Hundreds of bodies litter the killing field. Many still twitch as the cherry red blood bubbles out of slit necks and pools in the mud. Blood-splattered butchers hunch over the bodies, their axes methodically rising and falling as they hack through flesh and bone. Others peel away the skin with long curved black bladed knives. Cows that had fifteen minutes before been chased across the field by squealing children are now fat marbled slabs of meat laid out on eucalyptus leaves for sale. Near a pile of steaming entrails and flesh covered skulls, a woman squats in front of a plastic bucket churning blood, allegedly for drinking. Perhaps this, like kort, as the raw meat dish is called in Ethiopia, is a delicacy. The hecatomb is to celebrate Meskel, the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian holiday commemorating the
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