npaden, the best thing to do is gut it and skin it. Try not to touch the flesh with the hair if possible.

When you have itgutted and skinned, the main thing is to keep the cavity as cool as possible. Either put all the cutsin the cooler with ice or buy ice bags and place in cavity orHang in walk-in-cooler.

Back in the 80's I bought a FrigBox off a wrecked foodtruck and used it as a Walk-In-Chiller-Box on my place. Iwould chillit for 3 days so it would be easier to make the cuts when butchering.


Now as for scraping the hair off. We started trapping in October thru November to butcher for the Xmas holidays. We had many Cubans, Jamaicans, Haitians, Dominicans and Asians who would order a whole pig, half a pig or hams for the holidays. Most all of these wanted the skin on it and some wanted the skin and head on it.

We had a 55gal drum with scalding water and we would soak the burlap sacks andscald the pigs with it. Remove the sacks and place back in the scalding water. Now, take the back edge of the butcher knife and scrape allthe hair off, if the pig cooled down, place the scalding sacks back on them again and keep scraping the hair off until all the hair is off. Now dip a pot in the scaldingwater, pour on the pigand scrub the skin with a good scrubbing brush. Hose down real good to wash all the hair away from the table.The skin will be good andwhite.

Now is the time to gut and butcher using the hose and constatly washing it down. I sugguest you have some rubber boots on!