Butchering

“ Whilst unpacking their own animals, the two trappers could not refrain from glancing, every now and then, with no little astonishment, at the solitary stranger they had so unexpectedly encountered. If truth be told, his appearance not a little perplexed them. His hunting-frock of buckskin, shining with grease, and fringed pantaloons, over which the well-greased butcher-knife had evidently been often wiped after cutting his food, or butchering [Pg 53] the carcass of deer and buffalo, were of genuine mountain make. ”

“ The old man now has the carcass left and the butchering is done. For dinner, which is to be eaten in about half an hour, he lays aside the most tender parts—the diaphragm, the kidneys, and the pancreas. This is all prepared by Nelly, who on such solemn occasions is particularly proud of her skill as cook. The meat floats on an ocean of fat, while she now and then licks the point of the knife with delight. At such times she can brook no joking, having a sublime sense of her own importance, and being thoroughly convinced that she is indispensable. ”

“ This is somewhat at variance with the usual democratic way of doing things and bears a striking resemblance to a similar custom among the Western Cree. In an individual hunt anyone approaching a man engaged in butchering was given meat, sometimes even the last piece. ”

“ I have observed that the old ones pass all the carcasses, which, trailing to the ground, are hanging before the butchers’ shops, as if they were on a sort of parole d'honneur not to touch them; the middle-aged ones wistfully eye this meat, yet jog on also, while the piglings, who (so like mankind) have more appetite than judgment, can rarely resist taking a nibble; yet, no sooner does the dead calf begin again to move, than from the window immediately above out pops the head of a butcher, who, drinking his coffee, whip in hand, inflicts a prompt punishment, sounding quite equal to the offence. ”

“ The term butcher is applicable to whomever engages in the wanton and wasteful destruction of animal life with no idea of utilizing the remains. To the mind of such persons a sportsman’s goal is a slaughter pen. The game butcher recognizes no rules, but prides himself on the amount of havoc he can produce in a flock of birds or a herd of wild animals, and speaks with glee of the quantity of game he has destroyed. The market hunter, as the name implies, is out for business. ”

“ The Butcher has his arts and sophistications. To make meat weigh as heavy as possible he checks the full bleeding of the victim of his knife, and to make it appear plump and white and glistening, particularly joints of veal and lamb, he inflates the cellular membrane, by blowing into it with all his might, the breath respired from his lungs: by means of which practice, should he be infected with any loathsome disease, his customers stand a very good chance of being inoculated with “the blessing.” ”

“ For they count hunting the lowest, the vilest, and most abject part of butchery; and the other parts of it more profitable and more honest as bringing much more commodity, in that they (the butchers) kill their victims from necessity, whereas the hunter seeks nothing but pleasure of the seely [simple, innocent] and woful animal’s slaughter and murder. The which pleasure in beholding death, they say, doth rise in wild beasts, either of a cruel affection of mind or else by being changed, in continuance of time, into cruelty by long use of so cruel a pleasure. ”

“ The Tinker being awarded with a crown for his dexterity, went away; but one day being in merry talk with our Courtier, he changed his tone sadly, and told him that a butcher, on such a road, kept a lion-like mastiff dog; that he was not so much afraid to encounter him, as that if he would kill him, the butcher as he told him, would send him to jail, and punish him at the next sessions, having one Justice Clodpole on his side, who was his landlord, and whose house he served with meat, and doubted not would hearken to anything he said against him although ever so false and unjust. ”

“ There is, to be sure, this distinction between you and the butcher; it is his business, it is his profession, by which he gets his daily bread; and, indeed, the sooner he kills his victim the more merciful he is: but as for you, your conduct is ten thousand times more brutal than that of the butcher, inasmuch as you inflict torture upon a human being, merely for the pleasure of inflicting torture. And do you really believe, are you so besotted as to flatter yourselves, that you will escape? Do you really believe, that "Where vice and cruelty go before, vengeance will not follow after?" ”

“ There was a man in our village who led an exceedingly disreputable life. One morning when he got up rather early, two men appeared, and led him away to the market-place, where he saw a butcher hanging up half a pig. As they approached, the two men shoved him with all their might against the dead animal, and lo! his own flesh began to blend with the pork before him, while his conductors hurried off in an opposite direction. By-and-by the butcher wanted to sell a piece of his meat; and seizing a knife, began to cut off the quantity required. ”

“ The information which antiquity has left us respecting butchers’ shops and implements is extremely imperfect. We are told simply, that they had chopping-blocks and cleavers, large axes with which animals were felled in the slaughter-houses, flaying knives, hooks whereon to suspend and display their stock, with scales for weighing meat. [474] A very curious anecdote is related of a Milesian butcher: there was a man named Killicon, who betrayed his native city Miletos, to the Prienians. Among his countrymen, who on this occasion became fugitives, was a butcher. ”

“ A butcher, I make no doubt, would feel compunction at the slaughter of a fine horse; and though a surgeon can feel no pain in cutting off a limb, I have known him compassionate a man in a fit of the gout. The common hangman, who hath stretched the necks of hundreds, is known to have trembled at his first operation on a head: and the very professors of human blood-shedding, who, in their trade of war, butcher thousands, not only of their fellow-professors, but often of women and children, without remorse ”

“ The butcher passes in front and, with a stroke of his knife, slashes open the neck and throat of the poor wretches; the blood spouts out, convulsions rend the body, and only at the end of one minute or one and a half minutes does death supervene. ”

“ For butchery, as Sir Benjamin Richardson used to point out, is essentially a "dangerous trade." It not only deadens and destroys the moral sympathies, but it has the physical effect of straining the nerves and weakening the heart of the slaughterman, and thus naturally induces a tendency to have recourse to drink. How often, too, in reading of some murderous crime, has one seen it stated that the criminal was a butcher ”

“ If the butcher's trade begets in him, the butcher, a disposition to use the knife more indiscriminately, and causes him to look upon the taking of life indifferently and unconcernedly, so that in a majority of the States he is disqualified from sitting upon a murderer's jury, there then must be something not only in the associations we keep but in the business we follow. ”

“ A few of the chosen school-boys were permitted by the killers to exercise at times the privilege of knocking down a pig, and even, on rare occasions, to essay the sticking; but I turned with horror from both processes; and if I drew near at all, it was only when some animal, scraped and cleaned, and suspended from the beam, was in the course of being laid open by the butcher's knife, that I might mark the forms of the viscera, and the positions which they occupied. ”

“ The butchery is too horrible. The hand drops powerless, appalled at the quantity of birch which it must cut and brandish. I am glad we are not all found out, I say again; and protest, my dear brethren, against our having our deserts.
To fancy all men found out and punished is bad enough; but imagine all the women found out in the distinguished social circle in which you and I have the honor to move. Is it not a mercy that a many of these fair criminals remain unpunished and undiscovered! ”

“ I can pass through no street in which there are not poor slaughtered animals, hung up either entire or cut into pieces. Every moment I hear the cries of agony and of alarm of the victims whom they are driving to the slaughter-house,—see their struggles against the murderous knife of the butcher. Ever and again I ask of one or other of the men who surround me, by what right they kill them and devour their flesh ”

“ The butchers and drovers in particular are a savage race. The sheep which I have met on their way to the slaughter-house, have 168frequently their faces smeared with their own blood, and accidents from over-driven oxen are very common. Cattle are slaughtered with the clumsiest barbarity: the butcher hammers away at the forehead of the beast; blow after blow raises a swelling which renders the following blows ineffectual, and the butchery is completed by cutting the throat. Great pains have been taken by a nobleman who has travelled in Spain, to introduce our humane method of piercing the spine ”

“ Said the wee wee old woman, “Oh, butcher, do kill ox; ox won’t drink water, water won’t quench fire, fire won’t burn stick, stick won’t beat wee wee pig, wee wee pig won’t go over bridge, and I sha’n’t git home to-night!” But the butcher wouldn’t kill the ox. So the wee wee old woman went along till she came to a rope.
Said the wee wee old woman, “Oh, rope, do hang butcher; butcher won’t kill ox, ox won’t drink water, water won’t quench fire, fire won’t burn stick, stick won’t beat wee wee pig, wee wee pig won’t go over bridge, and I sha’n’t git home to-night!” ”

“ But what struck me as the worst thing of all, was that these butchers make no more of killing a man than a cow. They will quarrel for straws, and stick a knife into a person's body as readily as they would fell an ox. ”

“ A butcher whose actions attest that he wants to cause the public to stumble by eating invalidated meat, for example, he cuts off the lesions from a lung to make it appear kosher, should be fired, and in any case he is excused from paying back those who bought from him. ”

“ The old farmer looked upon the preparations in self-pleased importance—the butcher felt he was about no common feat of his craft, and, baring his arms, he struck the blow—not now fatal, for before even a hair had been injured, his arm was paralysed—the knife dropped from his hand, and the whole company was electrified by a piercing cry that awakened echo in a dozen hills, and made the welkin ring again ”

“ Every butcher who carries on the business, has a house in which he kills his animals, and prepares them for sale. When it is intended to slaughter an ox, a rope is thrown about his horns or neck, with which he is forced into the slaughter-house, and brought to the floor by the aid of a ring. ”

“ These queer creatures stay around the market, and although the law forbids their being fed, as it is found with them as with human buzzards that necessity is the mother of scavengering, your butcher is always ready to throw them a surreptitious piece of meat for your amusement. They are the only street cleaners, and if they got their dinners gratuitously they might cease their useful public labors. ”

“ Their resemblance to butchers was heightened by their habit of rolling up their sleeves to the elbow and walking through the corridors and cells, sometimes tumbling to the floor, drunk with wine and with human blood. ”

“ This public-house was principally used by journeymen butchers from the country, out of place, and in want of situations; so, what did we do, but—ha, ha, ha!—we agreed that I should be dressed up like a butcher myself, and go and live there!”
Never, surely, was a faculty of observation better brought to bear upon a purpose, than that which picked out this officer for the part. Nothing in all creation, could have suited him better. Even while he spoke, he became a greasy, sleepy, shy, good-natured, chuckle-headed, unsuspicious, and confiding young butcher. ”

“ A huge, massive butcher among them, a young man, had taken off his white apron and tied it around his neck, so that it hung down his back like a surplice, and he celebrated mass with the wildest and maddest words, full of obscenity and blasphemy. An oldish little fellow with a fat belly, active and nimble in spite of his weight, with a face like a skinned pumpkin was the sacristan and responded with the most frivolous refrains. ”

“ There's an awful amount of cruelty practised, and practised by some people that think themselves pretty good. I wouldn't have my lambs killed the way my father had his for a kingdom. I'll never forget the first one I saw butchered. I wouldn't feel worse at a hanging now. And that white ox, Hattie--you remember my telling you about him. He had to be killed, and father sent for the butcher, I was only a lad, and I was all of a shudder to have the life of the creature I had known taken from him. The butcher, stupid clown, gave him eight blows before he struck the right place. ”

“ Every morning the butcher comes to the village between five and six o'clock and sharpens his knife while he awaits calls for his ministrations. He is an undersized man with very broad shoulders and a face remarkable for its cunning, cruel expression. ”

“ Old, crumpled women, with blinking eyes, thrust themselves forward into the ring made out of the darkness by the rolling smoky flame which swung over the butcher’s barrow, and they groped obscenely with wart-eaten fingers among the shapeless remnants of oozing, dark-red meat. ”

“ Our hero sprang nearly erect, with a howl more like his antagonist than any human noise, and a desperate struggle, mingled with strange cries, aroused the dozing butcher from his pipe, and the fair cause of the disturbance from her knitting.
Original
“Sum tam rascal's after der sausages in der smoke haus!” was the butcher's first exclamation; the rosy daughter smiled assent, and “arm and out,” was the work of an instant. They found their trusty sentry baulking all Seth's efforts to retreat over the fence, and keeping him “a-wailin''” when he would have given worlds to leave. ”