Imagine the life Herb has to get up and live every day. Herb is a sticker at Surley Bros. Meats just outside of Valdosta, Georgia. See, Herb kills livestock—all day, every day—and he has killed livestock for close to seventeen years. After the first few weeks on the job he became desensitized to the gasping and muffled screeching of the animals as the lay choking on their own blood.

Every day Herb takes his breaks and lunches with Bob. Bob runs a line of machinery that processes the livestock that Herb kills. Bob’s machines rip flesh from bone—sometimes even successfully so—and Bob is okay with this. After all, someone has to feed the machines and why not Bob? Ever since Bob was a small child he’d had an affinity for all things dead. Immediately after high school he’d thought briefly about becoming a mortician or taxidermist but lacked the skill and concentration required by those vocations; shredding the flesh from the skeletons of dead animals seemed like a logical conclusion to him.

“Sometimes it’ll grab a chunk of vertebrae and pull in some spinal cord and we’ll have to try and get most of that out. You know, the FDA has standards for the amount of bone and spinal tissue we can put into our meat,” said Bob.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 30th, 2003 at 10:48 am and is filed under oddities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.