To The Kill: A Butcher Bears Witness

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It’s a drab February morning in Bucks County, PA, and I’ve come to a stranger’s house to watch an animal die. This is the personal abattoir, or slaughterhouse, of Aaron Waters, a country butcher with a unique internet presence. Through his Instagram, Aaron shares videos of visceral vocation: performing on-site slaughter for local farms. These videos serve a dual purpose as niche educational content and a sales platform for his preferred brand of knives, the latter of which led me to Aaron. I was looking for a boning knife and found a video, shared by Victory Knives, of a white-haired man in a sleeveless shirt and yellow apron, removing a pig’s head in three controlled strokes. There was something about that video—a pig so nearly alive, supine on a steel cradle; the man’s tattooed arms indifferent to the torrent of blood; the scraggly pasture surrounding him, teeming with undisturbed life. At this point, I had been a professional butcher for well over a year, experienced in the craft of “whole-animal” meat cutting, and I still felt dirty watching it.

My early days at the butcher shop had acquainted me with the constant smell of decay; the shocked look of a dead lamb’s head, skinless and tongue-slack. What I was still getting used to, and what spurred my reaction to Aaron’s video, were the bodies themselves— just moments from life coursing through every artery. I received these carcasses miles away from the farms where the animals were grown, and from the places they were taken to die. I had never so much as seen a slaughterhouse, but ensured every customer that the animals they paid a premium for were humanely dispatched, on the only bad day of their idyllic lives. This had been enough to convince the buyers, and myself, that we could all eat meat guilt-free.

After some time, the dissonance didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t sit right with Aaron either, who was as quick to dispel the myth of ethical consumption as he was to welcome me into his world. “There’s some verbiage that gets used that honestly offends me,” Aaron told me over the phone.  I had asked him about the language used by my generation of butchers, terms like “whole-animal” and “craft-butchery.”  “Probably the biggest thing is ‘harvesting,’” a euphemism for the practice of slaughter popular among hunters and young farmers. 

“We’re not picking produce. We’re taking the life of a creature. That’s just part of this...accept the fact that something’s dying so you can eat. That’s reality.”

In our first conversation, Aaron’s candid views on slaughter both endeared and unsettled me. Here’s a man who vilifies the mistreatment of animals—he feels farmers who willfully let their animals get injured or malnourished should take a bullet themselves. Simultaneously, he revels in the act of killing—slaughter is the only part of butchery he cares for anymore. When he implores me, “How much more of a sacrifice could any living creature make for you other than to feed you?,” his adulation reads as earnest.

So does his nonchalance when he recounts using the blood of a stuck pig to lure its companion to the gun. More than ever, I knew I needed to see this work firsthand. At the end of our phone call, he invited me to join him for a weekend of farm killing—Saturday for pigs and Sunday for cattle—which I eagerly accepted.

Weeks after our first exchange, I’m in Aaron’s driveway alongside a small caravan of fellow carnivores. The same yellow-aproned, horseshoe-mustached man of Instagram notoriety walks out of his garage to greet us, emerging through a heavy sliding door flanked by a sign marked “Waters Abattoir.”  He sidles past a navy blue pickup bearing the same name on the side, along with the silhouette of a hog imposed in the shadow of a cleaver. Pig-shaped planters surround the entrance to his house. Aaron is deceptively large, and moves with an economy that understates his exceptional strength and dexterity. At sixty-one, he is candid with his words and loose with his laughs. We shake hands for the first time and he ushers us into his workshop.

“Getting old is not for the faint of heart,” he tells me, punctuating the thought with hearty laughter, “the arthritis is getting the better of me.” 

Even so, his energy is palpable, and he wastes no time giving us the lay of the land. Hooks, chains, and cleavers surround us as we enter the abattoir. Everything is immaculate, but bears the patina of death. The floor is craggy cement graded towards a drain. On the wall nearest the entrance hangs a 20-gauge shotgun, for shooting bulls. Below it hangs  a 22-inch reciprocating saw, for paring whole cattle in half.

Without much prompting, Aaron waxes on every detail of his little shop’s operation, from his preferred brining technique to his favorite tool for scraping caked shit off cowhide. After twenty minutes we pull Aaron away from his pulpit to take us to the farm, where two pigs are waiting. We’ve nearly left the driveway in Aaron’s pickup when he rushes back into the garage; he forgot the gun. He throws a leaden cylinder behind our shared headrest, and we peel off to the Scheetz Homestead Farm. 

A dense arcade of maple and oak lets out at a 270 year-old barn, where we’re received by Mark Scheetz and his son, Mason. The farm is all dead grass and piles of corroded machinery. Mark leads our group to the livestock trailer, crimson sheet metal umbered with rust. We’ve been told by Aaron this is where the two pigs will be “knocked”—rendered braindead by a keen trauma to the skull. When Aaron Waters started killing in 1976, at the age of 15, the pigs were bled conscious. More cumbersome when cogent, cattle were stunned with sledgehammers. 

He bristles to remember that brutish time. “Obviously now I wouldn’t want to ever do it that way again. I have a huge degree of empathy for these animals. I used to kill a lot of down cows. I swear you can see the despair in their eyes.”

But the men who showed him the trade were country butchers, informed by World War II ammo shortages and frozen in the truth of turn-of-the-century stockyards. No bullets were wasted on the comfort of cattle.

Today he brandishes a captive-bolt pistol—a flashlight-shaped quasi-gun which discharges a fixed cylinder at the strike of a gunpowder charge. We amble cautiously behind him; our city feet hopscotching around mud and manure. 

The trailer creaks as the pigs acclimate to their hospice. These are gilts, non-breeding female hogs. Late winter air hangs unwelcome about our bundled bodies, none sure how close to get. But even in the wet chill Aaron’s warmth is undeniable. He struts up to the trailer like a pitcher to the mound.

Aaron hops in with a salutation to his prey, “Hey there buddy!”. He glories in this work.

Shadowy movements break through the apertures as the trailer shakes. I hold my breath. A shot rings out as Aaron throws open the door, and out tumbles a three hundred-pound Berkshire gilt. Simultaneously, Aaron steps down from the back of the truck, unsheathing his knife. Moving with the momentum of the rolling carcass, he grabs the gilt by the foreshank and drives his knife into the underside of the neck—one brief upward cut. Blood gushes into the gulches of tractor skids. His kill convulses as its muscles empty into the snowmelt. No one flinches.

A front-loading tractor and some heavy duty chain move the hog onto a workbench. The farmer cracks a dirty joke and Aaron demurs. “Your son’s here!” 

Mark’s adult son protests—he heard this one just last week. The tense air has broken, and we all watch Aaron work. 

He lops off the pig’s head in three strokes and the moment feels especially morbid—the mingle of inside and outside—but is short-lived as Aaron makes an incision at the joint of the foot and rips it off with a chiropractic crack. 

The animal abbreviates further. As Aaron works the hide down, he undresses a familiar form. Legs become hams, back becomes pork loin. Mark hoists the loader and the hog flies half mast. The butcher motions me over. I step around a disposed head to look the flayed animal down the rectum. 

“Here’s a trick if you’re right-handed. You start on the left side of the asshole and that’s your first cut. Then here,” he nicks the opposing side, “and just sweep under here. It makes it so much easier! But people don’t realize.” 

I do my best to realize, knowing if I ever do this myself I’ll struggle to remember. In our craft, what looks intuitive on a trained knife tends to knot together in your own hands. It’s the challenge, and the ultimate reward, of butchery: to untangle that machinery which permits life, a puzzle in flesh and blood, jigged along the cutting edge.

Rectum loose, the carcass is lifted to a full hoist. At this point the hog’s undercarriage has been split from sternum to pelvis, and Aaron reaches in to pluck out its insides. With a puff of steam the paunch tumbles out, a silvery jumble of tubes encased in the white lace of caul fat. Fifteen minutes have passed since Aaron entered the trailer, and his work here is done.

At the “whole-animal” butcher shops of New York, this is how we receive a pig: bled and emptied, bisected lengthwise along the backbone (skin intact, an impractical process for farm slaughter). This measure distinguishes, rather nebulously, whole-animal butcher shops from conventional meat markets. It’s an unequivocal distance from the base extreme of grocery store meat-cutting, where retail stores receive proteins in ready-to-portion roasts and steaks. No doubt the new-wave butcher facilitates a closer relationship between animal and eater. But these days,  even Whole Foods receives whole-carcass lamb, and there are carnicerias and pork stores that source product at diverse stages of completeness. To relish in the perceived honesty of the high-end butcher feels insincere at best, and classist at worst.

A “conscious” consumer might turn their nose up at Scheetz's pork. The pigs are raised in temperature-controlled indoor housing, not pasture. They’re fed ample grain, grown on the family’s other 250 acres. But anyone concerned about food miles would be hard-pressed to do better than the food economy enabled by the Waters Abattoir and its client farms, a 40 mile closed circuit of meat production. The shop operates as a custom-exempt butcher, meaning all of Aaron’s kills are cut for customers who buy portions of the live animal directly from the farmer. This kind of direct transaction exempts the meat from government oversight—its safety is guaranteed on trust. Aaron emphasizes that the communal aspect of his craft is what most endears him to it. 

“Going to the farm,” he tells me, “seeing the people that raise the animals, seeing their families, the whole communal event for me, and talking with them—that’s all I want to do.” He emphasizes the longevity of these relationships, “killing and processing animals for the grandchildren of the people I started with.” 

And all of this is wrapped up in a profound sense of humanity, not just for the animals he processes into food, but for the families he feeds as a result. 

This is why he refuses to change his pricing. “There’s nobody that goes out to the farm and kills near me,” he says. “You talk about somebody who could basically charge whatever the  hell I want to charge. I could. But it’s not fair. It’s not right. All these people I’m doing work for—they have families, they’re trying to make a living, and they want to provide for them.”

The next day—cattle day—the wet chill contracts to bristly frost. Aaron wears his sleeves hitched high as he reaches behind the seat for a .410 single barrel shotgun and loads a single slug. We met his prey yesterday, now huffing in the trailer, wedged between a human-sized birdcage designed to store grain and an eight-foot tall hen house with a sign reading “Beware of Attack Chicken.” Penned in a recess of the hen house, Mason’s pet goat lifts itself to the edge of his enclosure and brays in greeting. 

The trailer rocks as Aaron approaches with an armful of ancient chain. It jars me to see all these tools in a pragmatic context. Hooks and chains and knives and guns, lethal implements as practical, to the butcher, as a hammer. I ask Aaron if he feels like death is a big part of his life.

“I don’t focus on it with the animals because it’s my job which I enjoy and part of the fulfillment of that job is dispatching them as quickly and as painlessly as possible. And I know I have the knowledge of the reality that they are being raised for us to consume, for us to sustain ourselves. If you got overcome with the feeling of death you couldn’t do it.”

Aaron cracks the door of the trailer and introduces himself. The steer is apprehensive, despite the butcher’s endearment. This is a problem—even at a distance of a few feet, Aaron won’t take a shot unless he’s certain it will stun. His target remains out of reach, and Mark shuffles off to get a scoop of feed as a lure. With the farmer gone, Aaron holds the door of the trailer almost closed with one hand and his shotgun in the other, single-handedly blocking the egress of a twelve hundred-pound ruminant. Mark steps up behind Aaron as the steer wanders into range. Aaron takes aim through a crack in the door, the gun bursts, and the trailer convulses under dead weight.

At this time, an awkward ballet ensues. Bleeding needs to happen imminently but the massive carcass is impossible for one man to maneuver. Aaron climbs into the trailer and wraps a length of chain around the body. Mark tows it out as Aaron cuts the neck, and it thuds on the frozen mud, bleeding. This animal is four times larger than yesterday’s pigs, and in bleeding the scale becomes apparent: there’s quadruple the volume of blood, and likewise quadruple the violence of convulsing muscles. The beef lets out a volley of postmortem kicks as Aaron fits on the chains.

I try to follow Aaron’s moves more closely now. There are slight technical variations—cattle hides adhere more loosely to the muscle, creating a natural seam that is more peeled than cut. This being a male beef cattle, the pizzle is removed, and a small fountain of urine exits in its wake. 

Aaron calls me over once more to wax on the finer points of gut removal. It's crucial that digestive juices and waste aren’t let loose on the meat, which means keeping the organs intact. His trick is to lightly pierce the bulging caul, which collapses in to hug the encased stomachs.. He demonstrates this within a couple feet of my face. I’m hit up the nose with a blast of putrid gas. Lesson learned.

This beef, as with yesterday’s gilts, is already the property of four paying families. Since Aaron’s work is not USDA-inspected, all the hundreds of animals he slaughters are processed to this end. Some are given back to the farmers; all become food for families in the region. 

In the days of his grandfather, another country butcher, this economy was even tighter. “He was born in 1902. So back in those times you did a lot of bartering. So, in the wintertime when folks needed their hogs killed, Grandpap would go to their farm and kill ‘em, and cut it up and process it for them, and when it came to the summertime, if he needed help doing fieldwork, the neighbors came over. The scale always seemed to stay balanced that way for him.”

This time, there’s money changing hands, and cut sheets to consult. No buyer of this particular steer has expressed interest in the tail, which Aaron prepares to lop off into the dirt when I ask him how he skins it for consumption. He obligingly shows me, and asks if I want it. Flustered, I accept. He hoses it down and hands it to me, the freshest piece of meat I have ever touched. It feels lukewarm, and unexpectedly pure in my bare hands. Retail butchery gives one a heightened awareness of meat contact, the invisible trails of contamination availing themselves in the mind’s eye. Every steak is a hazard to be handled with care. Here, it’s like a potato dug from virgin earth.

The farmer hoists the steer to full height, and Aaron pulls out the many stomachs in one floppy load. With the cavity emptied, the butcher reaches in and grabs a flap of meat dangling off the 13th rib, where the adjacent skirt steaks meet. He hands this to me, still hot with the churn of rumination, and asks if I’ve had it before. Of course, this is the hanger steak—once the secret prize of butchers alone, now universally coveted.

Back home, my roommate and I subsisted for two nights on the off-cuts culled from our visit. After eating the hanger steak I had held warm in my hands three days prior, it dawned on me that our meals had undergone no regulatory scrutiny. All those furtive processes were bypassed—the rearing, slaughter, evisceration, and likewise the inspections. For the first time, it was up to me to determine the safety of the meat I was consuming, from the process I had witnessed.

It’s not radical to desire transparency in food. There were returns to the old ways of eating long before Aaron knocked his first heifer. Farm-to-table restaurants like Berkeley’s Chez Panisse established an ethos imploring even the most domesticated city dweller to reach out and touch ancestral earth—for a premium. 

But the whole ethos of farm-to-table is lost when food traveling through the shadowy conventional supply chain can be called organic. Likewise, if the “real cost” of this food is only payable by a privileged few, it will never replace a system designed to alienate us from our resources. The Scheetz Homestead represents an alternative. It’s a small farm designed to raise animals for maximum meat. The pigs live inside; the cattle eat corn. They are raised economically, with care. And the only interlocutor between farm and table is Mr. Waters, shepherding critters across the Styx with a shotgun and a sticking knife, for everyone to see.