E R N I E ' S   H O U S E   O F   W H O O P A S S

A little story of my first visit to an Abbatoir. Or "How I tasted *very* young veal." Some years ago I was a fresh-faced young student in the final year of my undergraduate studies at University. This year of the degree was, primarily, a research project based in the Biochemistry department. The area that I was studying was the structure of the crystallins, a family of proteins found in the lens of the eye. The reason these proteins are interesting is that they are produced before birth and remain in the lens, unreplaced or repaired, until death and subsequent decay/burning/consumption etc. So they have to be extremely stable - if they stuff up you get lovely cloudy deposits in what should've been nice clear lens. Cataracts. While we did work with human eyes when we could get them from the local hospital, most of the time we worked with cow eyes as they were readily available from any abbatoir. As part of this research we were looking at crystallins from as early as possible in their production. This require

So early one Monday morning, two PhD students from the lab and your humble narrator rolled up to the abbatoir in lovely Altona, a suburb of Melbourne here in Australia that is not exactly reknowned for its real estate values. Getting out of the departmental van, wearing our neat white lab coats, carrying big buckets to fill with eyes and a variety of scalpels and scissors to help remove them, the odour of a meatworks doing its morning slaughtering highlighted the reason why houses in the area were so cheap. I leave it to your imagination, but picture it, hundreds of cattle, sheep and pigs were being herded from the tight confines of the transports into cramped yards, then through to the killing room. The air was redolent with the smells of animal fear, shit, sweat, blood,and parboiled meat (from the bristle removing operation).

Add to this is it was a pleasant summer's day, around 20 celsius, with the promise of reaching the low 30s by lunchtime. We troop in to the office, and are taken from there to the main processing room, where the cattle arrive immediately after being killed. It's a huge assembly line - or should that be *dis*assembly line? Anyway, the cattle come in from a door in the far left corner, hanging by their left back leg from a hook on an overhead conveyor. As the bodies move slowly round the room, the abbatoir workers swarm over them, knives glinting in the fluorescent light, and take them to pieces. Firstly, the cattle are disembowled. This is the point where a somewhat belated pregnancy test occurs. Is the womb swollen and can I feel a calf in there? If so, the uterus is immediately separated and dumped down a chute. The rest of the contents go down a second chute after kidneys and so on that have value as offal are removed. (I guess that occasionally they keep tripe too, but not when we were there.) The heads a

But back to the heads. They are skinned and the cheeks and tounges removed to be sold as... cheeks and tounges. We stationed ourselves here for a while, plucking eyeballs as they came past. Once the workers realised what we wanted they helped - and their knives did a much neater job than our fumbling around with scalpels and scissors. Recall that maybe two minutes ago, these cattle were lowing out back, so they're still at a lovely body temperature. About 20 minutes gave us two buckets of cows eyes - they're rather big. So at this point we moved on to the place that really had me intruiged. The foetus room. And yes, that's what it said on the door. Here, the mystery of what they do with foetal calves that makes them a quick buck on the side was revealed. No, they don't slice them up and sell them as young veal. Guess they could though! What happens is that the chute from the room upstairs comes down to a large steel table. Here a couple of neanderthal workers sit, waiting. When the womb hits the table they s

The empty wombs and drained fetal calves are then thrown in to a big channel, with a rotating screw that lifts all the remains up in to a huge grinder. The various bits that get chucked down the other chute upstairs come down in to the same grinder, where they are all blended up to become blood and bone for fertilising peoples gardens. (All this bollocks about native people utilising an entire animal while we are so wasteful. What a wank, *nothing* of these cattle was rubbish, it was all used up.) So picture the room. Fairly small, but with a very high ceiling. Not brilliantly lit. Huge industrial grinding vat in one corner, with an open chute coming down through roof bringing all sorts of intestines and other bits in for processing. Another chute with a big steel screw slowly turning, slurping up ex-calves and empty wombs to join the rest of the former cow being converted into garden fertiliser. Deep machine and grinding noise coming from the vat, with the occasional series of thuds as a uterus bounces down

The chutes start backing up with bits; intestines are dangling over our heads, dripping the occasional drip of nameless goop. As we continue to receive wombs via our chute, but the screw has been turned off in the removal channel, we start to build up a nice collection of dead foetus bits, inverted uteri and a nice, ankle deep puddle of amniotic fluid. What an experience - but it got better. I was standing in front of the table, waiting for the next uterus for processing. The now-familiar thudding noise of a bouncing uterus started to echo down the chute and I stepped forward, knife ready to slice and dice. Now your average uterus is a rather muscular organ, and fairly tough. So it was with some suprise that I was drenched from head to foot in a sudden spray of amniotic fluid, as the uterus hit the table in front of me and ruptured.

Lab coats are not designed to prevent you getting wet when several litres of amniotic fluid hits you full on. I was soaked to the skin, hair dripping on to my shoulders, shoes (which were already sploshing around in a layer of cow innards) now full. I guess the middle of my back might have been dry, as the wave hit me from the front. Oh, and in case you were wondering. Not much flavour really - slightly salty. Bit like mild blood. For some reason, the abbatoir lads found this hysterically funny. Not quite roll on the ground funny, due to the condition of the ground, but side splitting anyway. When we finally collected enough baby-eyes we returned to University. Amniotic fluid is rather inoffensive, being sterile and having virtually no smell or taste, but it was only 8.30 in the morning and I had the rest of the day to sit around working, damp through every layer of clothing. And as the day wore on the inoffensive fresh fluid would undoubtedly suffer the ravages of environmental exposure on a warm summer's d

Of course, I changed in to them again for the trip home on the train.

Wouldn't want anyone I didn't have to work with to miss out on any odour that had developed during the day. The dog thought I was rather special when I got home. PS: Yes I've been back, but not to the foetus room. The other trips have been to scrape the intestinal mucosa out of pig guts to look for growth factors...

-- Doctor CJ