Perhaps you should see them being cleaned. My cousin used to clean them when I was little. She had this big, "
double, double, toil and trouble" style black pot and I still distinctly remember her reaching into the oh-so-recently-removed-from-the-pig chitlins. The guts, wrapped around her hand and forearm looked like the gloves worn by a
proctologist before he . . . you know. Anyway, I saw her reach in, and grip a dark mass, which she gradually pulled from within the recesses of the intestines towards the light. I don't remember actually seeing the crap after it had been removed. I ate them anyway.
Chitlins were almost always served boiled in my family, with hot sauce, a side of collard greens and hot water cornbread. Smelled absolutely awful. You will find chitlins much more common among black people in the South or one generation removed from it, as blacks were too poor to afford choice cuts of meat, but would be given the guts for free or dirt cheap, and it is good source of protein when you have limited access to better ones. My granddaddy probably could not get a good supply of tofu in the Mississippi Delta in 1935.