2/18/13

Today we witnessed beef slaughter, but before I get to that I want to introduce the main people we will be working with.

            Ryan Varner Asst. Meat Lab Mgr.                                                                      Jennifer Dominguez  Meat Lab Mgr.

  

Jennifer was kind enough to allow 11 vets to come and disrupt her lab with a million questions yet showed the patience of a superior manager.

Ryan grew up butchering meat with his father and his skills were extraordinary. The thing I appreciated was his patience, though he deals with students daily we had to test his limits. How he always seemed to have a smile on his face is beyond me.

Now the key player in our instruction was Ms. Sarah Wells.  She had spent a few days with us at KBS but now we were on her turf.  Over the course of our stay on campus she became a very important person in our lives.

Sarah Wells

Back to the beef slaughter.  Today they slaughtered 5 beef cattle.  Now none of us actually participated in the process as we don't have the required skills.  The staff here does everything humanly possible to ensure the animal doesn't suffer unnecessarily.  Though I don't want to get on my soap box these animals were raised for this purpose and I love beef.

The process of slaughter is first the stun followed by the animal being bled out. Then the animal is skinned, gutted, split and moved to the cooler to age before being cut for the consumer.

Skinning

Gutting

Splitting

 It was an interesting morning but now it's back to cutting pork. We will cut this beef next week.