Where meat comes from

I'm sitting in my room listening to some music, thinking about watching a movie tonight. Sveta pulls back the sheet that serves as my door. "Wren, can you help?" I say "Sure, with what?" She leads me outside and I see with what. Her uncle has brought a goat in from the village to celebrate the arrival of new baby. He needs help slaughtering it.

The Tuvan way of killing livestock requires at least two people. With the animal flipped on its back, one holds the head and front legs steady while the other makes an incision in the chest cavity. He sticks his hand inside the animal and pulls on the big arteries coming out of the heart, severing them. The animal dies very quickly and no blood escapes.

Our animal is a nice brown goat with long straight horns and a little beard. It doesn't seem to have any notion of what's coming and stands, more or less agreeably, while the uncle sharpens his knife. I am deputed to be the head-holder-- a neighbor will hold the front legs. I grab the horns and help to flip the goat onto its back. This it doesn't like, and it starts bellowing and trying to kick out with its hind legs. We have a firm grip on it however, and its bellowing soon sounds like cries of resignation. The uncle makes his cut and his arm disappears up to the elbow into the goat.

From my vantage point, I can feel every movement of the goat and hear every sound it makes. As the uncle does his work, the muffled bellows make way to ragged, mushy breaths. The warm, beating fur under my hands slowly goes slack. I can feel the life drain out of the body. The uncle says "That's it, you can let go." I haven't noticed that he's already out of the goat and turning to wipe off. A last couple involuntary breaths escape from the corpse.

Inside, the butchering is a well-coordinated and orchestrated affair. The uncle cuts off the legs and starts skinning, while Sveta and grandmother prepare what seems like every pan and bucket in the house. The whole hide stays in one piece, pulled away from the muscle underneath. Keeping the carcass on its former skin, the uncle slices open the abdomen and dumps the stomach and entrails into a waiting basin. I think, "That's the basin I wash my clothes in."

The goat seems to have had a good last meal, as its stomach is a sloshing bag of dark green, partly digested grass. Sveta empties the stomach and intestines into buckets to dump outside. Meanwhile, the uncle has moved upwards. The liver, heart, and other organs I can't quite identify go into another pan. The remaining blood is ladled out of the carcass to go into blood sausage. Then he starts on the musculature. Very quickly, what still looked like a skinless goat turns into piles of various cuts of meat. He cuts the ribs into manageable sections and snaps the pelvis with a knife and hammer. The head is severed and put aside, where it watches the whole proceeding with open eyes.

Grandmother and Sveta keep busy and within two hours of the beginning of the affair, we are all sitting in front of plates of boiled meat and blood sausage. The meat still smells a little like the live goat.

It is the closest I have ever been to the death of such a large animal, and I'm glad to have had the experience. As a meat-eater, it makes me feel much less hypocritical about my diet to have participated in the creation of meat. I will say, though that when, yesterday, Sveta and grandma stuck a big stick in the mouth of the severed goat head and grilled it over a fire, I didn’t eat the brains (I think).