Amateur Butchers

[bloodrayne]

Illegal Meat Slaughter On The Rise

The sheep is lying in the dirt, and a man is hacking away at it with a knife, separating skin from meat. A duck drinks from the stream of blood running from the dead animal's slashed throat.
This videotape, filmed in Guilford County, shows in gory detail a growing enterprise that some farmers are finding lucrative: illegal butchering.

State agriculture officials say they have found two major butchering operations this year -- one each in Guilford and Duplin counties -- where animals were slaughtered outdoors, either by the landowner or by his customers, and sold contaminated with feces, hair or maggots.

Both those cases will be criminally prosecuted, at least one as a felony, a rare event for the Department of Agriculture. Officials say they had one similar case in each of the two previous years, and both were handled with fines.

State inspectors say immigrants, many of whom don't know about state laws regulating food, are pushing the demand for illegal butchering.

The inspectors think they are seeing only a small part of the problem, and they say they have no idea how many people are slaughtering animals behind barns in rural areas. Legal butchers say they hear about it all the time.

Although it's difficult to prove how profitable underground butchery is, inspectors estimate that a farmer could make $5,000 to $10,000 in a weekend.

"We have some people who have seen an opportunity to make a lot of money," said Alan Wade, who investigates complaints of illegal butcher shops. "We can ask them to stop, but for some of these people the money is just too overwhelming."

Wade is one of four food compliance officers for the Department of Agriculture charged with finding and shutting down illegal butchers. He said the officers are spread thin because they also inspect legal butcher shops, warehouses and other facilities. They must rely on complaints to find illegal butchers, he said.

It is a misdemeanor to sell meat unless it comes from a licensed, inspected butcher shop. And it is a felony to sell contaminated or spoiled meat.

Wade said that when he has found illegal butcher shops in the past, they were usually symptoms of a dying trade rather than a growing one. Old-country butchers would slaughter hogs on their farms, cook up lard in outdoor buckets and make sausage in a barn. Their customers were mostly the elderly, who remembered meat being butchered this way when they were children.

Now, inspectors say the underground meat market is on the upswing, due largely to a surge in the state's immigrant population. Many newcomers want cheaper cuts that they can't find in the grocery store, or they want organs -- such as lungs -- that legal butchers can't sell. Some want to slaughter the animals themselves, or have them slaughtered according to religious practices.

Ransom Martin, who owns a farm on U.S. 70 in Johnston County, said people from Africa and the Middle East started coming to his farm in the late 1990s, asking to buy animals and slaughter them on his property.

He said he didn't think it was much different than a farmer slaughtering a hog in the pasture, so he allowed them to kill and butcher goats and lambs in his pasture and bury the waste in a hole. Soon, he had several regular customers.

"They'd tell their friends, and their friends told someone else," said Martin, 69.

But in 2002, one of Martin's customers complained to the Department of Agriculture after finding maggots in meat bought at his farm. Now, his farm is for sale and he owes the Department of Agriculture $15,000 in fines. But he says there are plenty of other farms for his former customers to go to.

"Sure," Martin said. "Several of the local farmers are doing it."

There are few legal options for people who want to slaughter their own meat, unless they bring an animal home and kill it on their own property. It is legal to butcher meat for personal use, but not for sale.

Abdul Chaudhry runs a state-licensed Halal butcher shop in Siler City, where animals are slaughtered according to Muslim religious practices. He slaughters animals with a sharp knife to the throat, cutting both carotid arteries at once and killing the animals without them suffering.

Each January, the Muslim holiday of Id al-Adha requires the ritual slaughter of an animal. Most Muslims buy the meat from a Halal butcher such as Chaudhry, but he said some want to slaughter the animal themselves. Chaudhry used to allow people to slaughter their own meat, but not anymore.

He said he quit allowing customers to slaughter after a man, surprised by the blood that squirted out when he cut a lamb's throat, jerked the knife and almost cut an employee who was holding the animal.

Customers frequently come in asking to slaughter their own meat, Chaudhry said. Or they want to take home lungs and stomachs. Some just want it cheaper than what he is willing to sell for.

Many of the customers he turns away go to farms like the one in the video, Chaudhry said.

"Some people just like to go and make recreation," said Chaudhry, who is originally from Pakistan. "The whole family goes. It's just like 100 years ago, when everybody made their own meat on the farm."

Agriculture officials say illegal slaughtering causes a host of health concerns.

Animals killed in licensed slaughterhouses are checked before and after they are killed for signs of disease. If there is suspicion of neurological disease -- such as mad cow disease, which can devastate livestock herds and sicken humans -- the meat is condemned, said Steve Wells, head of the Agriculture Department's Meat and Poultry Inspection Service.

Every morning, licensed plants are inspected for cleanliness, Wells said.

The illegal butchers his inspectors have discovered, mostly through anonymous complaints, slaughter animals in deplorable conditions. Often, illegal butchers work outside, with no refrigeration, and cut up meat on the ground. Their tools are often dirty knives and plywood boards, and their water supply a single hose.

At the Guilford County farm that inspectors videotaped, animals' throats were crudely slashed, and they were left to bleed on the ground in the summer heat before being butchered. The butchering took place on bare ground scattered with feathers, bones, trash and organs from previous slaughters.

Skinned sheep hung from trees. And not far away, nearly a dozen cars were parked -- customers, the inspectors presume, all waiting for their meat.

[horror_master]

Sicking to hear.