At 17 years old, I spent a few
weeks working at an abattoir in Toronto. I’d already worked at the lead smelter next door
a couple months earlier and thought I’d give the slaughterhouse a try. Nobody
wanted the shit jobs in these places so they always had open slots and paid
okay.
The slaughterhouse was a real
dump and oldtimers there said it hadn’t changed in decades. It was down by Lake Ontario Dundas
My job was a “prodder.” The
trucks would back up to a kind of chute. It would be locked to the slats down
the side of the truck’s payload. The rear gate would then be dropped, creating
a seamless connection with the chute. The pigs were jam packed so their general
freak-out pushed the first pigs down the chute and the rest would follow in churning
blind terror. Myself and one or two other employees would climb onto the
sides of the truck with long steel poles and 'prod' the animals toward their death.
Some of the smarter pigs went crazy
after realizing what’s up. A few would sometimes jam themselves into the
furthest corner of the truck’s payload and snarl and cry or try to climb up the
payload’s slatted walls. The steel poles we used also had sharp hooks on the
end so if prodding didn’t work, you’d have to hook them around a hoof or by the
rear. Some guys had fun slamming down the hook hard and
fast so it impaled the animal, maybe through a rib or hip or neck, then dragged it, literally kicking and screaming toward the chute while another guy would
jab and push.
The job gave me nightmares, of
course. I remember one pig – a big black character. He’d backed up into a
corner and sat on his haunches and let out these ear-splitting howls. It took three
of us a fair while to stab, jab, prod, poke and drag the fucker to the chute.
He was a bloody, lacerated mess by the time we rolled him down there.
Later, at lunch, where we ate the
company’s homemade pork sausage sandwiches, one of my workmates said: “That big
black fucker was too much, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“See the way he fought? That’s
the way I’d go down if was one of them.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see the way he looked at
me?”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Freaky, eh? He just sat on his ass, calm as a pope, and
said, ‘Go on, fuckhead. Do your worst.’”
“Yeah, I saw that.”
“Did he look at you too?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Fuck, man. He definitely looked
at me. I mean he communicated. I saw his whole life. As a piglet on his mamma’s tit. Running around some
farm out in the sun, fucking around in the mud and all that.”
“I don’t think they raise pigs
like that anymore. I think they’re just kept in narrow pens and force fed lots
of fattening shit and when they reach a certain weight, they’re put in the
truck.”
“You don’t think there’s pigs who
live free anymore – like on farms an that?”
“No, it probably wouldn’t make a
lot of sense money-wise.”
My workmate paused and considered
this information. “Yeah… I guess. But that motherfucker talked to me, man. He had something to say.”
“Yeah, I could see that.”
He put down his sandwich
and burped. “Y’know what?”
“What?”
“I can’t do this job anymore. That pig was telling
me to get out of here. He was telling me this place is a sin.”
“Yeah, it is.”
He sat up decisively, hands held wide and fingers spread. “Fuck this shit. I’m not going back after lunch. You wanna
quit with me?”
“Okay.”
“I heard there’s warehouse gigs
out at Albion and Finch that don’t pay too
bad.”
“That’s kinda far.”
“If we sign up at the Labor Pool
at Church and Sherbourne, they’ve got vans that take you out there and bring
you back. The Labor Pool takes a cut but it’s not much. You get a free ride and
they pay every Friday - in cash.”
“Sounds okay.”
“So you wanna quit with me?”
“Yeah.”
