So there I was – surrounded a group of Karen tribesmen in a tiny isolated village on the side of a hill a stone's throw from the Burmese border. There was a small wooden club in my hand and a squirming pig in a bag at my feet, which I had somehow earned the task of dispatching.
I sniffed, scratched the bag of my head and looked at horizon that stretched out around me for something – anything – that might give an indication as to how in the name of the sweet, suffering mother of Jaysus I had talked myself into such a predicament. My travelling partner had decided that he could just about bring himself to bare witness to the gruesome spectacle through the medium of a digital camera screen, so he trained his lens on me while I shuffled and hesitated.
“It's name is porky, by the way,” said Robbie, with a grin. “And it's a girl pig.”
Mick, the head of the first Karen village we had wandered into, was hunkered down and gripping the prostrate animal, which was still inside a sack, around the kneck.
“Bang, bang, bang!” he ordered, with a furrowed brow.
“Three times, yeah?” I queried, holding up digits to confirm his meaning.
“Yes, yes!” said a wild-eyed villager, who was practically salivating at the prospect of the coming spread.
I fortified myself with the knowledge that as the unfortunate animal was bought and paid for, it would be meeting its maker in the immediate future regardless of whether it was at my hand or not. The only appreciable difference my abandonment of responsibility was likely to have on the animal at that stage, would be that I might earn it a momentary stay of execution, the duration of which the grunting unfortunate would spend pinned down in that sack before Mick or one of the other villagers bumped it off. I had no interest in making the poor animal suffer. I decided to get it over with as quickly as possible. For both our sakes.
I raised the club and slammed it onto the top of the pig's head with as much guilt-ridden force as I could muster. There was a sickening thud and a very un-pig-like yelp that I momentarily feared might have been the result of unpracticed aim leaving Mick with a bashed finger. However, after a split second glance assured me that our mentor was largely unperturbed, I let fly with another two full-blooded swings of the club. Horrifyingly, each one brought forth another yelp and the bag kept wriggling. Panic-stricken at the thought that I was prolonging the creature's death, I decided to keep swinging, praying as I did so that the writhing bag would still.
“Ahh! Aaaahhh! Mai dee!” exclaimed the hungry villager, clearly unhappy with how events were progressing, as I hit for a fourth fifth and sixth time.
“Jaysus Christ will ya stop hitting the thing!” said Robbie, catching me by the shoulder. “It's dead man, stop hitting it!”
“It's still moving, I can't leave it like that!” I roared, pulling away and throwing in another blow for good measure.
“It's just twitching, that what happens! It's as dead as it's goin' to get you mad thing!”
So that was that. My attempt at delivering as swift an ending as possible to our friend Porky ended with me coming across as a psychopath with a penchant for mutilating dead (girl) pigs. However, after three days of marching through the rain sustained by beer and mystery meat soup, the victim quickly lost its status as something to mourn over and became little more than a collection of pork chops and ribs.
The butchery was left to the villagers, who first burnt off the hair by tossing the animal, as was, straight onto a fire. Its skin was then scraped with a knife before it was bled, beheaded, gutted and skewered on two wooden sticks. Literally nothing was wasted. The blood was collected and used make a soup, in which various organs floated amongst a mass of chillies. Even the head was boiled. As is the way with such things, the women tended to the pots while the men stood at the fire nodding sagely as the main dish barbecued.
Porky's head spent the next 30 minutes butting against the confines of the pot it boiled in. The women then cracked it open, gouged out the brains and ate them. I have a vivid memory of a woman plopping two fingers' worth of grey matter into the waiting mouth of a girl no more than two. Happily, we weren't encouraged to resort to such measures.
It took us another two days to get back to Chiang Mai city, by foot and by bus. Although I've since been pigeon holed alongside child killers and suicide bomers by many of my friends and family for 'murdering' one of God's creatures, it was worth it. It was one seriously tasty pig.
Rampage
team 
MURDERER!
