Through a small door the fated pigs enter the final pen fifteen or twenty at a time. They are nervous, perhaps because of the smell coming from within, perhaps because of the sounds. A man in the pen loops a chain around the hind foot of each successive pig, and then slips the iron ring at the other end of the chain over a hook at the outer margin of a revolving drum, perhaps ten feet in diameter. As the drum revolves the hook rises, slowly, drawing the pig backward by the leg, and finally lifting it bodily, head downward. When the hook reaches the top of its orbit it transfers the animal to a trolley, upon which it slides in due course to the waiting butcher, who dispatches it with a knife thrust in the neck, and turns to receive the next pig.
The manners of the pigs on their way to execution held me with a horrid fascination. Pigs look so much alike that we assume them to be minus individuality. That is not so. The French Revolution—of which the stockyards reminded Dr. George Brandes, the literary critic, who recently visited this country—scarcely could have brought out in its victims a wider range of characteristics than these pigs show. I have often noticed, of course, that some people are like pigs, but I had never before suspected that all pigs are so very much like people. Some of them come in yelling with fright. Others are silent. They shift about nervously, and sniff, as though scenting death. "It's the steam they smell," said a man in overalls beside me. Well, perhaps it is. But I could smell death there, and I still think the pigs can smell it, too. Some of the pigs lean against each other for companionship in their distress. Others merely wait with bowed heads, giving a curious effect of porcine resignation. When they feel the tug of the chain, and are dragged backward, some of them set up a new and frightful squealing; others go in silence, and with a sort of dignity, like martyrs dying for a cause.
As I stood there, studying the temperament of pigs, I saw the butcher looking up at me as he wiped his long, thin blade. He was a rawboned Slav with a pale face, high cheek bones, and large brown eyes, holding within their somber depths an expression of thoughtful, dreamy abstraction. I have never seen such eyes. Without prejudice or pity they seemed to look alike on man and pig. Being upon the platform above him, right side up, and free to go when I should please, I felt safe for the moment. But suppose I were not so—suppose I were to come along to him, hanging by one leg from the trolley—what would he do then? Would he stop to ask why they had sent another sort of animal, I wondered? Or would he do his work impartially?
I should not wish to take the chance.
The progress of the pig is swift—if the transition from pig to pork may be termed "progress." The carcass travels presently through boiling water, and emerges pink and clean. And as it goes along upon its trolley, it passes one man after another, each with an active knife, until, thirty minutes later, when it has undergone the government inspection, it is headless and in halves—mere meat, which looks as though it never could have been alive.
From the slaughter-house we passed through the smoke-house, where ham and bacon were smoking over hardwood fires in rows of ovens big as blocks of houses. Then through the pickling room with its enormous hogs-heads, giving the appearance of a monkish wine cellar. Then through the curing room with its countless piles of dry salt pork, neatly arranged like giant bricks.
The enthusiastic gentleman who escorted us kept pointing out the beauties of the way this work was done: the cleanliness, the system by which the rooms are washed with steam, the gigantic scale of all the operations. I heard, I noticed, I agreed. But all the time my mind was full of thoughts of dying pigs. Indeed, I had forgotten for the moment that other animals are also killed to feed carnivorous man. However, I was reminded of that, presently, when we came upon another building, consecrated to the conversion of life into veal and beef.
The steers meet death in little pens. It descends upon them unexpectedly from above, dealt out by a man with a sledge, who cracks them between the horns with a sound like that of a woodman's ax upon a tree. The creatures quiver and quickly crumple.
It is swift. In half a minute the false bottom of the pen turns up and rolls them out upon the floor, inert as bags of meal. Only after death do these cattle find their way to an elevated trolley line, like that used for the pigs. And, as with the pigs, they move along speedily; shortly they are to be seen in the beef cooler, where they hang in tremendous rows, forming strange vistas—a forest of dead meat.
The scene where calves were being killed according to the Jewish law, for kosher meat, presented the most sanguinary spectacle with which my eyes have ever burned. Two rabbis, old bearded men, performed the rites with long, slim, shiny blades. Literally they waded in a lake of gore. Even the walls were covered with it. Looking down upon them from above, we saw them silhouetted on a sheet of pigment utterly beyond comparison—for, without exaggeration, fire would look pale and cold beside the shrieking crimson of that blood—glistening, wet, and warm in the electric light.