Why We Love Pigs

Among pig tales the author tells is the story of the animal’s surprising snout.

Winston Churchill  famously remarked, “I’m fond of pigs. Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig—he just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.” But as Mark Essig, author of Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History Of The Humble Pig discovered, today’s pigs have been almost completely banished from sight to industrial hog farms where they live in gestation crates, never seeing the light of day.

pig shirtPig T-Shirts

Talking from his home in Asheville, North Carolina, he teases out our long relationship with the pig; explains how the Chinese are abandoning ancient husbandry practices to satisfy the booming demand for pork, while Americans are slowly turning away from the industrially produced variety; and why a pig’s snout is one of the most complex, and delicate, organs in all of nature.

You call our long relationship with the pig “a tale of love and loathing.” Unpack that idea for us.

We have to start with how incredibly useful the pig is to humans. The pig, like a person, is an omnivore. They’ll eat corn in a field, they’ll eat garbage on city streets, your kitchen waste or acorns in forests, even seashells on beaches. They’re also self-sufficient. You can pretty much turn them loose into the woods and they will take care of themselves. They’re good at fighting off predators.

Maybe most remarkably of all, they reproduce so quickly. A cow gestates for about nine months and gives you one calf. A sow gestates for just four months and gives you eight, twelve, or even more piglets. Each will grow to a weight where you can slaughter them very quickly. So, if you wanted to produce a large amount of meat quickly, the pig was the animal for you. Its other advantage was that it cured so well. You could apply some salt and some smoke to pork and you’d get bacon or ham, whereas, cured beef and mutton tended not to be so palatable.

That’s the love side of the equation. The loathing side has to do primarily with point number one: their omnivorous diet. Because a pig will eat anything, it means it eats unsavoury things such as dead animals, rotting garbage, and even human faeces. Particularly among people who are concerned with the ritual purity of their religions, pigs have been considered a loathsome creature despite their usefulness.

See more Pig T-Shirts at AnimalShirt.net