Un porc la Gura Bicului

Nothing sounds like a pig dying. Nothing is so loud, so wild, so frightening, so sad.

The modern sounds of death simply don't measure up. The echo of a gunshot; the plastic, metal and glass crunches of a car crash. They are mechanical, man-made, and when a man dies from them, its the result of centuries of mechanization. People die in hospitals, where the heart-rate monitor stops pulsing and becomes a solid beep.

A dying chicken makes no noise. Nor does a goose, duck or any other bird. Maybe they don't know what's coming.

But this sow knows, and she starts squealing as soon as the two men go into the pig pen. Maybe, she thinks, they're coming for the other one in the pen with her. But when one of the men grabs her back hooves and drags all 150 pounds of her toward the half-wall separating the pen from the killing grounds, she knows it's her time.

The sound of a million screeching demons fills the air as the other man pulls her over the three-foot-high board and into the killing grounds. They turn her onto her side and one lifts her left front leg into the air. The other straddles her near her hind legs, weighing her down. The man over her bottom half takes a barbecue skewer, about two feet long, and aims. The pig is panicking, thinking that the men might let her go if she makes enough noise.

The skewer plunges through her left chest, straight into the heart.

Blood guzzles out, accompanied by a deafening shriek of defeat. The scream lasts for a full minute, sounding like all the blond virgins of a thousand slasher flicks; too close to human.

The pig loses its spirit as the blood spreads, now eight inches across her chest. She spasms, but with her hind legs pinned she can only shake her head a foot in either direction. A minute passes. Her breathing gets deeper. She bucks again, but moves even less than before. Minutes pass like this; her breaths deepening, her final movements getting smaller and smaller. The men and five others watch her slowly dying.

She exhales a last time. Her eyes stare vacantly. All of her muscles relax, and urine trickles out of her to the ground.

Next, the men will torch her skin and peel off her hair with a knife. They'll pull the nails off her hooves. They'll rub salt on her skin, wrap her in a blanket and sit on her for five minutes to soften the flesh. One man will take the cigarette out of his mouth and put it in her nostril. All the people around will think this is funny. The men will cut off her head, collecting the blood in a bucket. They'll remove her intestines and bury them in the ground. They'll butcher her and put her in the freezer. The meat will last for about a month.

But that doesn't matter much to the pig. And by the time we eat the meat, the pig doesn't matter much to us.