A Different Kind Of DIY Project

At Least 60lbs of Organic meat not including the bone weight.

It's difficult to describe with any accuracy what it's like to kill your own food to someone who hasn't. It takes a firm resolve. It takes nerve. It takes skill so that the animal suffers as little as possible, which means as an empathetic human being you suffer as little as possible. It's easy to kill, but to kill quickly and efficiently takes focus. Focus is difficult to maintain under stressful situations. Slaughtering your first animal at the age of 30 is a very stressful situation.I did it. It wasn't easy, in fact it was one of the hardest things I've ever forced myself to do. I have never gone game hunting. I've never taken down an animal from 50 paces with a rifle. I have gripped a goats jaw and lifted it's head so as to cut it's throat.

The blood flew, gushed, spurted, and drained from the soon to be corpse. The legs kick on their own long past consciousness in some cases. While skinning the animal, some muscles intermittently twitch. I've gotten way ahead of myself. Between the throat cutting and the skinning part is a void where time stands still and an appreciation for every mosel of meat you ever ate sets in. I didn't have to do what I did. As a consumer of meat I made the decision to do it myself. My goat meat is as organic as organic can get. There is no pollution where I live and their winter feed is locally grown. The animals get plenty of excercise (I live in the mountains of central Greece). I know what I'm eating. I know what the animal that I am eating ate. I know it's healthy, healthy as any food can get. It's what I want for myself and should the good lord bless me with descendents it what they will be raised on as well.

This morning I helped my neighbour slaughter and butcher one of the full grown goats. He's been doing this all his life. Whoah. They take alot longer to drain than the kids do. The result of all this nastiness is that I have meat in the fridge for the next 2 to 3 months at least, if not longer. About 300 retail dollars worth of meat, let's not take into consideration how much the label organic should theoretically add to that. In a sense I'm trying to despoil my self, not that I've ever really been spoiled (at least not by 20th century standards.

5yrs. ago if you said to me that I would do a tour in the Greek military, I would have told you that you had lost your mind. If you had told me that I would make a go of homesteading on a mountain, I would have told you the same, but if you told me that I would butcher my own meat.... I would have laughed my arse off at you.

These days I laugh at little. GMO foods, war, torture, fascism on the rise EVERYWHERE thanks to the willfull ignorance of the masses. I won't start ranting here, that's for another post.

P.S. I have been offline since september. In case anyone is wondering why I haven't been posting.