I worked at a huge hog farm in south Texas when I was I high school. We likely had 5,000 hogs any given day. Every Friday, we would sell a big pen of market hogs (roughly 240 pounders) to a packer out of San Antonio. Next to the loading chute we had a pen for the “sick hogs.” When you have 5000 hogs, you are going to have about 20 every week that want to die of something—and sometimes some nasty shit where the hog is all pussed up or bleeding out of all orafices. Anyway, after the good hogs were loaded, the packer would buy the sick hogs for pennies on the dollar. The only stipulation: they had to be alive when we loaded them—like stick-a-mirror-under-their-nose alive. I learned to drive a Bobcat skid steer by loading nasty hogs in a bucket and depositing them in a trailer.
I asked the driver one time what they did with those hogs. He said “grind’em into hotdogs.” No idea if that is true. But what is fact is that I ate a delicious All American dog from the Sonic in Post today coming back from the lake. Hot dogs are a gift from the gods. And a noble end to a pussed piglet.