Ethically reared, premium quality meat with fat is the starting point for creating your own home-made delicious and gristle-free sausage and how your meat is reared really does matter for both taste and importance of caring how animals reared for meat are kept!
Pigs in particular are intelligent creatures that would naturally inhabit the woodland floor, scavenging in their social groups all day to find enough sustenance for survival and breeding. They lay down fat to keep warm against the cold and need cool damp or watery wallows and shade in hot weather to keep cool.
This is sadly not how the vast majority of pork available in the shops/supermarkets is reared; breeds of pig created to grow fast in mainly artificial conditions and to be as lean as possible, sometimes kept indoors and on no bedding with slatted floors suspended over lagoons of the animals own effluent.
They are kept in confined and restricted conditions, often in darkness or artificial light without stimulus for an intelligent animal and without any access to truly ‘natural’ behaviours – it is no wonder they bite each others tails off and become aggressive and stressed!
Rare and Traditional Pig Breeds
Rare or traditional breed pigs kept as close to ‘naturally’ as possible are very different. Breeds like the British Saddleback, Gloucester Old Spot, Oxford and Sandy, Large Black, Berkshire…….plenty more, having experienced very little ‘commercially improved breeding’ cope well in ‘natural’ conditions where they please themselves about being indoors or foraging outdoors in the soil for tasty treats. These traditional breeds are fatter, more bristly and better equipped for a ‘natural life’.
Smallholder and Small Scale Producers of Ethical Meat
There are small-scale specialist breeders of ethical meat all across the country who have passion for their pigs and will be happy (by appointment!) to show you in person how their pigs for meat are kept but expect this pork to be substantially more costly than the lesser alternative. There are also small family butchers who deal with local suppliers, farm shops, farmers markets, specialist internet suppliers….
Ask Questions!
Stress at the point of slaughter infects your meat with unnecessary and undesirable stress-induced chemical rushes so degrading the quality that stress free slaughter provides. It’s not just kind to the animal, it’s better for you.