Prime cuts for primetime television
‘‘Surely they’re not going to show it,’’ the bloke said as we perched in front of the television.
A cow stood in the yards and a home kill butcher had her in his sights. Bang! The cow dropped dead on primetime Sunday night family viewing time.
The butcher cut the carcass open, peeled the skin off it and removed its stomach.
‘‘Awesome! I can’t believe they showed that! The townies will hate it!’’ the bloke laughed.
In my previous life as one of those townies I would have probably agreed.
I would have been horrified at what I’d just seen, let alone the stillborn calves and the farmer with his arm half-way up a bovine’s nether regions.
Now I was quite stoked to see the realities of rural life on-air for everyone to see.
In my neck of the woods, the killing of the farm pigs is a fullyfledged Sunday session, and hunting is just how we keep the freezer filled.
It’s no secret that the lambs and calves kids bottle feed end up on their plates.
The bloke, you see, deals with animals every day.
One of his more delightful features is that as a stock truck driver he comes home whiffing of eau d’animal and is usually covered in cow, sheep or deer crap. Such a glamorous job. As a full-fledged townie I once asked one of his mates if he felt any guilt about taking animals off to be killed every day.
‘‘I’m taking them to heaven,’’ was his reply.
Only a year after moving to the country I was given the job of taking photos inside a meat processing plant. A visit to heaven? Perhaps not. I tend to think I was maybe given the job to see if I could handle it, rather than for my photography skills.
But there was no backing out for me. I was determined to do the job without getting girly or showing my true city-girl colours.
So there I was, in my freezing work whites and someone else’s gumboots, taking photos of animals being butchered along the chain.
I kind of forgot the carcasses used to be standing upright in a paddock mooing, as I watched the boners slicing and dicing. There’s some real skill to doing that and not severing an artery.
My tour guide asked if I wanted to see the slaughter room and a morbid fascination took over.
Before I knew it the borrowed gumboots were standing in a pool of blood as I watched bovines being killed, humanely and with a minimum of fuss.
I didn’t raise the camera to take pics, I just watched and took it all in.
Cripes, mum and dad aren’t going to believe I’ve done this.
I held onto my lunch and didn’t vow on the spot to become vegetarian. It didn’t faze me at all.
Perhaps there was hope for me as a country girl yet.