The Only Difference Between Slaughter and Laughter is an S.

So I finally have a blog set up! It's taken me almost 7 months in Nicaragua to get it together, but here it is. I've been writing over the past few months, and this first post is something I wrote on January 1st, 2011. It's a meditation on the ethics of butchering animals and the humanity that seems to be thrown into question in the process.

A little dark and a little dramatic I know, but hey, I was right in the middle of learning Spanish and assimilating into Nicaraguan culture...

______________________________________________

I've just witnessed the slaughter of a pig.

There have been two or three sulking chanchos out in the back patio area of my host family's house for a few weeks now, tied up to tree roots and fence posts, oinking at all hours and shitting underneath the hanging lines of drying clothes.

When the hogs were first tied up out there, I was on my way to the latrine one evening, lighting my way with the handy lantern built into my cell phone, when I tripped over a squishy mound that let out a squeal as my foot made unexpected contact with its face. I know I should have expected a prostrate pig to be guarding the entrance to the bathroom like a malevolent troll, but I was startled and I swore loudly...then apologized, stepping over it and proceeding into the latrine.

Just a few minutes ago I watched as that pig, or maybe one of its similarly doomed compañeros, met its fate at the hands of my host brothers. There was a paralyzing flood of fragmentary thought and emotion that coursed through me as I watched the animal slain. On the one hand I felt truly sorry for the animal, projecting fear and pain into its death screams, and on the other, I told myself it was just another part of human existence—of the carnivorous existence of millions of other predatory creatures across the globe.

All predators kill their prey, right? But what then makes people different from lions and tigers and bears? Surely there's a difference.

The slaughter began when Walter dragged the pig by its ears, squealing in protest, over to what appeared to be some sort of sacrificial altar made of stone and concrete slabs (like the Stone Table in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe used to torture Aslan). Another guy, a neighbor who lives nearby, took a large wooden club, literally a human-sized version of what a giant might use to smash peasants, and cracked the pig a good one right on the head like he was hitting it out of the park. The poor animal crumpled under the furious blow and Walter ran around with a dagger and made a lime-sized hole in its throat. The blood poured out as if through a ruptured dam, its bright hue contrasting strikingly with the dark brown of the mud. That blood must have just come from its lungs, I thought, probably still rich with oxygen it would no longer need.

As the candy-apple blood pooled and eddied on the ground, the pig kicked and thrashed while three or four guys tried to hold it down. Walter, with the knife in one hand, plunged the other into the throat-hole (whose initial deluge was quickly slowing to a bloody trickle) in an attempt to find the esophagus. He had a certain degree of difficulty with this, and another guy tried his luck, this time a relative visiting for the Año Nuevo celebration wearing only shoes and a blue blanket tied around his waist, and who appeared to have just woken up from the previous night's festivities. After a few seconds of rummaging around inside the hole with the pig still making noises and flailing about, he was successful. Walter quickly sliced through the air pipe and the frantic jerking slowed significantly. In the end, Walter and most of the guys holding the pig down were splattered with a certain amount of blood—a fitting testament to their gory task.

What really struck me though, through all of the butchery and carnage, was the laughter. They hooted and hollered, guffawing as the blood was thrown onto their ecstatic faces. What was that?  

Was it a wild and primal blood-lust that burst forth out of their violence, sounding as an expression of mirth? Maybe. But I think it was something else—something a bit more human.

It seems to me that they laughed to shield themselves from the horror. To deal with it. If they felt any revulsion in what they were doing, they certainly weren't going to express it by recoiling or showing any sign of spinelessness. That would have been socially out of the question for these guys, ensconced as they are in the culture of machismo. So instead of reacting directly to the terribleness, the emotional charge that came with the act of violently ending another creature's life was rerouted, channeled into laughter, and thus presented itself as an exhilarated gaiety.

The guy with the club gave me a giddy replay of his game winning home-run, eagerly seeking my approval. I forced a smile and nodded, lacking the words or cultural understanding to muster an appropriately subtle response.

But I can imagine a lion or tiger laughing too... As the animal rips into the flesh of its kill, blood matted in its fur and splashed upon its snout, its laughter echoes with a Darwinistic fury and a wild, primal revelry. The human laughter on the other hand, is different. This laughter is born of an intrinsic empathy and a basic guilt; it is a shrewd laughter, and this at least gives me hope. There is a difference there, and it is in that difference that we find humanity.

Fifty minutes later as I look at the site where the pig was killed, the coagulated blood is being picked over by a swarm of black vultures and a few skeletal stray dogs. I need to believe in that humanity right now, isolated as I am from most everything I'm familiar with. To believe otherwise would be insane.