Festival of Cruelty 18

It's time once more to enter the shadow world of suicidefoodism, the world where no one's constrained by decency. They don't have to pretend that animals are complicit in their own deaths. It's a world we visit every few months, though we've long forgotten why. (Read up on the custom by checking out Festival of Cruelty #17.)

Rural Route BBQ: As every crazed hillbilly with a knife to brandish and a chicken to choke knows, terror is the finest seasoning.

Pig Chaser BBQ Sauce: Continuing the theme, the Pigchaser menaces pigs throughout Illinois. He's just so villainous, the way he pursues his panic-stricken quarry, sandaled and full of wicked glee. The entrailpreneurs of the various Festivals of Cruelty are no shrinking violets, meekly coaxing the "food" animals onto the coals. No, they tend to drift more into bloodthirsty Harold territory. They are hunters (of penned livestock), and they ask no one for permission!

Virginia Smokis Porkis: It looks like an innocent depiction of Man's brutal dominance over gentle Nature, but you couldn't be more wrong.

See, in the official state seal (no, this isn't the official one), Virtus, the Roman goddess of virtue, is shown triumphant over Tyranny. The legend beneath the vanquished despot reads Sic Semper Tyrannis or "Thus always to tyrants." In the Smokis Porkis (or "Doesn't actually mean anything") version, the role of the tyrant is played by a dead pig. So, like, take that, pig? You, um, tyrant?

Smokin' Up a Storm: It's no longer enough, apparently, to kill and butcher them the old-fashioned way. To satisfy a jaded public, ever more diabolical means of dispatching the animals must be dreamt up. In this case, it's some kind of weather-controlling contraption that has sucked up the cow, pig, and chicken. Within its artificial funnel cloud, it subjects them to punishing speeds and stunning jolts of lightning.

WTF? Smoke -n- BBQ: It would hardly be a Festival of Cruelty without some dog or wolf making life miserable for a pig or two. It's practically a tradition! No, seriously. Take a look at recent Festivals and see what we mean.

Festival of Cruelty 17

Every few months, we leave the safety of suicidefoodism's comfy lies—"the animals want us to do to them what we want to do to them" chief among them—and descend into the dungeons of the truth. Finding there nothing soft, nothing easy, we hold out as long as we can before climbing into the light of lies above. (Our last visit into the darkness.)

Burnside BBQ: Burn the side, burn the front, burn the back. Burn it all. In for a penny, in for a pound. The worst part: The pig's got a napkin tied under his chin. When they said they'd be pleased to have him for dinner, he thought they meant something else.








El Pampero: Who says "food" animals are mistreated, forced to live without adequate space, mental stimulation, or medical attention? Jab! Take that! Jab! And that!

We know that El Pampero means "the one from the pampas," the great, grassy plains of Argentina. But we can't help wanting to translate it as "The Pamperer." That's how we imagine the hypo-wielding pig describing himself, with supervillainish sarcasm.



Law Dawg BBQ: More abuse of canine power. It's an unlikely trope: the uniformed dog or wolf—a law enforcement officer or a pilot or a chef—rousting the local pig populace. In this case, a good ol' boy sheriff ushers a pig into the paddy wagon for a bit of extrajudicial barbecuing.







SS BBQ Team: Although the aproned executioner adheres to a system designed to remove the stink of patronage and caprice, still the deck is, shall we say, stacked. It's a sure thing: someone's going to die. The concession the chef makes is a small one. After all, he doesn't really much care who's next. He knows he'll get around to killing and grilling each of them in turn.








Stu Pit: So much for the respect the barbecuing community professes for the animals their food used to be.

See you next time! (There's going to be a next time?!)

Festival of Cruelty 16

It's time. Every 50 posts, we leave the childlike world of illusion and visit the land of brutal truth. We turn our backs on the calming lie of complicit animals who are accessories to their own murders and face squarely an unending anti-animal sentiment. (Our most most recent visit was, as always, sobering.)

Whiskered Dog BBQ: For the crime of being born animals, the chicken and pig have been imprisoned, saddled with balls-and-chains, and then allowed to escape. And all of this, the whole sordid circus—the corrupt courts, the vicious penal system—exists only so that they can be chased down by a dog police officer on a motorcycle and a cleaver-happy little girl. Are we alone in wondering (again, again, and again!) why the animals have to be brutalized, tormented, and ridiculed prior to being slaughtered and butchered? Justice deferred is justice denied! Or, you know, injustice deferred is still injustice.

(Would you believe that two previous festivals of cruelty—this one and this one—also feature images of canine predators on motorized vehicles hunting down pigs and chickens? They might, in fact, have been created by the same artist.)


Jake Culpeeper's Cattle Company: Is Jake Culpeeper hiding his eyes, unable to confront his own cruelty?

No, we believe he is merely wiping away a single tear of mirth.

"Jump, cow! Lookit 'er go!"





Piping Hot: She must not only die. She must die a lingering death. She must die from a broken spirit, as much as from the severe burns, asphyxiation, or whatever trauma actually kills her in their enormous death chamber. The fans they have supplied are clearly intended as mocking imitations of mercy. Dying of thirst? Take this thimble topped to the brim with warm seawater. Dying of exposure to the freezing elements? Have a watchband. Starving to death? Here's a photo of a single kernel of corn. Likewise, the cow slowly dying within a makeshift torture apparatus.



Louie's Chicken Shack: Down at Louie's, they got a lumberjack/Quebecois fur trader who delights in hacking off the chickens' heads out back. They don't even have to pay him. He just shows up, sharpens the axe, and gets to it. When he's ankle-deep in heads, he wipes down the blade and goes home. It's a sweet deal for everyone.







Freestate Smokers: Free state, huh? They sure do have a sense of humor out in Maryland. It's not so free for the "food" animals. Sure, they're free to burst out of the smokers. They're free to be wracked with fear and anxiety. But mostly they're free to shut up and die.

Festival of Cruelty 15: Forcible Testicle Removal

For those of you unfamiliar with our cringe-inducing Festival of Cruelty series (the last official entry was three and a half months ago, but there was also a Festival of Cruelty special report recently), here's the gist:

Suicide food is all about deception. But some meat-promoting imagery is so nakedly honest in its depiction of pure contempt, its expression of such hatred for animals, that we find it almost refreshing. (Almost.) This is stuff that could stand a little camouflage, a little lipstick, a little stagecraft. At least a few bandages to hide the wounds. This isn't suicide food. It's murder food. And it's instructive to dive into the cesspool now and then. What it teaches us, exactly, we have long since forgotten.

So! Hold your nose and jump in and try not to drown in our newest, themed Festival of Cruelty.

Huntley (Illinois) Turkey Testicle Festival: As it turns out, some turkeys object to castration. This one clutches his savaged loins. He gapes in wordless horror, as though petitioning Heaven's vacant throne. But most of all, he advertises an event whose foundation is the consumption of turkeys' private parts. Do you see what we mean about cruelty? They don't even bother dressing this up in the same old clichés of subservience, compliance, and victims identifying with their predators. It's just shock, pain, and anguish.




Olean (Missouri) Jaycees Testicle Festival: We "love" the disdain implicit in this one. "Our volunteers make the difference," they say as they show us this maimed cow wearing a button that identifies him as one of those volunteers! "No, no," they proclaim, "that one's a volunteer. He signed up to have his stuff hacked off! You saw the button, didn't you?" It's the most half-hearted disavowal in the history of people caught in the act, the equivalent of "Honest, officer! The dead guy was on the floor when I got there."



Minnesota Testicle Festival: They call it the home of the Minnesota Tendergroin, because if there's one thing people like more than eating an animal's testicles while it watches, it's making puns while they do it. (You should know that testicle festivals are hotbeds of suspect humor as well as viciousness.) Featured here is a former bull—he's a steer now—who can only snort in impotent agony.

While people laugh at him.




Thirteenth Annual "Calf Fry" Testicle Festival: The newly castrated can also take the stoic cowboy route, hoping to numb the pain with nothing stronger than beer and nicotine. But it won't soothe the searing sting of degradation.

Notice the barren landscape, the single tumbleweed an errant mark on a blank sheet of paper. It all serves to emphasize the castrato's loneliness. He went from vigorous to victimized just like that, with no one to witness his turmoil but the uncaring sky.



Rock Creek Lodge: More craven snorting. This steer's got a haunted, hunted look in his eyes. Which is only fitting, seeing as he's been hunted down, and the aftermath of what they've done to him will haunt him the rest of his days. Which—let's look on the bright side—won't number too many.







Outdoorama Turkey Testicle Festival: Is this turkey warding off the knives? Are his hands thrown up before him in an "Out of my way!" gesture? Either way, there's no stopping them. There's no getting between the hungry hordes and the poultry testicles they crave.




Addendum: We have, of course, seen castrated animals before. There was a steer, a turkey, and a different steer from way back. Improbably, it's a motif that's been with us through the ages.

Packard's: a Festival of Cruelty Special Report

The most recent installment in our Festival of Cruelty series wasn't that long ago, and we won't be due for the next scheduled episode for another six weeks or so. But we can't sit on this any longer. We have been seeking images of the (Northampton, Massachusetts) Packard's menu for months and we finally have them.

From the moment we first glimpsed the menu, a year and a half ago, the memory has haunted us. And seeing these images again reminds us of how we became obsessed.

Like other exhibits from the ongoing Festival of Cruelty, these showcase a raw meanness, an iconoclastic blatancy. To go out of your way to demonize and brutalize the animals who became your food, to treat them as utterly undeserving of any but the harshest treatment… Well, it's practically thrilling. Because it's entirely unnecessary—the animals are dead, the food they were made into is in the ovens even now—it has the power to grab us by the throat and insist that we take note.

And take note we did!

We saw the chicken immobilized in a contraption straight out of a supervillain's daydream, its wings about to be buzz-sawed off, to land in baskets filled with the limbs of previous victims. The chicken, paralyzed in mute horror, holds up a sign reading "Why?!" As any "food" animal should know, the answer is, "Because they can."

Below the de-winger is a scene of true depravity: amid the stink of rotting carcasses, beloved figures from our collective childhood huddle outside a Bates Hotel for unsuspecting animals, their legs and wings amputated, their stumps bleeding through the bandages. (It's the in-your-face flipside of this old post.) We've seen "food" animal amputations before (here, for instance, and here), but it's presented by Packard's with such stinging spite that it seems brand-new. Sesame Street's Count Von Count mocks Big Bird's phantom limbs. And do you see the posters on the brick wall? Packard's wants Foghorn Leghorn and Baby Huey so they can hack them apart too!

Animals on crutches, animals pushing themselves around in wheeled boxes, animals slowly dying. On a menu? At a place where you're going to eat? On purpose?

We want you to see the other Packard's menu art. (Click the images to see them bigger.) Like the tableau above, they're positively brimming with an unstinting hatred for animals.

Festival of Cruelty 14

The time has come again, regrettably, to leave behind the disingenuous sham that is suicide food, and stumble into a land of foulest honesty. We come here every 50 posts, for reasons we have long since forgotten, and stare goggle-eyed at the worst of the worst. For here we see beyond and beneath suicidefoodism's Big Lie. No one in this quarter bothers trying to make you believe the animals are complicit. Here they are not actors, but only objects.

(Visit our most recent foray when you're done.)

Chain Gang BBQ: For those of you already squeamish about the thought of exploiting prison labor, comes this piece of bad business. The pigs (surely sentenced to life) are herded into a work detail under the blistering sun. Behind them, they drag a new ball and chain: a hot, heavy, smelly barbecue.

No, we're not sure why the grinning warden is eating a bird's leg and not a rack of ribs.



Bringin' The Heat BBQ Team: After painting it with the blood of its offspring (we're assuming), an imp made of fire threatens to burn a pig alive. He's getting ready to touch the flame to the pig's tail, like setting a lit match to tinder, but the pig can hardly muster the will to care.





Miller's Bar-B-Que: Out there in southeastern Pennsylvania, they do things a little differently. When the nights lengthen and the stars dazzle, Manheimers like to plug in the ol' electric gun and chase themselves a chicken or two. It's a simple pastime that harkens back to a simple time. A time when a businessman could terrorize a bird without drawing dirty looks and jeers.



Angry Tom's BBQ: So is this what it looks like when Tom isn't angry? (When he follows his own advice, about forgoing wrath for barbecue.) Because—and we're not professionals—he looks a teensy bit furious. Maybe it's the way he's straddling his homing airplane, fork all agleam with malice, putting his foes to flight. We admit not following the scenario very well. Is the plane on the ground? (Was Tom grounded for rage-related reasons?) Are the cow, pig, and chicken running in the clouds?

See this post for a similar treatment of the theme—the fork-brandishing wolf chasing down his prey aboard a mechanical mount. Awfully specific, that theme.



Peg Leg Porkers: Getting drunk and risking your life for a good cause (?) by trying to stay one step ahead of rampaging bulls gets old. To inject a much-needed thrill into the spectacle, we recommend forcing a terrified pig—one with an inexplicable wooden leg—to take your place.

(Keeping score? This is the fifth instance of peg-legged pigs we've featured.)

Festival of Cruelty 13: Spotlight on Harold

We first encountered Harold in the inaugural post of our Festival of Cruelty feature. Unbeknownst to us, Harold has been busy since then, amassing a sizable body of work. We have therefore chosen to showcase Harold and his chicken-hating ways in this, our 13th installment of the Festival of Cruelty.

For those of you who are still blissfully ignorant of this hateful little series, an explanation: the Festivals of Cruelty afford us the opportunity to enjoy some plainspoken anti-animal sentiment. Instead of the usual suicidefoodist fare, with its obfuscation and misdirection—its perversion of obvious truths—we get to experience unadorned candor. It's like hearing the whispers out of range of cameras and microphones. (Revisit the previous edition, won't you?)

Which brings us back to Harold. Here is a monarch who just loves killing (or at least chasing and menacing) chickens throughout Chicago and points beyond. He can't get enough of it.





































Sometimes Harold keeps his regal status under wraps. But whether he's in his crown and ermine-trimmed jacket or the humble garb of the short-order cook, whether he runs to the left or the right, whether his quarry scampers or, legless, flaps in fright, the constant is that insatiable hatchet. Those damn chickens will feel the sting of his singing steel!

(Thanks to Debora Drower for her photo of the frantic neon Harold.)

Addendum (11/08/11): Another slight Harold variation.

Festival of Cruelty 12

We apologize, but it's time once again. Time to hold our noses and plunge into suicidefoodism's more honest sister city. (Do you remember the last time we visited?) It's not pretty. There are no convenient, comforting lies to hide behind. No illusions of consent. No coy, winking livestock. Here, all is coercion and force. Before we're done, you might remember suicidefoodism's deceptions with fondness.

Denny's Chicken Warning: Superbowl XLIV. The violence. The aggression. The intimidation. And that's just the commercials! (Thank you.) In this high-spirited Denny's spot, a burly, egg-loving chicken hater puts the birds on notice. He's coming for their eggs, and he hopes to terrorize them with the news. The rest is unrestrained hilarity as the chickens panic, the tears of mirth roll on, and a "good" time is had by "all."

(Thanks to Dr. KCinDC for the referral.)



Au Pied de Cochon: From Paris, City of Lights, land of sophistication and good taste, comes this ode to brutality. Three red-nosed fiends in chef's hats and aprons terrorize a pig, preparing to hack off his foot, riding him, staring at his mouth while, um, fingering a mysterious object of uncertain culinary importance. While all roads lead to this elegant establishment, bringing the hordes of refined diners, the pig and others like him are wrestled to the ground and slaughtered, on and on, jour et nuit.

(Thanks to Dr. Dan for the improved picture of this one.)


Meat Monster: The act of butchery has become so difficult, so gosh-darned tedious, that the barbekooks have devised an automatic, self-guiding killing mechanism. Just program your coordinates, and this thing will rush a panicked animal to your doorstep, ready to be hacked in half by steel jaws. Our machines are truly extensions of our will! The future is now!




The Taylor Corn & Que: The pig roasts alive while the bully steer lords it over him, a casual god of war, one blood-red tomato held aloft.





El Puerco Lloron: The weeping pig weeps for his life, for the lives of his family and friends, all the pigs who lived before him—briefly—only to be killed, cooked, and eaten. No weeping can undo his fate. His tears are only a seasoning for his carcass.

(Thanks to Dr. Mrs. Suicidefood for the referral.)








Duck in a Can: More gracious cuisine, this time in the form of a duck, body still stuck inside a tin can, fleeing his good-natured, amateur butcher. We know the man is a hobbyist, rather than a professional duck-killer, by his clothing. No white coat to denote his objective distance. The man is possessed by a demon of bloodshed. His tongue flaps from his mouth as he tears after the duck. He might even eat that thing raw.

Festival of Cruelty 11

We apologize, but it's time for our required descent into the depths of what can only be called murder food. As you no doubt know, this stuff is what you get when you strip away the pleasant, smiling façade of ordinary suicide food.

We make this hellward journey every few months, if only to test our strength. Read the most recent installment of this series and then dig into this, Festival of Cruelty, part 11.

Penalty Box BBQ: Finally, someone has combined the venom of hockey and the violence of barbecue! Here, two boars have contrived to get themselves sent to the penalty box, wherein they might strangle and eviscerate a chicken on the opposing team. What's most discomfiting about the image is that the thugs are clearly not caught in the grip of hockey mania. This attack is premeditated; they've smuggled actual weapons onto the ice as part of their plot to gut that bird. And why? What did the bird do? The bird did nothing. His only offense was witnessing the pigs' complete debasement at the hands of the barbecue community. For that he must be destroyed.




Marshy's: The weary, defeated look on this chicken's face tells a tale, you know? He is heartsick as he counts down to Thursday, when he will join the ranks of amputee poultry.

He almost wishes today were Thursday, just to get it over with!

To hear the ticking as Thursday draws ever nearer, to know what fate Thursday ushers in! If his wings must be torn off, let them be torn off today! Now! Anything to end the torment of the end anticipated so vividly!





Pork Me Purple Bar-B-Que: No, pig, we will not. What we will do, however, is suggest that you visit a therapist qualified to help you explore and address your death wish, sexual addiction, survivor guilt, and unresolved anger. Leave your number at reception.





Embotits Artesans: The butcher isn't fooling anyone. Look at the big, red pig. He's not having it. He tries to back away. The butcher won't relent. "Come on, pig," he coaxes, the itching blade growing heavier with every breath. The pig, ears back, adopts a posture of fear. Kneeling, the butcher raises a hand in friendship. The pig is unconvinced, but knows he is about to die.

And this is the moment the butcher shop chose to memorialize?




Action Gas: The fairy tales that lend a shiver of excitement to a child's imaginings are here transformed into torture porn. Where the Brothers Grimm would let the details of the pigs', the childrens', the assorted iconic characters' grisly deaths remain obscure—at least in the tales' modern, Americanized versions—the Brothers Action Gas want you to know, to feel just how sharply the victims suffer. After all, how can you judge the purity of their gas if you can't hear the pigs screaming? Note also how they put the barbecue consumer into the role of mindless villain. Who identifies with the Big Bad Wolf in that story, anyway?