

Food writer Hilary McNevin was invited to her friend’s farm to watch three lambs being killed. How did observing the process change her view on meat?
It was an invitation I couldn’t resist. “We’re slaughtering some lambs on the farm, would you like to come over and watch, perhaps help?”
Some friends in a hamlet called Waterloo, 45 minutes west of Ballarat in Victoria, had too many animals on their land and chose to cull three wether lambs – castrated male lambs – for their own consumption. These lambs had had a lovely time for the last eight and 10 months and as wether lambs there was nothing more for them to do on a working farm, except to “cut the grass and provide us with meat”, said one of the owners.
I did say yes, immediately. I’m an omnivore and a food writer and if I want to harp on about the ethical treatment of animals, the provenance of produce and our culture of convenience and consumption, it would be remiss of me to decline an experience such as this.
So much focus is given to plates of food and the current hottest restaurant and chef, it is often disproportionate to the hard yakka and nitty gritty of how our food is grown and raised. I was in but, as we drove to the farm, I became anxious.
How was I going to feel witnessing this for the first time? The idea of eating meat is something I am very comfortable with but the idea of seeing an animal killed to feed my friends had thrown me.
We pulled up at the farm and the three lambs pegged for slaughter had been separated from their flock for the past few hours. The owners of the farm had asked two local mates, Cameron and Andrew, to assist with the kill. Both had been involved in slaughtering animals for personal use on farms before and both were ready, although there wasn’t much talking; more a silent preparation.
“Let’s do it,” Andrew suddenly said to Cameron and they walked down to the three lambs. A single shot from a high-powered .22 rifle was put to the head of each animal and, as they hit the ground, Cameron moved in swiftly and slit their throats. In a matter of minutes, the three corpses were wheelbarrowed to the shed to be skinned and gutted.
Important things were checked off in this process, which made me feel it was humane. The owners of the lambs needed to be very caring in their raising of the lambs – they were. The process of the slaughter had to be done quickly and with as little stress as possible – it was – and the processing of the animal had to occur in a hygienic and respectful way to turn it into food. This was about to happen.
The bodies were hanged by their back legs, one at a time, in a large shed. The skinning began.
Andrew and Cameron took to each side of the body and ran a knife around the shank. Then they put the blade underneath the skin from the leg to the belly, careful not to pierce the flesh. They moved down to the sternum and throat, across the shoulders and then down the two front legs and the front feet. They peeled the skin back from the hind legs, their hands in-between the skin and the meat and pulled the skin down over the back and the front. Finally, they pulled it off the front legs. There was a sharp crack of the neck bone when the head was removed.
Part of what is confronting about this process is the sounds – the resonant pitch of the skinning, the crack of the neck, the slice down the carcass, the plop of the guts happens again and again. By the third lamb it’s easier to witness. Andrew and Cameron had a method that was speedy and careful.
In a matter of two hours it was all done and the carcasses were taken to a coolroom at a local cafe to hang for a couple of weeks before they would be driven back to the farm, butchered and put in the freezer.
I was invited to dinner three weeks after the slaughter. We had a slow-cooked leg with silverbeet and potatoes. The meat was nothing like you’d buy from a commercial butcher. Pale in colour, herbaceous in flavour, reminiscent of parsley, sage and rosemary – which weren’t used in the cooking – and there was a richness to its texture and weight. There were leftovers enjoyed the next day and one lamb will provide the owners of the farm with up to 20 meals, depending on the size of the carcass.
We enjoyed the meal but agreed that, given all the work and time involved, we would eat much less meat if this was the only way to get it. The convenience of meat in supermarkets, wrapped in plastic on polystyrene trays, has deadened our connection with this primal process. I won’t stop eating meat but more than ever before I have stopped to think about what meat I’m buying and what food chain I am supporting through my purchases.
After the afternoon, provenance matters to me more than ever and I’d rather go without meat than support intensive farming.
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