It has begun...

And what has begun can not be stopped until all is accomplished...

For a little back ground on these meat-sacks, check out my previous post Bully Goats Rough: the saga continues.

Trust me, these Bully-Goats have been free-loading on me long enough and deserve to be re-purposed as tasty Gyros!

The Actors: @bluerthangreen, @papa-pepper, some @little-peppers and some that are @alittlebluer.

Oh, yeah, and Blotchy, the culled goat to be.

A little hot chocolate with marshmallows to keep our little helpers warm on an unusually cold Winter afternoon in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Temps were right around 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Not too bad, coming from the Frozen Tundra of Wisconsin, but too cold for my liking.

Blotchy just received a 45 caliber slug into his cranium. Papa-Pepper is about to slit the goats throat.

We began on the hind legs, cutting through the skin all the way around, just below where the tendon meets the leg bone. That crotch is a convenient place to hook the animal in order to hang it. We then cut through the leg and snap it off cleanly, severing the hooves from the carcass.

After the carcass is hoisted up by the tow straps and hung from a sturdy limb, we began to peel the hide away from the body with one hand and with the other we carefully cut any sheen or connective tissue that was stubbornly holding it on. It's sort of like peeling tape off a package and using an Exacto-knife to cut away any remaining glue residue.

After the carcass was completely skinned, we emptied the contents of the gut cavity into a bucket, cleverly nicknamed the "gut bucket." Papa-Pepper briefly showed off the lungs before chucking them to the nearby pigs. Waste not, want not on the homestead. Every part will be used, either by us humans, or by the pigs, ducks, or dogs.

In the future, I'm going to invest in an electric winch. Tow straps work in a pinch, but it usually takes two guys and several adjustments to get the carcass to the right hanging height.

The finished job! All done in a little over 1 hour. Not bad, considering Papa-Pepper is a novice and I am a complete noob, having never slaughtered anything bigger than a chicken before.

Here on the Bluer Than Green Homestead, also known as the All For The Good Homestead, we like to wear goat heads for hats after each culling.

It's sort of a macabre tradition, but it sure makes for some creepy, I mean really creepy pictures.

You have to admit it, there is something creepy about goat heads to begin with.

You add the split skull, The Hills Have Eyes deformity look, with being placed on top of human torsos and the creepy factor goes up about 1000x.

In all seriousness,

the skull was sawzalled open so that @papa-pepper could harvest the tiny goat brain. He wants to learn how to use the brain to tan my hide, my goat hide, that is. I'm sure he'll make a riveting post about it in the near future.

Thanks for Reading!

I hope you weren't too grossed out by the images. Actually, I kind of am, since a little grossness was the feel I was aiming for. You know what they say? "All work and no sadistic play makes life a little boring."

Or something like that...