Member-only story
Eating Pets, Butchering Pigs and Vegan Absolutism — Part 3: Meeting Theresa and the Stench of Death
A Story About Meat
Continued from Part 2— ‘It’s an Eating Dog World’ — found here
Entering Andy’s farm, there was a garden centre feeling to it. Not a kitsch, OAP populated tea room, but an absence of the sprawling, muddy, farmyard surrounded by barns stacked with hay and tractors. The driveway was lined on both sides with potted plants of all sizes, from waist-high saplings through to towering specimens, as if we were entering a nursery for rare and exotic plants, before the driveway finally opened out, with the requisite hay-filled barns loomed into view.
Andy is an avid horticulturalist, growing various unusual bamboos on his labyrinthine farm, which has been developed from bare fields and a caravan into a rural idyl with a farmhouse over the last twenty-odd years. There’s also a plethora of unusual looking chickens, geese, sheep, cows and the reason for our visit — rare breed pigs. Specifically, the three sisters, a black-haired, enthusiastic and talkative trio who grew up together on the farm. Standing at a year of age, these Large Black Tamworth cross pigs had reached double the age of a factory farmed pig that has been raised for meat.
We’d come to meet our dinner.
