About one hundred oxen will be driven into the yard at a time, and of these twenty or thirty go into the slaughterhouse, in which six or eight butchers are kept briskly at work. They are horrid ruffians to look at, in their sheepskin jackets, their leathern breeches, and their high boots, unsmeared by ought save the gore in which they are constantly wading. The villanous stink and the villanous spectacle in the slaughterhouse exceed any that the mind of man can imagine. The business is generally carried on during the rainy part of the season, so that the whole salgan is soon converted into a swamp of blood and mud.
As great expedition is required, the business of the slaughterhouse is carried on in a hurried manner, and the poor animals are subjected to much unnecessary suffering. It would require more hands and more time than can be afforded in a salgan, to put an ox to death in the artist-like manner customary among our butchers. In the salgan the beasts are left loose, the big-booted murderers enter the place with their heavy axes, and striking ea-ch animal a tremendous blow on the back, break its spine, and so bring it to the ground. Then snorting and bellowing the poor victims lie upon the ground, twenty or thirty of them at a time, helpless and unresisting, but a considerable time elapses before the whole of them can be put out of their pain.
The ox has but Httle fat upon his loins and back ; and, therefore, after the skin has been drawn off, three or four poods of meat are cut off to be offered afterwards for sale in the bazaar. None but the j)oor, however, buy it ; for the blow on the spine always has the effect of injuring the meat. The remainder of the carcass is cut up, and every thing cast into the boiler, with the exception of the intestines, which are given to the s\nne, of whom there are always a large number at every salgan wallo'W'ing in the miry gore, and undergoing the process of being fattened up for the market.
At every salgan there are usually from four to six boilers, each large enough to contain the meat of ten or fifteen oxen. A little water is put into the boilers to prevent " the soup" from burning. The fat collects at the top, and is skimmed off with large ladles, and before it has quite cooled it is poured into the casks in which it is afterwards shipped. This first fat is the best, and is quite white. The second has already a yellowish tinge. If a sufficient number of casks is not at hand, the hides are sown together, and the tallow pom-ed into them, till the whole assumes again a form sometliing like that the animal wore when living. Of these tallow-stuffed oxen a large number are usually seen standing about the salgans.
Another harvest of fat is obtained by afterwards subjecting the ma.'ih of bones and meat to huge presses, but this after-tallow is of a very inferior quality, of a dark brown colour, and is rarely exported. It is used for greasing wheels, and for any other purpose for which a coarse kind of grease is required.
An ox in good condition will give from seven to eight poods (from 250