How to Butcher a Hog

A guide on how to butcher a hog. Going through the steps of a successful hog slaughter and butcher isn't as difficult as you might think, especially when heeding the advice of how one enterprising pig farmer combines experience and know-how.

By Craig W. Snyde
Updated on January 11, 2022
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by Adobe Stock/ahirao

A guide on how to butcher a hog. Going through the steps of a successful hog slaughter and butcher isn’t as difficult as you might think, especially when heeding the advice of how one enterprising pig farmer combines experience and know-how.

Raising and harvesting a hog is a practical way to put nourishing food on the family table while taking an important step toward self-sufficiency… and away from artificially inflated supermarket prices and hormone-gorged meat. Nor is butchering your own swine all that hard to do. In fact, with a little preparation and common sense, you can make sure that the animal doesn’t suffer, that the slaughtering goes smoothly, and that the entire operation (not including chilling and sectioning) takes only two or three hours.

It should be pretty obvious that rearing and slaughtering your own pigs can guarantee quality pork on your table. Furthermore, many do-it-yourself meat processors feel that killing and preparing an animal can serve to remind a consumer that some of the food he or she eats was once a flesh-and-blood creature and didn’t come into this world as a tidy, prepackaged chop. And whether or not you think that factor is important, there’s no doubt that learning how to butcher a homestead-raised hog is a good way to save money and add to your self-reliance skills.

How to Butcher a Hog: Picking Your Pork

Let’s assume that you’ve raised a pig and that the porker is now about the right size (175 to 250 pounds) and age (8 to 10 months) for butchering. (Overly fat or old swine don’t usually make for good eating.) Generally, a barrow (a male hog that’s been castrated before reaching sexual maturity) or a gilt (a young female) is the best candidate for table fare. Boars (uncastrated males) and sows (adult females) in heat should be avoided at butchering time, since their flesh tends to have an unpleasant undertaste often described as “musky” or “rank.” (If you do wish to harvest such an animal, be sure to geld the boar and allow the wound to heal first… or wait until the female goes out of heat.)

When you’ve selected your animal, it’s time to lead the ham to slaughter. The remainder of this article has been arranged sequentially… in an effort to present a thorough, step-by-step guide for the novice hog processor.

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