B.T.'s Smokehouse

And just what is going on here?

Could it really be as awful as it seems? (Could anything be as awful as this seems?)

Before, in the golden springtime of our innocence, we found this distasteful. Oh, to return to those childlike days, when something as tame as a cowboy pig slowly strangling a chicken into a near-death sex-coma was risqué! We mourn our lost naiveté. Life was so simple, the horrors of the world so remote.

But we have taken a pledge. Faced with an image like this one from B.T.'s Smokehouse of Brimfield, Massachusetts, we must do our duty and document our conclusions. Namely, that this is the most deviant act of foreplay we have ever seen. (This cross-species branding play is what the in-crowd refers to as "bronking.")

The mounting steer is our Barry White, full of charm and insistence. Look into his hooded eyes, and you can almost hear his basso profundo, and feel his need. The sow, then, is our coquette slipping into character. The explosive beads of perspiration belie her eroticism. See the smile on this gilt? (That's hog-farmer talk for young female pig.) She knows the score.

That all this is in the service of selling dead animal parts only compounds our nausea.