Un-easy
jobs
The faces behind five cringe-inducing businesses
S
ome people work in fields that aren’t for the squeamish, but the services they provide are often important and necessary to our everyday way of life. In the CN&R’s special Business issue, you’ll be introduced to several local businesspeople whose professions appear to have a disconcerting aspect to them. They include a mobile butcher, a funeral director, a porta-potty maven, an exterminator and a woman whose specialty is giving colonics. These folks gave the CN&R behind-the-scenes access, speaking candidly about their work, which, depending on your perspective, may not be so unsettling after all. You decide.
20 CN&R February 20, 2014
Butcher with a Mobile slaughter operator takes
B
everly Chandler surprised herself seven months ago when she began assisting her brother-in-law, George Westbrook, owner of George’s Mobile Slaughtering and Custom Butchering, with his business out in the field. “It didn’t bother me in the slightest,” she said, referring to the duo’s work slaughtering farm animals. Interestingly, that wasn’t the case for Westbrook, who said it took him quite a while to adjust from the job of cutting meat in a butcher shop to the front-end job of actually taking the life of animals raised for consumption. That was 13 years ago, and based on Westbrook’s work today, it’s clear he remains respectful of livestock. Last Tuesday morning (Feb. 11), Westbrook’s schedule had him in a bucolic Durham neighborhood of gentleman farms. Here, a customer hired him to slaughter three spring lambs that were closing in on being a year old. “The job I am providing will be a humane job,” he said, just before going into a barn for a wether, a castrated male sheep. Slaughtering an animal is not for the faint of heart. However, as Westbrook said, the sheep did not appear to suffer. As he held the wether, Chandler rendered it unconscious by carefully positioning a bolt gun to its head and pulling the trigger. The stunned animal fell to the ground, and moments later Westbrook used a butchering knife to make a deep
slit at its throat. The sheep made no sound throughout the process, although its legs, due to its nervous system, did flail for a short time. Westbrook reached down and patted the animal as it bled out, just as one would do to a pet dog lying on the ground. “I’m always sure to give thanks to my animals,” he later said about that interaction with the sheep. “It makes me feel a little bit better about what I do.” When the animal was still, Westbrook used the knife to skin its hocks—the elbow region of the back legs—where he placed large hooks connected to a hoist mounted to his rig, a Chevy truck with a boxed-in cargo area used to hold carcasses. The sheep was pulled up off the ground and Westbrook and Chandler then set to work on eviscerating— removing the organs—and skinning it. All told, the process took about 15 minutes. As he later explained, hogs take him about 20 minutes, while cattle (which are shot with a .22 rifle) take about 40 minutes. The 32-year-old Westbrook got into
the butchering business somewhat by happenstance. He’d been a student in environmental studies at Feather River College in Quincy, hoping to go to work for the U.S. Forest Service, when a dearth of jobs led him to work as a butcher. He learned his craft while working in Cottonwood, his hometown, for Bowman Meat Co. After a couple of years, he decided to