Respect Butchers Like Your Best 6th Grade Lab Partner

If there was dissection going on in 6th grade science class, I knew not to go in with a weak partner. I knew to pick someone giddy to take a knife to a frog—the same kid who probably made worm mud pie during pre-school recess, who'd grow up with no sweat separating a shoulder from a cow. I need this person, because I more than sweat.

Though I wish I could, I can't even chop a sardine's head without feeling a little clammy. And thanks to a profession like butchery, I don't have to, for the same reason I don't have to perform root canal on a friend. Doing it yourself is great, and certainly a great lesson in something we no longer need to know how to do. And, really, I'm working on it. But above all, we got to give it to those who do it every day, and with such care and precision, without a flinch.

I wonder, often, how, in fact, they got over the sound of animal bone cracking or seeing a skinned head. Is it, I wonder, like getting used to the necessary crackle of killing a bug? Or is it, for them, as common as taking a drumstick from a chicken, something we easily associate with food not flesh?

However they do it, I say thank you, and, is it over yet?