A Leave of Absence

Although I admit that I haven't been the most regular poster recently, I can now say with confidence that I know I won't be posting for the next month or so, as I'll be traveling quite a bit. As always, there will be lots of pig-related news that I'll miss. Just this weekend, for example, news broke (again) over the controversy (again) over the U.S. Army's shooting of live pigs in medical drills. A spokesman for the military said  "It's to teach Army personnel how to manage critically injured patients within the first few hours of their injury." A representative of PETA responded that "Shooting and maiming pigs is as outdated as Civil War rifles." You can find the AP story here. More at the end of the summer...

Salon's Pork Week

Salon.com has been running a series of pig-related stories this week under the broader heading Pork Week. The week began with an essay called "Bacon Mania" by Sarah Hepola that sought to explain American's current fascination with bacon. On Tuesday, in "Belly of the Beast," Rebecca Traister described how she has started to cure her own bacon. Today, the entry is a video about Veritas Farms in New Paltz, New York, where they raise Gloucestershire Old Spot and Large Black pigs. The video "Not the Other White Meat" by Caitlin Shamberg and Rebecca Traister, is quite lovely in that the pigs seem quite happy to be pigs. Just be sure to turn the volume down at the start, as the clip is prefaced by an incredibly loud and irritating vodka ad.

It will be interesting to see what else they discuss in this "Pork Week." So far the stories have been interesting but fairly light, perhaps because they seem to take it as a given that Salon readers are familiar with the industrial production of pork and are looking for natural, free range and do-it-yourself alternatives.

Pigs and the Floods in Iowa, Part 2: Rescue!

An update about the Iowa floods from your occasional blogger (sorry about that--things have been a bit crazy. I'll try to get more up on the site before I'm far away starting in a couple of weeks).

A consortium of animal welfare groups helped rescue some pigs stranded by the floods in Iowa. You can find a YouTube video summarizing their efforts here. My favorite part was watching the volunteers work to get one of the pigs into the truck that will take it to a Farm Sanctuary farm.

You can find out more about this pig rescue effort courtesy of Kinship Circle, which has a Flickr page here (where the above photo by Molly Wald of the Best Friends Animal Society came from) with lots of links to news articles and places where you can donate to both Farm Sanctuary's Emergency Pig Rescue Fund and Kinship Circle Animal Disaster Aid Network. Sure looks like they're doing good work out there, work that is deserving of our support.