Technical Abstract: Animal manure represents a significant portion of the total sustainable U.S. renewable energy sources that can serve as a bioenergy feedstock in thermochemical conversion processes. The process of slow pyrolysis or carbonization promotes the conversion of animal manure like swine manure into charcoal. The kinetics of the thermal decomposition play an important role in design and operation of animal manure carbonation. In this paper, the carbonizing kinetics of swine solids taken from different treatment stages were investigated with a thermogravimetric analyzer. Compared to their biologically stabilized counterpart (lagoon sludge) with an activation energy of 160 kJ mol-1, the activation energies for fresh swine solid samples such as homogenized flushed manure and dewatered solids were much lower between 92 and 95 kJ mol-1. Compared to the first order cellulose decomposition, the pyrolytic decomposition of the swine manures were more complex with the reaction orders varying at 3.7 and 5.0. The two different mathematical methods employed in this paper yielded the identical values of E and A, confirming the validity of these methods.