Quote Originally Posted by Wendi View Post
WMC built a lot of machinery for Farmer John and had to go there to install. He saw the kill in action. My friend works in Vernon and says you can smell the blood/kill in the air. YUCK
When we shoved the cars in there, we had a little makeshift shelter we would sit in while the "pigboys" as we called them (employees of Farmer John who would unload the hogs from the cars) would unload the cars for us. We had a large 50 gallon drum for building a fire in to keep warm and we kept a 25' length of rebar up there with us to prod any of the hogs that did not want to go, as the longer they took, the longer we had to wait to go home, seeing as this was our go home move for the day. So naturally we wanted to encourage the hogs to get off the cars quickly. For those hogs that still didn't get with the program, we took the rebar and stuck it in the fire for five minutes, that usually got them hopping. But the worst was when even that didn't work. One of those poor pigboy bastards had to crawl into the car and chase it out. Through all that pig crap. To this day, that was the worst thing I ever saw on this job. So one day I went in looking for the restroom, and asked some focker where it was, and he pointed me to a hallway and to go down some steps...I did and ended up right on the kill floor. (They did this to all strangers and to us rails, it was a joke they played on us) Took me years and years to get to the point that I could eat pork again. Still don't really. As for the smell, that's Bandini, the rendering plant nearby. They take all the carcasses and render (incinerate) them to turn them into fertilizer. When I started working in 1990 in East LA yard for the UP off Washington Blvd., the smell made me vomit. There was a shower in the locker room and I would shower after the shift and still could not get it off me...over time I learned to shower repeatedly after working a yard job there...yeah, the smell is that gross and disgusting.