“This is the real thing,” Aaron said, “This is farming, for real.”
“It’s pretty hard-core,” I chuckled, as I widened my incision with the scalpel.
Stuart was silent. I heard him gulp and then wimper, just a little.
We were stuck – castrating pigs. I freely admit I am a procrastinator and, in this case, for good reason. It’s not the most pleasant job.
We first started performing surgery nearly ten years ago. Our first two pigs produced an abundance of little boars that had to be, for lack of a better word, tamed. With pigs, stools and bullwhips won’t make a dent. You have to use a scalpel, and sometimes even that doesn’t work.
There was Peripatetic, for instance - the half-crazed pig who we had cut (read: castrated) when young. I truly believe he was mentally damaged. He escaped one day, took a wrong turn, and ended up in the horse pasture.
The horses quickly made him the ball in a pickup game of soccer. The second goal was ugly and I know he was hooved in the head pretty hard.
After that, Peripatetic didn’t come around very often. He actually disappeared somewhere in the woods. He would reappear every few weeks, strangely hairier, and keep his distance. If he even saw a horsefly, he would vanish. When we’d see him the next time, he’d be hairier still. When we finally managed to trap him, I promise, he had the most beautiful, blonde, lustrous hair growing at least three inches off the tips of his ears.
Castration did wonders for his hair, but it did not tame him.
But back to the actual work at hand. Castration is truly traumatic. Without going into the painful details, it is enough to say that when we began castrating little pigs of about 20 lb., none of the men on the farm could bear it. The scene was something like this:
We would line up at the barn, face the cage of caught piggies, set up a piece of plywood on a couple of rickety sawhorses, and don gloves and aprons. We would then, very solemnly, pray and stand aside. No male was brave enough to operate – my sister and eight month-pregnant wife were the first bold surgeons.
The men would valiantly pull the pigs out of their cage and hold them. This was somewhat difficult since we had to do this while simultaneously trying not cry, gag, or look at what was happening. Truly. During castration, my brother-in-law gagged almost continuously. When he didn’t gag, he moaned. This was bad because I’m a sucker for gagging. As long as I’m not hugging a toilet, if I hear gagging, I laugh. I don’t have to even hear the gagging. I can hear a story about someone hearing gagging and laugh. Some might call this keeping alive the child in me; others might term it nourishing the sadist.
Regardless, the women were castration whizzes. They studiously ignored our empathetic whining and worked with precision. Eventually, however, they wanted us to grow up. So we had to learn. And learn we have.
We actually had a boar named Nelson (Rockefeller). He was a bad dude – mean. When he got too big to handle and had sired too many piglets with genetic defects, we decided it was time to cut him. We were all too ready to leave our first full-size, totally grown boar castration to the professionals, so we carried him to the vet. I myself was absent, but through repeated re-tellings in hushed alleyways of the farm, I have heard that the vet gave the boar a shot of anesthetic. This made him mad. The next shot made him mean. The final shot made him irate enough to run the vet, his helper and one brother over the gate and out the back of the trailer. Another brother, Wright, was the only human left in the trailer. Nelson saw him just after Wright activated the suction cups on his back and played Spiderman on the trailer ceiling while the boar made leaping bites at the air just below him.
Eventually, Nelson slowed down enough for surgery, but our vet has declined cutting any more of our pigs.
Today was much quieter, however. The pigs did squeal. Our stomachs did turn, but we never saw Spiderman and nobody got bit. This is not to say, however, that I’m not still searching our genetic pool for self-castrating pigs.





