Eat Wild Pig!

     

     Of all days to forget the camera.

     I had even thought about it the day before. I told myself that I should take the digital camera with me when we went to Elmer's to pick coffee in his orchard the next morning. Now I know it was some kind of premonition, or an intuitive message sent up from the idea section of my subconscious. Because there was something pretty extraordinary to take pictures of.

      It's not the first time we've been caught without a camera at Elmer's. The first wild pig we ever saw, about two weeks after coming to the island, was caught in a trap on his farm. An astonishing thing for someone not accustomed to the sight of wild pigs, and a photograph would have been appropriate. But, as I said, no camera. You'll have to take my word for it that it was impressive.

      That pig was taken away by Elmer's brother to be slaughtered at a later time. The next pig we saw, the one I'm going to tell you about, was to be dispatched by Elmer himself that day, right there on the farm. He told us as soon as we showed up for work that he'd trapped one the night before and was going to shoot it.

There was a stench of decay in the air as we approached.

      “I shot another one a couple of days ago, but it ran off into the grass and died. I'm not going to go in there and get it. Frick that.”

He explained that the one in the trap was a female. He'd seen her before with two piglets, which were presumably still running around. The trap was located next to deep gulch running along the south side of the farm.

      Without bothering to look, we got to work in the orchard and picked coffee cherries for about three hours. We came back out around mid-afternoon, hauling our buckets of cherries under the shelter attached to Elmer's workshed, where he keeps the husker for extracting the beans.

      After a few minutes he came out from feeding his chickens.

      “Now I have to shoot this pig. And when I'm done, you can take some home with you.”

      Hannah and I both perked up. Fresh wild pig? Seriously? It was an idea we hadn't really dared to entertain, mainly because we have no way to refrigerate food. Fresh meat can turn in a day in the tropical heat. The only thing to do is eat it the same day, if we have it. Besides, we never presumed that it would ever be available to us, assuming that if Elmer killed a pig and took some of the meat, he'd want to keep it for himself or his extended family.

      He motioned for us to follow him toward the gulch. The trap was homemade, an old pickup bed supporting a length of chain-link fence and assorted barred metal frames. The pig inside pushed with its hooves and snout against the bars as if testing for a weak spot. She was plainly very strong, maybe as strong as a healthy human being, with bristly black hair, a wiry frame, and a long head. She looked markedly different from a farm-raised pig—her body was as lean and muscular as a hound dog's, and similar in size. I wondered if she might have the strength to shake the trap apart, and what then? Chances were she'd run off, but if a pig such as this felt the need to attack and got a bead on someone, that someone could easily end up in the emergency room.

      “I need to hose it down before I shoot it,” Elmer told us, and reached for a length of hose that lay coiled next to a nearby tree. He showered the animal thoroughly with a powerful stream of water, first one side and then the other as it turned around in the cramped space of the trap. It seemed not to mind at all, and even halted in its efforts to get free as if taking a break to freshen up.

      When he finished, Elmer dropped the hose and went to his truck. He fished around in the back seat and pulled out a .22 rifle. He came back to the trap, raised the rifle, and took aim. Hannah and I covered our ears.

      Over one eye there was a deep cut from one of the times she had smashed her head into the bars. For a second I found myself concerned for her health, and then reminded myself she only had about that long to live.

      The rifle went off with a loud pop and the pig went down immediately. We moved in closer to get a better look. A thin, steady stream of blood spurted from the wound at the top of her head while she lay on her right side, kicking her legs as if still trying to get away, convulsing as though most of the life still remained in her body. The left eye stared up blankly at nothing.

      Elmer picked up the hose again and doused the pig with more water. The weakening bloodflow mixed with it on the metal floor of the trap into a pinkish liquid.

      “Come on, enough already!” Elmer hollered at the kicking body.

“You guys can take some of the meat home with you. I'll give some to the dogs. They'll eat everything, the fur, the bones, all of it.”

      A couple of minutes went by before the pig had mostly stopped moving. Elmer reached into the trap, yanked the body out, and let it flop onto the ground. Although it was dead, the hooves still moved feebly.

He took out a small pocket knife, hardly longer than a pairing knife.

      “You're just going to use that?” Hannah asked.

      Elmer shrugged. “It's all you need. I'm not going to keep very much. You just need to cut the skin, get through the meat and the joint, and poof, you're done. The rest I'll throw in the gully. Once it starts to rot, the other pigs down there will come around and eat it.”

      He held up a foreleg and sliced into the skin where it joined the torso, into the layer of fat underneath, past that into the muscle, and detached the shoulder at the joint. An opened vein filled the wound with blood like water filling a basin.    The smell of blood and animal musk reached our nostrils.

      We took the foreleg to the workshed, and Elmer wedged the hoof into the rear bumper of a Ford pickup he keeps parked there. He cut into the shoulder, pulling away the bristly hide, and separated a substantial hunk of meat, about the size of a ten-ounce steak. Looking closely at the hanging leg, I could see some of the muscle tissue still twitching.

      “You have to cool the meat down or it'll start to rot really soon,” he informed us. We placed the meat in a plastic bag and filled the bag with water from a two-liter soda bottle.

      “That should help cool it down,” he said.

      Bloody water squirted from the bottom of the bag.

      “Maybe I have another bag that doesn't leak.”

      I put the leaking bag inside another he had lying around the workshed.

The meat looked appetizing, even when submerged in a bag of pink water. It seemed just as good as anything you'd see in a supermarket, the same color and texture as a fresh cut of pork loin.

      Elmer went back to the carcass and removed the other three legs. What remained he picked up and tossed into the gulch. Loud thunks echoed back up to us as it hit boulders and tree roots on the way down.

He gave the legs to his two black mutts, Two and Four. They're named after the number of white feet they have respectively. Pulling against their chains, they leaped and barked as we arrived bearing these rare treats. As soon as Elmer tossed the legs to them, Four buried one in the dirt.

      “They like to do that. He'll dig it back up and eat it as soon as it starts to smell.”

      People are a little more civilized in their eating habits. He advised us to cook the meat very well—very well—to kill the trichinosis virus. It's the same advice you hear in regard to all pork, the difference in this case being that the pig is almost guaranteed to be a carrier.

      Pork of this kind is sold in various parts of the island, but always by roadsides, never in stores. It's illegal to sell commercially, presumably because of the threat of disease. The hunting of wild pig is a fairly common practice here, done usually with the aid of dogs to help track them down and hold them .

      Pigs may have first come to the islands with the original human settlers. They most certainly came with the tide of Europeans, who weren't terribly concerned with the effects the pigs had on island ecosystems. Little surprise, then, that some went feral, and have been reproducing in large numbers ever since, making a devastating impact on the unique—in some cases nearly extinct—island flora. Sows can birth two litters a year, and without hunting their numbers would likely grow wildly out of control. Local farmers consider them, at best, a nuisance, and at worst a serious threat to crops such as macadamia nuts. One solution is to erect fencing to keep them out, but that does little to help rare, wild vegetation. On islands with a fixed amount of square mileage, and hundreds of thousands of years to wait before any more turns up, keeping the wild pig population down is an important concern, and hunting is an expedient way to accomplish that.

      It isn't easy to see a living creature destroyed in front of you. It's not something to be taken lightly, and without a suitable degree of contemplation. At the same time, if you're one to eat meat, it's very important to witness the death of an animal that will be consumed as food. Too many people approach what they eat from a mental distance, and have a relationship to it that is several times removed from the source. It puts me in mind of a lyric from the Citizen Fish song “Flesh and Blood”: “The meat you eat is wrapped up neat/You didn't see it bleed”. The overall message of the song—that the consumption of meat wastes resources, and is essentially evil and cruel—is not one that I fully agree with, but the band makes a good point. If you are an omnivore who includes a measure of animal protein in your diet, it makes sense to observe the death and preparation of a living creature and come to terms with it, one way or the other.

      A couple of years ago, Hannah and I were watching a DVD of the French horror film Eyes Without A Face. Included on the disk was a documentary by the same filmmaker called Blood of the Beasts, shot in the '40's in slaughterhouses outside Paris. It provides a very unflinching glimpse into the killing and processing of livestock: calves have their necks slit while strapped down to a metal table, then are decapitated and dismembered, the stumps of the legs still twitching forcefully even with the head laying atop a pile of other calves' heads; several sheep are tied down on their backs and have their throats slashed, kicking at the air as they bleed out. A horse is killed in a businesslike manner with a bolt gun, then bled and skinned by a man with one leg—a leg he lost by a slip of his own knife, cutting himself too badly for the limb to be saved.

      After watching all this, we felt we had a decision to make. Did we feel that we could continue eating commercially mass-produced meat, in light of how systematic and brutal the process is? It's not like we didn't already know, we just hadn't been confronted with the bloody reality of it in a long time. As a kid, I cleaned and gutted fish I caught on summer vacation. I watched my dad kill chickens that we would later eat, hanging them upside down and bleeding them alive much in the way some of the animals in the documentary bowed out of this world. Neither of us was naïve or uninformed about death in relation to food. Watching the grim viscousness of commercial production, however, left us feeling a little sick.

      We set the notion of converting to vegetarianism to the side as something to consider. We even began a sampling of non-animal proteins that could be eaten as a substitute for meat, such as tempeh and fake hot dogs. Veganism was out—we both like cheese too much, and vegan cheese is nowhere near the same. We're aware that, for many vegans, the choice is a moral or health-conscious one, and is not based primarily in food aesthetics. But that's what eventually proved to be our undoing. We like the taste of real meat, and certain flavor profiles and textures are only really available to you when you are an omnivore.

      That's the main reason we never took the next step and stopped eating meat. It's just too good, and in my opinion anyway, good for you if eaten in moderate amounts. The human body does well with a certain amount of animal fats and proteins, and the amino acids in meat help the body to assimilate the proteins more efficiently. I'd put money down on the claim that every culture in the world, throughout the entirety of human history, has consumed protein in one form or another from things that walk, swim, crawl, or fly. Our species evolved to derive nutrients from a broad spectrum of sources, animals included.

      We still had to address the issue of factory farming. Just because we'd made the decision to remain omnivores didn't mean we were shutting our eyes to the nauseating facts behind mass production. One of the most effective arguments against the consumption of meat—and eggs and dairy, to a large extent—is that the raising of livestock requires the use of too much land, too much grain to feed animals, and is grossly unsanitary because of the conditions in which the animals are kept. These are excellent points, and for myself, I feel that the methods employed by factory farms should be discouraged, and eventually eliminated. If more of us, over time, can agree that people should be closer to their food from the beginning, from growth to consumption, in the locavore style, then we will likely agree as well that the commercial production of meat and dairy should diminish to the point that it becomes virtually nonexistent.

      Ideally, people should raise their own animals, under far more humane conditions, and in conditions that are much more sanitary and healthy. This would mean that the quantity of meat available to people would be greatly reduced, but that should be the case anyway if one takes into account that animal fats and proteins ought to comprise a proportionately small percentage of one's diet. Asian cuisine is probably one of the best examples of this idea: meals are made up of a preponderance of grains and vegetables, with some fish or meat included.

      And then there's hunting. To hunt for sport is wasteful and largely pointless, encouraging an unhealthy element in the minds of those who partake in it, inasmuch as the pleasure involved is in the act of killing itself, abstracted from any need for food. Hunting for food, provided the target animals are abundant, is an effective means of acquiring good meat free from artificial hormones, a feedlot diet, and the general cruelty of factory farming. The pig Elmer caught was a wild animal that is in no small supply on the island, and belonged to an invasive species besides. Reduction of their numbers is important to local agriculture, and to kill them without eating them is to let good meat go to waste.

      It could be pointed out that if everyone hunted for their meat, there wouldn't be any animals left. It could also be pointed out that there is no way everyone on Earth can find the space to raise enough chickens, cows, goats, rabbits, pigs, or whatever other types of livestock needed to provide humanity with meat, dairy, and eggs, not if we're all supposed to do it ourselves.

      We are now at the seven-billion marker on the road to human overpopulation. To feed all of these people will require the use of an enormous amount of land, regardless of the kind of diet they consume. Meat, grain, vegetables, fruit, all need space to grow, and all are vital to human existence. The nutritional needs of our species do not change just because we've allowed ourselves to expand way out of proportion to our environment and its capacity to sustain us. The problem, in terms of land use for food production, isn't that people should give up animals as a food source. The problem is that there are too many people.

      As I said, it's not an easy thing to watch an animal be killed for food, or for any other reason, but I was glad to find that I didn't feel repulsed, or morally offended, or turned off by the blood and death throes of the pig from the idea of eating meat. I felt that I had passed some kind of test. Granted, I wasn't the one doing the trapping and shooting, but that's a small step from watching it happen. Elmer's rough butchering of the pig did not disgust me in any way; I found the fresh meat I saw beneath the layers of skin and fat to be appetizing, not repellent.

      Speaking of appetites: when we got the pork home, Hannah placed it in a bowl of salt water to tenderize it and draw out some of the excess blood. An hour later, she cut away the tougher, more fibrous layers of muscle, and put the meat in a bag with soy sauce and balsamic vinegar as a marinade. Some time after that, when the meat had absorbed the flavor, she put it in a pan with the marinade and boiled it until the liquid evaporated. This helped to draw out some of the oils and reduce the gaminess.

      She sliced it into strips, chopped some onion and bell pepper, and sautéed these until the meat was very well done. The result had a strong enough flavor, and dark coloring, that I would have mistaken it for beef if I hadn't known better. It reminded me a lot of what comes in Mongolian beef at Chinese buffets. It was some of the best pork either of us had eaten in a long time, and easily the wildest.

      We're both really grateful for the opportunity to enjoy our food the way we do on the island of Hawai'i. Most of what we eat, whether vegetable, fruit, or protein, comes from farms we either work on or visit. Apart from growing it yourself, there is no better way of getting food. I can't help but think that we experience Hawaii in a way most tourists don't by living in this manner. How many tourists not only eat wild pig, but see it shot and butchered in front of them? How many eat produce directly from farms and gardens, and not purchased in a store or served in a restaurant? How many even take a look at where native-grown food comes from? Not many, I'll bet. We're able to see the Big Island in a way that the majority of visitors here don't, and that opportunity not only makes us feel lucky, but a little bit wiser as well.