayed inside the house!
I could do chickens and rabbits - but not beef and porkers.
Probably just as well. A local guy wanted to have a whole roast pig at his wedding at my parents'. He brought a pig and stayed to help get him ready for me to cook. My dad has a low platform we use to scald and scrape. Anyways the pig is in the pen and my dad shoots it in the head with the .22. It drops like it is dead and my dad goes in to cut it's throat. Standard practice is to slide the knife through the front of the shoulder into the heart to bleed it. But cutting the jugular while the heart is still fibrillating works fine. Anyways this pig gets up and heads out of the pen. WTH? J grabs an ear and my bro says "aim him for the platform". They guide the pig over and one more tug on the ear and he jumps up on the platform. The whole time J is saying " comon pig help us out, you can do it". Keep in mind this pig is gasping, staggering, and bleeding like a stuck pig. When he hopped up on the platform I had the .22 and popped a cap in his brain. My dad was appalled. It was bizarre to the point of funny. I still laugh.
From there everything went all right. ;-)