Killing Pigs

So, my kids are getting more and more geared to the coming vacation. This is obvious through their constant tangents, laziness and, let's face it, fist fighting.

But my 7b class got onto a pretty funny tangent today I let them run with for a while...But first let me recount a recent experience.

For those who are unaware, one of the long-standing Bulgarian Christmas traditions is the slaughtering of a family pig. It's a day of family togetherness, along the lines of going into the woods to find the perfect tree. Only this is in their yards, and it is much more...bloody.

I woke up this Saturday to the screaming of a neighbor's pig. Of course I rushed to the balcony to watch. It was a cold morning, gloomy, thick frost on the ground, but that made it perfect.

They were dragging the pig out of the pigpen, and he seemed to know what was coming. He was screaming and kicking and being more violent than any pig has the right to be. The men of the family brought him to the center of the courtyard and laid down on him to keep him still.

Then they began the cut. Across the throat. Slow, deliberate. The screaming is indescribable if you've never heard it. But then it happens...the moment of recognition and resignation. As the blood begins to collect on the cement, the crying stops, the thrashing slows. This might be due to the encroaching weakness from loss of blood, but I like to think that in some cosmic way the pig realizes he is fulfilling his destiny...This family has nourished him, and now he must nourish the family. The moment of death is obvious (a total-body jerk), and as soon as the pig is dead he is hoisted onto a table and the skin is blow torched off of his bones. His fat is stewed. His meat is divided up into portions. His ears are given to the kids to chew on. And when that family eats the meat it is not just meat, but rather an animal they raised and knew and cared for.

But enough of that...Back to my 7b class.

This is my class of 13 boys and 2 girls, and today was a very "boy day." While they were working in their notebooks, one kid asked another kid when his family was killing the pig. The other kid replied they had killed one over the weekend, and planned to kill another this coming weekend. Another boy asked one of the girls when her family planned to kill some of their rabbits. She said soon, to which another boy said that all of his family's rabbits had been taken down by some disease in September. The girl then looked at me and said, in Bulgarian, "Killing rabbits is the worst. They sound like children screaming."

The boys started to laugh at my mildly shocked expression and began to throw their killing stories out to me. One boy's family, apparently, had gotten their pig so fat this year that it would have taken too long to bleed out, so they shot him. (All the boys then started holding their arms like they had shotguns and went POW POW while laughing.) Another kid informed us that once his family had killed a pregnant pig, and the baby meat was the best he'd eaten ever. (The kids all nodded knowingly with this one.)

After I had had my fill of these killing stories, I forced them back on task for a while. But I can't help remarking that even though it wasn't an entirely productive class, it was an amusing one.