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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (57622)	12/23/2000 8:04:38 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Santa? I laugh at your Santa We celebrate the winter solstice (we really do, actually) so Christmas is sort of an afterthought for us. And I have no fear of your silly Santa. I can't speak for Rambi. her sons tell me she still believe in Santa so maybe your empty threats will scare her.

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (57622)	12/23/2000 9:46:49 PM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

I'm not certain what's on the menu. But I suspect it will be a Honey Baked Ham. Those are reallllly good. Might even make a carnivore out of Vegan Gaugie. ...somehow, I don't think so.... (-: You know, it's something of a minor coincidence that you should happen to mention hams and carnivores and so on... Why, just this morning, I happened to be reflecting upon all of the animals that have come and gone on our farm... the last horse and the final few goats having departed just a couple of weeks ago and the barn now stands empty. I happened to start thinking about the couple of so times that we raised hogs here at the farm. This wasn't so much a commercial venture as a culinary adventure which Mr. Croc wished to pursue... for his intention was to raise delicious home-grown hogs and take them to a Dutch butcher in a neighbouring town to have the hogs turned into various gourmet sausages and traditionally smoked hams free of the usual sodium nitrates that find their way into most commercially processed meats. The hogs happen to come to mind as their delivery to the butcher shop was always such a memorable event and made such a vivid impression on me... ....as the vegetarian observer to this enterprise. Now, the first hog-raising adventure was something of a great learning experience for us. We had purchased two very fine Hampshire hogs... black with white belted markings around their shoulders. They were fine specimens and grew extremely quickly, fed on goat milk, garden gleanings and grain meal from our own granary... The trouble was when we tried to arrange for butchering at the little Dutch butcher shop... He was too overloaded with work and wanted us to wait for another week or two...which then stretched into 3 or 4... By this time, the once average-sized hogs were now gargantuan-sized... threatening to break down the walls of their pens like porcine Godzillas... grunting and smashing and rooting at the wooden panels and digging great caverns into the dirt floors of their stall. They were gaining weight at an alarming rate... probably a couple of pounds a day... having phenomenal feed conversion rates... The day finally came to load them into our truck... at that time... a flashy black and silver 1977 Ranchero GT with a plywood livestock box on the back (yes... go ahead and laff... it's okay...). Unfortunately, the hogs that should have weighed in at around 225 pounds, were now well over 300 pounds of grunting, squealing, vicious pigflesh... The two of us were ill-prepared to deal with two uncooperative, unwilling hogs that outweighed us almost 3 to 1.... On the morning of the butcher shop appointment, we struggled and swore and fought with the two hogs for about an hour before giving up and calling for reinforcements. We called my father-in-law and brother-in-law who had many years of experience in dealing with unruly hogs and cattle. They arrived a few minutes later, snickering slightly at our lack of hog savvy... However, a few minutes later, the snickering turned to cursing and swearing after both of our "saviours" were knocked ass-over-tea-kettle by the 2 commando hogs which had simultaneously decided to rampage down the aisle in a mad dash for freedom. More yelling and pushing soon ensued... and someone (not Mr. Croc or I) decided that the way to deal with these hogs was to push them along towards the loading ramp using a big sheet of plywood... This seemed to work well until that critical moment when the hogs were almost at the top of the ramp and then, like highly-coordinated ants with one mind, the hogs turned on us and one reached its maw over the sheet of plywood and grabbed my brother-in-law by the arm as the other hog shoved on the plywood and in the chaos that ensued, all four of us were knocked flat as the hogs tore back down the ramp and down the aisle into their stall... Now, if you tell a story like this around a bunch of farmers.. chances are that someone is going to say, "Just put a bucket over a hog's head and you can walk him backwards into any place you want".... Bin there, done that... uh-uhn... not with big hogs like these... Nope...these were real Killer Hogs... The kind you don't ever want to mess with... and yep, eventually, we did get them loaded and delivered... after about 3 hours of skirmishing and plenty of bites, bruises and falls... The next hog-raising adventure went a little more smoothly as Mr. Croc arranged to deliver these hogs while they were still of manageable proportions. But even then, hogs are not easy to load.. or, at least...they weren't... until I learned a little trick... a secret strategy which I haven't seen or heard mentioned in any of the hog-raising literature that I've seen... You see, hogs are rather nervous creatures, despite what we might think of them... being those laid-back animals wallowing around in the mud on a hot summer's day. Nope, they may be couch-potatoes, but they are nervous couch-potatoes... And the one thing that will scare a hog worse than just about anything else in the entire world, is to hear another hog making a frightened squeal as if maybe its tail is being twisted off.... And so, I struck upon the idea of hiding somewhere back down the alley from the hog pen and parking the truck with the loading ramp at the opposite end of the alley... Then letting the hogs out into the alley where they only had 2 choices of direction in which to travel. At an appropriate moment, I would let out the most blood-curdling squealing shrieks possible.. ones that I had rehearsed specifically for this purpose over the period of several nights... The hogs, upon hearing the first few squeals, raced down the alley in the opposite direction and tore up the ramp and huddled inside the truck trying to hide behind each other... Mr. Croc, doing his part, quickly slammed the tailgate shut and secured the back of the truck... Total loading time = 30 seconds... A new record had been made in hog-loading... ....by a vegetarian, no less.... ...I am glad to report that these days, Mr. Croc is almost as much a vegetarian as I... and so I now, no longer, have to act as an accomplice to the dirty deed of loading hogs destined for the abattoir... ...thank heavens......