Reflecting on the tremendous suffering

This is the testimony of Ariadna Creus, who documented one of the many pig slaughter that are traditionally carried out every year. Far from being a disappearing custom, some sectors of society seek to recover these practices as a way of promoting the rural world, without questioning the brutality that characterizes some of its most deeply rooted traditions. Our intention in disseminating these images is to make people reflect on the enormous suffering involved in the use of animals for our benefit, in any of its possible forms. Because animal exploitation and death, whether intensive, extensive or family, are equally exploitation and death.

Helena Rivera (AV editorial team)

A woman collects the fresh blood in a bucket, while the men prevent the pig from moving.

"Stunning" of the pig before slaughter.

The pig is fully conscious and fighting for his life, while the men prevent him from moving and stick the knife in him.

Lifeless body lying in the street while another of his companions is killed.

Undercutting the hairs with a blowtorch.

Boiling their bodies to cleanse the skin.

Preparing the pig carcass for butchering.

Before butchering, they take a break for an aperitif.

Three pigs prepared for butchering.

Two women take the entrails.

One hand shows a piece of meat from the pig that has just been killed.

Buckets full of minced meat. Cleaning of casings.

A woman cleans the parts of the animal.

Families and friends meet again, it is a time of celebration. They participate in an ancestral tradition, in a meeting whose central axis is the sacrifice, the death. It is the slaughter of the pig.

Sometimes the animal's head is hit with a mallet, in an attempt to make him less conscious when he is killed. Other times there is no attempt to stun him, and a sharp knife is plunged directly into his throat, leaving his blood to gush out in a long agony. 

Stunned or not, by legal or illegal methods, his life slips away, often aware of everything that is happening. Feeling fear, pain and an intense dizziness that invades his body.

Surrounded by men who immobilize him, he agonizes as he bleeds to death.

The pig finally dies. Men and women then proceed to cut up his body.

As I write this, the memory of those shrieks, so intense, so impotent, comes back to me. And I never really forget them. They are stuck in me, just like that knife in the helpless neck of those pigs I watched agonize and die slowly.

Ariadna Creus

Sausages.

Men play cards after the killing.

Work by Ariadna Creus.

Published in December 2022