Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Butchering Hogs

Twenty years ago, between Dad’s family and his cousins family, we’d do 12 or 14 every year over Thanksgiving Weekend.
We’d pop them in the noggin with a .22 Magnum, slit their throat and winch them on to the bed of Dad’s rollback.
It was always a big family thing, with over 2 dozen sons, daughters, spouses and kids working together to get them scalded, scraped and butchered, hopefully by early Saturday so we’d have time that weekend to shoot our rifles in for Monday’s first day of buck season.
Lotta work, but a lot of great memories too.
Wish we still did stuff like this, but over the years, the patriarchs died out, and the families got more spread out, and the tradition sorta fell through the floorboards.
As I said before, I’ve always felt that I was very lucky to be part of this, but the times are a changing.
( I sometimes wonder if I could remember enough to do the butchering now, and the kids, Ben and my nephews and nieces would remember enough to help, or would they be in the road Mosta the time?
I sometimes think that maybe an EMP or some catastrophe wouldn’t be such a bad thing, as it might teach us again to rely on ourselves and our families more.
Christ, I sound like an old man!
7mm

I bet not many people know what actual cracklins from rendering lard tastes like.

This is the crackling bucket so far. These get frozen in bags for Scooby snacks for the labs. Mucho better than the China crap you see in the stores.

find bp gas station near me

Don’t you have a lard press?

I do have an old enterprise lard press but don’t go through the hassle. I don’t need all the lard I’m getting, give quite a bit away.

Yield looks to be about 9 gallon off of the chunk and another 3 gallon of leaf lard.

Lard press/stuffer

Chittlings and paunch is fine delicacy cleaned and cooked right

Damn good.


Next day, all that fat can make holding a turd tough!😉


Hmmmm?
Bet some of our "members" struggle with that regularly.😁😁😁😁

In the rural east, killing hogs was an annual November deal with neighbors pitching in until the community had things wrapped up.

Cracklings! Worked a small cut plant just out of high school. Cracklings were bagged and tossed atop the bins in the freezer rooms amounting to tonnage over the year. Around Thanksgiving their availability would be announced, and they'd be gone by lunch time. Really go good in cornbread.

Nobody has hogs anymore around where I live. Used to be everywhere. My Mother in Law used to make souse every year from the heads. Never liked the stuff myself. My Grandparents made it too.

thought this thread was going to be about burns.

Now that's funny !!!!

According to burns, every thread is about him.

Crappie Killer
Cool thread. Thanks for posting it

Grew up helping my Dad butchering both Hogs and Beef on the Farm. Seems like a lifetime ago but learned a ton of butchering ability. He also cut up Deer locally to make extra bucks. My job was to skin all that were brought in, then to help with the butchering. Got to be hard to find someone who smoked Hams and Bacon, so he built his own Smoker.

Wifeys grand dad used brown sugar salt mix and poured red pepper on top to ward off the rats on jowls and side meat.

Lost art and tradition

The gathering of a family part is great too

There’s 4 generations of women in that room. You just don’t walk in there and start barking orders

Always loved to hear the old timers talk about butchering hogs.
I talked to a lot of them about it.
Hogs fed this country from the beginning up through the 50’s at least.

An old feller I knew came from a family of eight. Six kids plus parents.
He said they had two Jersey milk cows. Knowing they couldn’t drink it all, I asked what they did with all that milk.
He said what they didn’t use they fed to the hogs. He said they loved it; made em’ so fat they could hardly walk.
Totally different living today.