fatvegan

The other I was up late somewhere and there was a show on SBS. It was a documentary about a Latin American jungle village. The scene I saw was of a group of people killing a cow to get it ready for a feast. They tied it between to trees, with its head tied to one and its tail tied to the other so it couldn't really move. If it sat down the rope around it's next would start to strangle it.

All the people were laughing and joking about it. They gave a machete to a girl who didn't seem to have killed a cow before. The others described how she was supposed to do it. You had to thrust the machete down through it's collar bone to get into the heart. She thrust in and the cow bellowed. She wasn't strong enough to get it in all the way, so the cow just stood there with the machete about 6 inches into its body. A boy came over and starting pushing it further in. The cow really screamed and blood started spurting out of the hole. It fell down onto its knees and the rope around its kneck starting to strangle it. Someone came over and cut the rope so the cow fell to the ground. It lay there screaming and gasping while buckets of blood poured out of the hole. They pulled the machete out and you could see the blood pulsating out. The cow struggled to get up again. It really made the most harrowing noises. Eventually it fell down. Its tongue fell out of its mouth. It just lay downing gasping quietly.

The people starting poking it in the eyeball to find out if it was dead. When it was they started cutting it up.

Maybe sometimes killing animals in the wild yourself is more romantic than this was. But what I saw made abattoirs seemly thoroughly humane.