Only the Pig's Squeal Gets Away.
Meat packers will tell you that nowadays they save everything but the pig's last dying squeal. Naturally, the hides and skins of the animals slaughtered are worth saving. The tips of cows' horns are used for the mouthpieces of pipes; the horns themselves are split and pressed flat, and combs, the backs of brushes, and large buttons are made of them. What bits and splinters are too small to be worked up go for fertilizer.
Hoofs are sorted by colors. The white ones go to Japan, there to be made up into ornaments of artistic merit. We haven't got that far along ourselves. The striped ones stay here to be made up into buttons. The black ones are utilized in the manufacture of cyanide of potash, by which gold is extracted from low-grade ores it formerly did not pay to work.
The bones in the feet of cattle bear up a great weight, so they are hard and take a high polish. They can be used instead of ivory, which is getting scarce. Tooth-brush handles and cutlery handles are made of these bones. The others in the skeleton are built of lime stuck together with glue and molded into shape by the push and pull of muscles.
The soft bones of the head, shoulders, ribs, and breast do not need to be so stiff as the bones of the legs; they have more glue in proportion to lime than the leg-bones. The animal needs a kind of flexible, weather-proof varnish flowed over it, so to speak, to protect the tissues. Glue is what makes this coat or hide. So from bones and scraps and trimmings of hide this glue or gelatin is soaked out. Even the bones on which meat has been cooked have some little dribs of gelatin and fat in them, and these are stewed under pressure until there is nothing left in them of the gelatin, of which they now make the little capsules in which the druggist puts the medicine whose taste we don't just fancy, and fats which go to the soap-maker for the want of a better destination.