As a result of being a nose-to-tail carnivore, Davis has been called everything from a killer to an anti-feminist by animal activists, who might be surprised to learn she once was a vegetarian herself. (When I asked her why she began eating meat again, she replied, “I was hungry.”) The organization that leased Davis a commercial kitchen for Winterim asked that we not mention its name, and when Davis initially visited the space, someone asked how she was going to contain the pig’s blood. “What blood?” she said, and the reply revealed that the owners thought she was going to walk a live pig through the front door and kill it in front of nine teenagers. This ignorance, Davis says, is telling of our relationship to the animals that we eat — most of us don’t know the difference between butchery and slaughter.

Here’s how Wilburess actually died. At the slaughterhouse, she walked down a chute into a kill room where Latin dance music was playing. A man applied an electrical prong to the back of her head to stun her senseless. He sent another stun to her heart to induce cardiac arrest. Then he checked her eyes for rapid movements and, finding none, pierced her brachial artery. He moved her body into a vat of scalding water to loosen the hair follicles. Then she was placed on a table to be dehaired. A worker hung her body on a hook, eviscerated it, then cut it down the middle. The students watched it all. No one fainted. No one cried. (Though a few kids admitted to their teachers later that they were considerably shaken.) As for Davis, she said that the first time she witnessed a slaughter, she broke into tears, and nearly every time she visits a slaughterhouse, she gets choked up.

The reasoning underlying the Portland Meat Collective, she says, is that by taking part in the process, we begin to think of how to use the animal differently. “Once you slaughter a pig, you dehair it, you butcher it, you wrap it and you put it in your freezer, it’s so much work you don’t want to waste it,” Davis says. “It’s special.” Two days after Wilburess’s slaughter, Davis cut off the pig’s head and started listing its possible uses. “Once I take the face off, there’s a lot I can do with this. I can make my jowl bacon. I can leave the face intact and make porchetta di testa. I can dry the pig ears and give them to a dog. I can make headcheese.” She pointed to the area just next to the jaw. “The more a muscle works, the tougher it is, the more flavorful it is. Imagine how much these worked — the cheeks!” The students watched in silence. “They’re delicious.”

The first animal Davis ever slaughtered was a chicken. After that, she killed a rabbit. “I’ve never figured out how to fully articulate what happens,” she said. “I don’t feel guilty, and I don’t feel bad. It is a pure and intense experience, but it is the most complicated experience you can have in terms of living and dying.”

The way the Portland Meat Collective teaches rabbit slaughter is by having a person sit in a chair with a rabbit at their feet and gently place a broomstick over its neck. When you pull the body, the stick breaks the rabbit’s neck. Sometimes, it goes badly. “This one guy pulled the body so hard, he ripped the head off,” Davis told me. “I came home from that class and curled up on a couch and didn’t move for a day.” In a separate incident last year, activists stole 18 rabbits from a breeder who supplies the Meat Collective. Among the group of stolen rabbits was a nursing mother, and because she’d gone missing, several 10-day-old rabbits died. Davis wrote an essay about the incident that was later adapted for the radio program “This American Life.” (Again the line between Portland and “Portlandia” blurred; it turns out one of the suspected rabbit thieves was an extra on the TV show.)

As a kid, Davis hunted and fished with her family, and one summer she worked in an “intentional community,” where bakers consulted their astrological charts before baking bread. As an adult, after working at National Geographic Adventure and Saveur, she moved west in 2006 to become the food editor of Portland Monthly. There, Davis experienced — and later wrote an article about — “the tastiest cut of beef you’ve never heard of”: bavette. But when she set out to buy it, she was stymied. No butcher carried it or could even tell her where the cut was located on the cow. The chef at the restaurant where she first ate bavette couldn’t tell her exactly where on the animal it came from; nor could the guys at the meat shop, who mostly wielded their knives not to butcher an animal but to cut open boxes and pull out ready-made cuts. Eventually, she discovered that the bavette was located between the sirloin and the flank. It is known as “flap meat” in the U.S., and typically tossed into the container reserved for grind.

In 2009, in search of a deeper understanding, Davis went to France to study with an American cooking teacher named Kate Hill and to serve as an apprentice with a family of butchers and farmers named the Chapolards. She doesn’t speak French, and the Chapolards didn’t speak English, so she learned their craft through risk and repetition. She made some costly mistakes, like the time they handed her what she thought was a shoulder primal, and she cubed and skewered it, only to realize it was actually a ham. “I basically just lost them hundreds of dollars,” she recalls.