The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge!

Pigs in the Supreme Court

2012-01-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports (here) on Monday's Supreme Court decision that unanimously struck down a California law that prevented the slaughter of non-ambulatory animals. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion, which held that the Federal Meat Inspection Act (a result, in part, of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle back at the start of the twentieth century) preempted the state law. Kagan's opinion focused on pigs, with the justice calculating that between 100,000 and one million pigs annually become unable to walk after being delivered to slaughterhouses. Under the California law--one prompted by a Humane Society of the United States undercover investigation of animals being kicked, dragged, and prodded to slaughter--these "downer animals" would have to be immediately euthanized and not killed for consumption. The Supreme Court's decision puts paid to the idea, put forth by U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, in support of the California law, that "States are free to decide which animals may be turned into meat." The current system, in which federal meat inspectors decide what is done with "downers," remains in place. By the way, the USDA estimates that over 28 million hogs will be slaughtered in the first quarter of 2012 in the United States.

Smithfield, NAFTA, and Mexico

2012-01-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

David Bacon has a long investigative piece (here) in the January 23rd issue of The Nation that shows the implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for farmers in Veracruz, Mexico. Although you wouldn't know it from the title--"How U.S. Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration"--the entire essay focuses on transformations in the North American pork industry. In short, when NAFTA opened up Mexican markets to pork imports from U.S. companies like Smithfield, Mexican pork prices dropped 56 percent and approximately 4,000 Mexican pig farms had to shut down, displacing workers and devastating local economies. This in turn fueled migration to the U.S., both illegal and legal through the H2-A visa program that allowed U.S. agricultural employers to bring workers into the country on employment contracts. Ironically, many of these Veracruzano pig farmers and slaughterhouse workers wound up in North Carolina, where they got jobs in Smithfield's Tar Heel slaughterhouse.

Bacon's well-researched article looks at efforts to unionize the Tar Heel plant and the anti-immigrant climate and crackdowns by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that have subsequently driven many of these Mexican workers from North Carolina. The photo above, one that accompanies the on-line version of Bacon's article, is of a market in North Carolina named for and catering to these Mexican migrants, although many of these businesses have lost customers as they have fled the state.

Although it is less central to the article, Bacon also examines the environmental and economic effects of large scale pig farming operations in Mexico, especially those at the plant known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico in Veracruz's Perote valley, one now owned and operated by Smithfield. Throughout he is interested in activism on both sides of the border dedicated to improving people's living and working conditions, activism that has to be transnational because it is responding to global trade and transnational corporations. Overall, this is a great read and contains material I wish I'd been able to include in PIG, although I do tell similar stories about the implications of the expansion of industrial-scale pig farming for local communities and traditions in North America and throughout the globe.

Nicknames of the States, 1884

2012-01-10T16:17:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my colleague Oliver for tipping me off about this Boing Boing post (here) about H.W. Hill & Co.'s 1884 "Nicknames of the States," which features pigs enacting, well, the nicknames of the states. The original is at the Library of Congress (here) where I found a number of excellent images for my book Pig, but not this one. The details here are amazing, as are the many (often forgotten) state nicknames. Hill & Co. manufactured and sold farm equipment, including rings for hog's snouts to prevent rooting.

Pigs in Japan's Radiation-Exclusion Zone

2012-01-03T17:59:00.000-08:00

A student e-mailed me a link (here) to a collection of photographs by AP photographer David Guttenfelder, sent by National Geographic to the nuclear exclusion zone around Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Among the resulting and haunting images Guttenfelder took of this abandoned area (abandoned by humans, that is) was this one, of a hog taking a nap after a meal in a feed store. There are other images of pigs in this Boston.com "The Big Picture" feature, including one of a hog taking a nap in a puddle in the middle of the street. Clearly people were evacuated without much thought for the welfare of their animals. Guttenfelder's photos were taken in late June 2011, so it is not clear what life is like for these abandoned hogs, if indeed they are still living.

Jonas Laberg's Marzipan Pig

2011-12-23T15:55:00.000-08:00

Jonas Laberg has created this marzipan pig for the holidays, but even he thinks it "turned out a bit too evil-demon-from hell-y" to give to the little girls (five and seven years old) it was originally intended for. It's made of 10kg or marzipan. For more images and some fascinating discussion in the comments, see the creator's blog.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Swimming With Pigs in the Bahamas

2011-12-11T17:10:00.001-08:00

I have occasionally blogged about swimming pigs, but they seem to be back in the news, as several colleagues sent me links to a recent video on Huffington Post about a beach known as "pig beach" on Big Major Spot Island. There were several 2009 articles about this phenomenon, including one in the Telegraph (here). The chance to swim with these pigs has proven so alluring that it is now included in official Bahamas tourism information (here) where this image appeared. If you'd like to see video, there are several YouTube options taken by vacationers staying at or near the the Staniel Cay Yacht Club, which is close to Big Major Cay in the Exumas. Check out this one (where the pigs are lured by the promise of apple cores) and this one in which the pigs swim out to a boat looking for food but are left to fend on their own.

Pig Wings?

2011-12-03T10:07:00.001-08:00

Perhaps the perfect testimony to the transformation of modern pork is the "discovery" of the Pig Wing, a two-ounce piece of pork cut from the fibula of a ham shank. Once upon a time people presumably understood that a ham had a bone in it, one often used to flavor soups and stews once the ham was carved and eaten. But because consumers expressed a preference for the spiral-sliced and boneless hams that were marketed to them by the industry as more convenient meat, pork processors started removing the shank before processing, creating the possibility for the return of the repressed as a new product to market.

The food writer John T. Edge of, among other things, the Southern Foodways Alliance, wrote a great article on this development in his recent "United Tastes" column for The New York Times (here) on November 30th in the "Dining" section, where I learned that a big challenge has been coming up with a more pleasant sounding name for these ham shanks. Already in play are "pork hammers," "sluggers," squealers, and, of course, "Pig Wings." Look for them to perhaps be one of the breakthrough pork products in the next year or two.

I was particularly pleased with the illustration by Xaquín G.V. (above) that accompanied Edge's article, as it serves as a reminder that ham comes from pig, a point one wouldn't think would need to be made much anymore, but that given the incredible modern disconnection between our meat and its sources in living animals (a subject I discuss in both PIG and in my contribution to the special issue of Antennae on pigs, downloadable as a pdf here), perhaps this was indeed "news" to some folks.

Matthew Herbert, One Pig

2011-10-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

The electronic artist Matthew Herbert's new album is called One Pig, and it samples sounds recorded from the life of one pig from birth through consumption on the dinner plate. He has described the album as a meditation on "the drama and the melancholy of nurturing animals to slaughter them to eat." He adds, in an interview with Quietus (here), "My intention was to understand the consequences of that decision and to witness the whole process, and in doing so I wanted to amplify the quite explicit but often entirely invisible friction that's constantly surrounding us between things we do and the consequences of our actions."

I have only listened to the album once so far, but found it quite interesting and thought that parts of it were quite moving, although it may wind up more significant as a project then as a listening experience one returns to again and again. We'll see, I guess.

If you aren't willing to spring for a copy of the album just yet, you can listen to a stream of the album on The Guardian website here. An early (and positive) review of the album via Pitchfork can be found here.

A Question of Scale

2011-10-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

Although we all know that pigs are primarily raised to produce pork, we often forget the scale of this enterprise, especially when we think about the cultural pig, the "pigs of the imagination" as I call it in the book. So, as a reminder, here's the latest update on U.S. pig meat production last month, courtesy of the USDA's National Agriculture Statistics Service (full report in pdf format here):

U.S. pig meat production totaled 1.95 billion pounds in September 2011, up 4% from September 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hog slaughter totaled 9.69 million head, up 4% from September 2010. The average live weight was unchanged from 2010 numbers, at 270 pounds.

Pig Thefts in the Midwest

2011-09-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

Given the currently high price for hogs, there has been a rash of thefts of pigs in the upper midwest, particularly in Minnesota. Monica Davey has the details in today's New York Times here. The photo comes from the article and is by Allen Brisson-Smith.

Out Now: PIG

2011-09-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

Out today, at long last: PIG. Available at Amazon here: http://goo.gl/S6y6B

Farmer Jones' Pigs

2011-06-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

I have been on the road, and while at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. I was able to examine and play with this lovely board game from the last third of the nineteenth century. It is called Farmer Jones' Pigs and was produced by McLoughlin Bros.

The goal of the game is to move all three of your pigs from the barn to the cornfield, avoiding the farmer and his dogs (which can send you back to the pen) and not getting too delayed at the pond or garden. You spin this lovely spinner to advance the pigs:

Here are some of the delightful pig tokens on the board:

I was fortunate enough to be able to play a while with Tracy, one of the staff at the AAS. The game has held up pretty well, although it seemed to have one major glitch: if you spun a "two" on the very first spin you would advance all the way to the end via a seemingly endless series of "go to" spaces. Once finished, one simply needed to spin another "two" to get that pig into the cornfield.

Overall, though, I found the game delightful and was left wishing I had seen it on an earlier visit to Worcester so that I could have included an illustration of it in PIG. Perhaps I'll be able to use it in my next pig project...

Li Songsong, Pig Years at Pace Gallery, New York

2011-06-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

LI SONGSONG, Pig Years, 2010, oil on aluminum panel, 380 × 520 cm. Courtesy the Pace Gallery, New York.

My friend Lisa was just at the Pace Gallery in New York City, where there is an exhibit of the recent work of Beijing-born artist Li Songsong. This painting, Pig Years, is perhaps best described in Irina Makarova's review (here) of the show for ArtAsiaPacific. She writes:

Pig Years (2010), at 12 feet in height, is a gargantuan, multi-hued painting made of four separate panels—with each panel consisting of overlapping layers of smaller panels—attached together by aluminum plates. The panels, with their overlapping layout and sea of clashing colors (varying shades of gray, yellow and blue), appear as though they would not come together as one image. But upon stepping back from the painting, the content emerges: a massive pile of pigs that are heaped together like a mountain of rocks.
Li manages to capture the feeling of trying to recall a memory, which, with the passing of time, is reconfigured or blurred, and becomes an amalgamation of associated senses, patches of other memories and shadows of the original. Just as our perception of people, places and ideas are based on sensory experiences, which are overlaid and bound together to form memories, so are Li’s paintings, in which multiple panels, grids, layers and colors come together as one integrated image.

If you happen to be able to make it to New York City, it sure sounds like this is worth seeing in person, as this reproduction can't possibly convey a sense of the size and detail of Li's work.

Wild Pigs in San Diego County

2011-06-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

The L.A. Times had an article a few days ago (here) about the growing problem posed by wild pigs in San Diego County, California and the joint efforts of the Forest Service and two Native American tribes, the Barona band of Mission Indians and the Viejas band of Kumeyaay Indians, to do something about the problem. The article notes that it is unclear where these wild-living pigs (a term I came to prefer from reading the literature on this issue globally in working on Pig) came from but that proposed efforts to eradicate them have proven quite controversial. We might just be headed for a reprise of the debate over the mass extermination of wild-living pigs on Santa Cruz Island, a subject I discuss at length in Pig. The above image comes from the L.A. Times article, credited to the California Department of Fish and Game.

Ai Weiwei's "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads" (2009)

2011-05-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

Ai Weiwei's "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads" (2009) was officially dedicated yesterday. The twelve bronze statues, each representing a symbol from the Chinese zodiac, can be seen at the Pulitzer Fountain, located at Park Ave South and Fifth Avenue, New York City. Mr. Ai was not present at the dedication, as he was detained by the Chinese government back in April for his criticism of the Communist party. The New York Times has an article about the dedication and the calls for Mr. Ai's release here. There is also a review of the exhibition by Roberta Smith in today's paper that you can find here. These sculptures will be touring the United States, visiting Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, and Pittsburgh in the next year or so. Apparently there is another set on display in London.

Jennie Cell, Butchering Day (ca. 1955)

2011-05-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a while since I last updated this blog, which I started in order to share and keep track of interesting material as I worked on my contribution to the Reaktion Books "Animal" series. I am now in the final stages of working on PIG, which will appear in print this summer after a long gestation. A lot of material from this blog made it into the book, but given the immensity of the human-pig relationship and the small size of the Reaktion "Animal" series books, there's obviously a lot that was left out. I was just at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where I discovered a lovely piece of folk art that would have been a perfect illustration for the book. This illustration by Jennie Cell (1905-1988) depicts a scene from everyday life that would have been quite familiar in many social environments throughout the world--traditional hog butchering and meat preparation. Her Butchering Day (ca. 1955) is the first of what I am sure will be many images that I wish I had found in time.

Pigs and the Ebola Virus

2009-01-30T12:01:00.000-08:00

For those of you obsessed with worst-case scenarios, the New York Times ran a story (here) on January 23, 2009 about the confirmation of the transmission of the Ebola virus from a pig to its human pig handler in the Philippines. While this strain of the virus, Ebola Reston, is not dangerous to humans, the development is potentially troubling because humans are in contact with pigs much more often than they are with monkeys and apes, the known hosts of the Ebola virus and the vectors for the spread of hemorrhagic fever in Africa. Ebola Reston is normally a monkey virus; scientists think that it was spread to the pigs by fruit bats. The article indicates that scientists aren't particularly worried about this news. As one expert on pathogens noted, "It's probably a rare event that pigs get infected."

Bacon Explosion

2009-01-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

I suppose it's an index of how busy I have been that I failed to notice that a recipe for something called the "Bacon Explosion" has been sweeping the internet. Thanks to a piece in Wednesday's New York Times food section by Damon Darlin (here), I now feel up to date. The "Bacon Explosion"--two pounds of pork sausage wrapped in two pounds of bacon--was created by Jason Day and Aaron Chronister of the Kansas-based BBQ competition team Burnt Finger BBQ. It contains about 5000 calories and 500 grams of fat, and is either something that will make your mouth water or turn your stomach in disgust. The NYT article is largely dedicated to the mechanics of the recipe's spread throughout the country via the internet and text messaging. More germane for my purposes, of course, is the recipe itself, which reflects both the surging popularity of bacon and a carnophallic backlash to vegetarians, the health conscious, and friends of animals.

The image of the "Bacon Explosion" on the smoker comes from the bbqaddicts.com website where the recipe first appeared. The NYT also has lots of instructional photos and video in case you want to make one of these for Sunday's Super Bowl.

Why (Domesticated) Pigs are Pink

2009-01-28T09:26:00.000-08:00

According to a recent article reporting on the work of geneticist Greger Larson, pigs developed their bright coat colors after domestication. When you think about it, this is really a no-brainer, as the coats of wild pigs and boar provide camouflage in the forest, and humans are the ones that created "breeds" that reflected what looked good to them over the long process of domestication. Accordingly, as Larson notes, the brightly colored coats reflect "the real human penchant for novelty."

The study does reveal in detail the mechanism for changes to coat color: mutations to the gene melanocortin receptor-1 (MC1R). These mutations account for pigs that are black, or pink, or spotted, all colors and patterns that would have a hard time surviving in the wild. Interestingly, a pink pig doesn't produce any melanin, making pink a "default" color.

Today's picture is one of my own, of wild hogs corralled at the Ocmulgee Wild Hog Festival in Abbeville, Georgia. These suckers would be hard to spot in the woods, that's for sure. The New Scientist article summarizing work published in PL0S Genetics can be found here.

Pigs and Politics II: The Pork Barrel

2008-10-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

While most of the talk this presidential election cycle has been about "earmarks" (itself a term related to agriculture in that an "earmark" is made to show ownership of cattle, pigs and sheep), what's really being argued over is traditional "pork barrel" politics. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of the term--spending used to benefit constituents of a given politician in return for votes or campaign contributions--to the 1870s, when references to "pork" were common in Congress. It cites the Defiance (Ohio) Democrat in 1873 for first referring to the "many previous visits to the public pork-barrel." The term is decidedly American in origin.

Today's photo (found on Flickr) was taken by Bill Barber at Yorktown and depicts soldiers' rations: salt pork, beans, and hard tack. It's amazingly difficult to find a photo of an actual barrel of pork, as that means of preservation which led to so much interesting language ("scraping the bottom of the barrel" and so on) has long disappeared.

Pigs & Politics

2008-10-07T13:01:00.000-07:00

I was out of town when the whole pointless "lipstick on a pig" controversy (I hate to use a word that actually dignifies what was one of the more banal moments in contemporary American politics) occurred. By means of making up the omission, there is a brief post on Gawker (here) that was sent to me by a number of friends. It addresses some of the recent ways the epithet "pig" has been hurled by and at women...

La Piganino

2008-10-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

This 1867 lithograph by an unknown artist satirizes amateur musicians and the contemporary vogue for all things Italian, according to David Tatham, who included this image from his personal collection in his wonderful The Lure of the Striped Pig: The Illustration of Popular Music in America, 1820-1870 (Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, 1973). His book is full of amazing images, many of which would be of great utility for the nineteenth-century cultural historian. In fact, I'm planning on getting a lot of use out of them in my American Cultural History course this semester. But back to La Piganino--what an amazing image! The fine folks at Porkopolis (here) note that this mock instrument is part of a long tradition of animal instruments, including the Cat Piano (image and story here). Note the musical pig in the picture in the background. More on the pig and whistle, and for that matter, the whole Dedham Striped Pig controversy, later...

The Learned Pig's Return

2008-10-01T17:51:00.000-07:00

My six week trip to Alaska and the Yukon turned into a longer absence from this blog than I had anticipated. I missed a bunch of pig news in the interim, but, I suppose, most of you heard of the pig in Australia named Bruce (left) who aggressively kept an elderly woman trapped in her house for ten days. When she tried to drive the pig away with a broom, the pig simply "snapped it in half with his mouth." If you missed this "when animals attack" story there is a good version here via MSNBC.

A Leave of Absence

2008-07-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-07-07T17:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Pigs and the Floods in Iowa, Part 1: Shooting Hogs on the Levee

2008-06-25T10:26:00.001-07:00

Continuing with the pigs and disasters theme that seems to have dominated the few posts I've managed to get up this summer (sorry 'bout that), one of my grad students e-mailed me an article about what has been happening to the pigs in the midwestern areas that have been ravaged by floods. The AP article (here) began by talking about the pigs that were shot by Des Moines County sheriff's deputies on Tuesday, June 17th. The pigs apparently swam away from their flooded farm and scrambled on top of a levee. Fearing that the pigs' hooves would poke through sandbags or worse, that they would root in the levee, the animals were shot. The county's emergency management commission chairman, LeRoy Lippert, tried to preempt any outrage about this, noting that the killing of pigs "happens every day. My gosh, that's what slaughterhouses do--that's how we get bacon and pork chops. It's just one of the casualties of the flooding situation." It will be interesting to see what the effect of the flooding in the midwest will have been on the region's hog farms.

Today's image is of pigs in the sea at Big Majors Cay in the Bahamas. Not quite the right image for this story, I know, but then no one took photos that I've been able to find of the pigs left behind as roadkill on the levee.

Pigs and the Earthquake in Sichuan

2008-05-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

To follow up on the previous post, pigs also died in the hundreds of thousands in the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan province in China on May 12th. According to an article entitled "Economic Tremors of Chinese Disaster" by Leo Lewis in the Times (UK) Online (here), about 1 in 10 pigs in China is produced in Sichuan, making it the nation's biggest producer of pigs. He notes that an estimated 800,000 pigs have died as a result of the quake, but that such a loss only represents less than 1% of the province's pork production.

There may be some effect on pork prices, which have doubled in China over the past year already. According to a great overview on the NBC World News Blog by researcher Ed Flanagan (here), about 65% of the 110 pounds of meat the average Chinese eat each year is pork, which has made the pork price increases--tied to an outbreak of PRRS ("blue ear disease"), underproduction as a result of low prices in 2006, poor weather, the use of feedstuffs in ethanol production, and the greater demand for meat as a result of growing incomes--quite burdensome. As it turns out, supply can't meet demand, even in a country that has half a billion pigs.

Today's image accompanied an L.A. Times article (here) by Don Lee called "Fallout from China's Quake Could Include Inflation," which is also worth a read. According to the article, Liu Feng, a salesman at a pork-processor located about 130 miles from the epicenter of the quake, noted that "we cannot purchase pigs" due to damage to the region's infrastructure. Apparently the Sichuan Gaojin Food Co. normally bought 1,000 hogs per day, but as Feng complained, "Today we raised the price twice and the most we got was 200 pigs."

Tornado Hits Hog Farm in Oklahoma

2008-05-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

By now probably everyone who has a television has seen the footage of the massive tornado that ripped through Oklahoma on Saturday, destroying three barns at a hog farm near the town of Lacey. If you missed the story, you can read the AP version here. If you are in to weather porn, check the raw video footage here.

I was skeptical of the claim on CNN last night that none of the animals were injured or killed in this twister (no humans were hurt--they took shelter in time in the farm's windowless office). There's still no solid evidence about what happened to all the pigs in this natural disaster, but there's a good article here in the Enid [Oklahoma] News and Eagle that mentions the risk of starvation or dehydration of the sows and piglets in the farrowing operation at the Seaboard Foods hog farm. It would certainly be ironic if the farrowing units condemned by animal rights advocates turned out to help save the animals in this instance, as the article implies.

The photo to the left of a sow and her piglets at the destroyed barn comes from the AP and was shot by Enid News and Eagle photographer Bonnie Vculek. Sadly, here is another photo (here) that clearly shows that some of the sows didn't make it. While the damage has been roughly quantified in the millions of dollars, I'll be surprised if we actually hear about the animals lost. We'll see, I suppose.

Hog Genius on National Geographic's "Wild"

2008-05-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

The National Geographic Channel has produced an installment of their series Wild called "Hog Genius." I'm not sure when it will next air, or even if it has appeared yet, but you can find some great photos (including the one to the left of pigs walking through the snow) and a couple of video clips here on the Wild website.

One clip shows a video game-based experiment in porcine intelligence at Penn State. In this experiment, pigs need to use a joystick to move a ball into an area on the screen for a food treat. They do this quite well, even as the area shrinks. The other clip demonstrates the problem-solving and performance skills of Vietnamese Pot-Bellied Pigs. It features a 10 month old pig at Top Hogs in Denver and Nelly from Valentine's Performing Pigs. If I get better information about a forthcoming air date I'll let you know. It's certainly worth a look on the web, however.

FDR on the Proper Use of Pigs

2008-05-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

At the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money the other day the "Presidential Statement of the Day" came from Franklin Roosevelt in a speech to farmers in Washington, D.C. on May 14th, 1935. As part of his response to the concern that food needed for relief may have been destroyed wastefully, he noted:

The crocodile tears shed by the professional mourners of an old and obsolete order over the slaughter of little pigs and over other measures to reduce surplus agricultural inventories deceive very few thinking people in this country, and least of all the farmers themselves.

I have always supposed, ever since I was able to play around, that the acknowledged destiny of a pig is sausage, or ham, or bacon, or pork. It was in those forms--as sausage, ham, bacon, or pork--that millions of pigs were consumed by vast numbers of needy people who otherwise would have had to do without them.

I'll have to dig a bit to see what this specific issue was about. I'd note here that the timing of the LGM post happily coincides with the passing of the Farm Bill by the Senate yesterday. While I'll eventually post separately about what this iteration of the farm bill means for America's pork producers and pigs, for now, the NPPC (National Pork Producer's Council) seems pleased, describing the bill as "favorable" to the industry. You can find their press release here.

Drunken Pig Monument in Ukraine

2008-05-15T15:57:00.001-07:00

In a story that almost seems too good to be true, a monument to a drunken pig is supposedly to be unveiled in the town of Komsomolsk in central Ukraine. It will portray a pig lying on its belly with its snout in a trough and will be located adjacent to a cafe. According to the sculptor, Oleg Ryabo, "This monument symbolizes those people who make pigs of themselves by drinking far too much." Thanks to Dave from the more-consistently posting Axis of Evel Knievel for the reference to the Russian News and Information Agency (here).

Roger Waters Has Lost His Pig (Again)

2008-04-29T20:06:00.001-07:00

The big news from the Coachella Festival out here in California over the weekend wasn't the return of Portishead but the disappearance of Rogers Waters' inflatable pig. The giant flying pig, which goes back to Pink Floyd's stage shows in support of their Animals record (1977), broke free from its tethers and drifted off. It's not only recognizable because it's a gigantic pig, but because it says "Don't be led to the slaughter. Vote Democrat November 2nd" on it. It also has a check mark next to "Obama" on the bottom. When I first heard that, I wondered if the pig really was Waters' pig--perhaps it was a marketing stunt. There's a good account of the show and the pig here via a blog at Entertainment Weekly (a better source than Reuters this time). Either way, the festival organizers are offering a great reward for its return: $10,000 and four tickets to the festival for life.

By the way, this isn't the first time the pig has floated away. While shooting the cover for Animals at Battersea Power Station it also got loose. See my earlier blog entry, with video, here.

UPDATE: The pig has apparently been found (here). It landed in at least two pieces at the Hideaway Golf Club in La Quinta, California. No word whether the finders will want to use their festival tickets, but hey, the money's really good in these recessionary times.

"Big Idiot Buys a Pig"

2008-04-24T18:02:00.000-07:00

Although it's not obvious from this blog, I have a deep and abiding interest in old and strange music. My favorite recent release in this vein is Dust-to-Digital's Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days, drawn from the extensive collections of old 78's of Seattle residents Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor. There are all kinds of songs and performances from all over the world on this set, including He Zemin & Huang Peiying's "Big Idiot Buys a Pig" (ca. 1930), which may be one of the greatest song titles ever. I have no idea what's going on in this 78, nor do I know how to add music tracks to this blog, but thankfully the review of Victrola Favorites at Dusted Magazine has this track available for folks to listen to via a stream. So click here and start listening, then go out and pick up this amazing release.

The "Everything's Better with Bacon" Flickr Pool

2008-04-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

My friend Sean e-mailed me concerning a photo pool on Flickr about bacon. You too can fritter away valuable time by perusing the tons of photos in the "Everything's Better with Bacon" group (here). There are over 1400 "members" contributing almost 2300 images of bacon and bacon-related items to this Flickr site. The photo to the right is from (and of) Mr. Bacon Pants, who tells the tale (here) of his participation in the Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival, held in Des Moines, Iowa last month on National Pig Day. There is a Des Moines Register article previewing this event as well that you can find here.

Jimmy Buffett's Swine Not?

2008-03-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

It has been a crazy semester, which has meant that I have not been as attentive to this blog as I would have liked. Now, at least, it's time for our much-needed spring break, and as we're headed to Key West for some of it, I figured I'd mention the forthcoming novel by Jimmy Buffett called Swine Not?, which tells yet another story of a pig in the city.

Buffett's novel, apparently based on a true story, concerns the adventures of Rumpy, a pot-bellied pig brought to a New York City residence hotel by his Tennessee family (more information here if you'd like it). Helen Bransford provides the illustrations for Buffett's story, including the image above of Rumpy with some of his pigeon friends. If you happen to be a Parrothead (I am not a Buffett fan, actually, though I've been to the Keys enough to kinda see the appeal) it might be worth picking up when it's released in May.

The more interesting question is why the urban pig seems so appealing (think of the Eloise books, Babe: Pig in the City, etc.). Today these texts play off the rural-urban and nature-culture dichotomies, but once upon a time pigs were ubiquitous in the streets of cities and there was nothing romantic about that at all. More on that later once I've found a way to scan some of the illustrations about the perils of pigs in the streets from an early nineteenth-century children's book I've found.

"Great Movie Pigs" Slideshow

2008-03-08T15:04:00.000-08:00

I was contemplating a post on the rising popularity of pigs in movies (the most recent appears in the ads for Disney's College Road Trip), when I happened to look at today's L.A. Times online and found a great feature and slideshow put together by Susan King called "Great Movie Pigs" (here).

The famous pigs depicted on the site include Babe, Napoleon, Porky, Miss Piggy, Hamm, and Wilbur, among others. King's feature is accompanied by a few quotes from animal trainer James P. Warren (he's worked on Charlotte's Web and College Road Trip, among many, many other films), who notes that "If you look at all of those films, they tend to use smaller pigs. They go for the cute look--the little pug nose. I think they are so animated when the move and how they look at the camera. What they can offer is so much, it's very appealing."

Breaking the Association of Pigs and Truffles

2008-03-02T09:41:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times ran a nice article (here) this morning about the spike in truffle prices in France, largely due to a drought that has reduced the size of the annual harvest. The article is accompanied by a picture of a truffle hunter and his dog, not his pig. It goes on to note, sadly, that "truffle-hunting pigs--bigger, hungrier and harder to manage--have largely fallen out of favor." Perhaps this headline in The Onion--"Airport Security Pig Finds Concealed Truffles"--was a sign of the times. For a brief history of why pigs have traditionally proved so good at finding truffles, see this 1982 article by Walter Sullivan in the New York Times.

Pigs and the Blood Thinner Heparin

2008-02-29T20:59:00.001-08:00

My mom had a knee-replacement surgery last year and one of the drugs she was given to prevent clots was called heparin. She had to be tested regularly to make sure she didn't have too high or too low of a dose. I hadn't given the medicine much thought until I read this morning's New York Times, which had a front-page article by Walt Bogdanich headlined "Blood Thinner Might Be Tied to More Deaths" (here). My mom is not taking heparin at the moment, but I was still interested. To my surprise, I learned that most heparin is derived from pig intestines. In fact, as Bogdanich notes, some of the recent problems associated with heparin perhaps stem from the unregulated Chinese family workshops that scrape the mucous membrane from pig's intestines then bake it into a crude form of heparin that is later refined. Near the end of his article, Bogdanich writes "the Chinese heparin market has been in turmoil over the last year, as pig disease has swept through the country, depleting stocks, leading some farmers to sell sick pigs into the market and forcing heparin producers to scramble for new sources of raw material." Not all heparin comes from pigs, of course; much of it comes from bovine tissue as well. There have been over 400 adverse reactions to heparin, although it's not clear how many deaths have resulted, as the people receiving this anticoagulant are often awfully sick to begin with. While the health issues are obviously paramount here, I'm sure glad my mom is not a vegetarian or vegan, although if she were, how would she know about the source of this medicine and what other options might there have been?

The photo above accompanied a Wall Street Journal article "Making Heparin is a Dirty Job," which I found here. It is an interesting and kinda disgusting account of Chinese heparin factories.

Wooly Pigs in the Pacific Northwest

2008-02-28T14:55:00.000-08:00

My friend Annie in New Zealand sent me a link to the Wooly Pigs Blog, run by Heath and Zuzana Putnam, now of Spokane, Washington. They have imported a herd of wooly Mangalitsa pigs and raise them in the "European style"--outside, with no drugs, hormones, chemicals and eating a natural diet. You can read more about their operation and the pork they produce for sale to consumers and high-end restaurants here.

I first found out about them via a blog entry on the topic "Are we nice to the animals?" which you can find here. The most interesting thing I gleaned from the discussion, something I've read of elsewhere, is the independent farmer's lament that he has to use USDA-approved facilities to slaughter his animals, where the animals receive perhaps their worst treatment. Given what we've learned here in Los Angeles about the treatment of cattle at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company (see the L.A. Times article about America's largest meat recall here) I'm not surprised that they feel that way.

All in all, the Wooly Pigs websites are great reads. If eating pork is your thing, perhaps check them out.

Tigers & Piglets: An Urban Legend Explained

2008-02-26T14:55:00.000-08:00

One of my students sent me an e-mail over the break with photos of a tigress nursing piglets in little tiger costumes. According to the e-mail, forwarded under the title "A lesson in world peace among divergent cultures (and religions)," this scene took place at a zoo in California. Before the images and the "story," it reads: "Once more my faith in animals grows stronger. We could learn so much from them. Imagine!" After the photos, this version of the e-mail ends with "Now, please tell me one more time... Why can't the rest of the world get along?"

I told my student that I'd seen these before and wanted to check out the story. Thankfully, Snopes.com came to the rescue yet again, letting me know that these were real photos, but with an inaccurate description. You can read the full story here, but in brief, I received an even more recent e-mail than the one Snopes addressed; they discuss one that made the rounds in which the tigress was supposedly given these piglets as a treatment for depression after losing her own cubs. As it turns out, these images come from the Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Thailand, where this is apparently a common form of visual entertainment for zoo patrons.

There have been a lot of problems at, and concerns about this zoo: the Animal Welfare Institute has noted that this zoo has been investigated for illegally breeding and selling its tigers for use in Chinese medicines and that somewhere around 80 to 100 tigers died at the zoo due to an outbreak of avian influenza. I guess this type of creation of a story and a heavily-forwarded e-mail around an image isn't all that surprising--just look at how much has been made out of Barack Obama's decision to be a good guest on a visit to Kenya.

Le Cochon Danseur

2008-02-19T17:03:00.000-08:00

Here is a wonderful and strange film from 1907, the Pathé short "Le Cochon Danseur." According to the IMDB it should be about four minutes long; someone has edited the YouTube version down to these key moments, I suppose. I've been watching a lot of early American films lately for my cultural history course and was glad I found this one. Enjoy. For those of you fluent in French, there is a brief wikipedia article about the film here.

“I always had brains on my arms”: A Medical Mystery in Minnesota

2008-02-08T12:57:00.000-08:00

The New York Times ran an incredibly interesting (and disgusting) story about a mysterious illness striking workers at Quality Pork Processors in Minnesota. Denise Grady's piece "A Medical Mystery Unfolds In Minnesota" (here) describes an illness that ultimately struck 12 workers. A bit of epidemiological detective work led to the tentative conclusion that the thing all these workers had in common was "blowing brains," the process at the "head table" where hogs' brains are blasted out of their skulls with compressed air so that they can be barreled and sold overseas. As Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the Minnesota State Epidemiologist noted, this produces "aerosolization of brain tissue" which then created an immune system response in the workers exposed to it. The Times article is well worth reading in full. As it turns out, most of the workers are getting better now that steps have been taken to reduce the exposure to "aerosolized pig brains" and a course of treatment for the neurological symptoms has been discovered.

Image of Quality Pork Processors by Nate Howard for The New York Times.

Pig Cars and Pork-Barrel Political Protest

2008-02-01T10:06:00.000-08:00

The graphic design company Sagmeister, Inc. completed this project for True Majority (the social justice group led by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's fame). The pig-shaped van, complete with trailing piglets, compares the Pentagon budget with that for education and foreign aid, obviously advocating more funds for the latter than the former. There are a couple of great pictures of these vehicles, which light up at night, here on the Sagmeister site as well. Thanks to Lisa for finding this and sending it along.

Beer Drinking Pigs

2008-01-07T13:51:00.000-08:00

Just in time for tonight's BCS National Championship football game, which brings together pigskin and beer, a number of links to articles about pigs that enjoy drinking beer. Thanks, I think, to my student Colin for all of these. Here goes:

Beer Drinking Pigs at the Mt. Pellier Domino Club, St. Croix (here). One of the pigs can be seen at left.

Training an Apprentice Beer Drinking Pig in Tasmania (here).

Finally, there is grainy amateur video of a pig drinking beer by crushing a can of beer in its mouth here. I'm not sure where this was taken, but in some ways it seems like the setup in St. Croix.

Once again, providing the latest and greatest in porcine news...

Meatpaper Magazine

2008-01-04T14:19:00.001-08:00

I've been cleaning out the e-mail inbox lately while stranded on break in Florida and remembered that Mr. Sidetable had forwarded me an article from the New York Times that I hadn't gotten around to reading during the end of the semester craziness. The article (here) by Oliver Schwaner-Albright was about a new magazine, Meatpaper: Your Journal of Meat Culture. I haven't had the internet access to fully see what the magazine is all about, but you can find a link here. I'll be posting sporadically (as if that's not what I've been doing anyway) while in Coral Springs...

A Holiday Pig (Well, Wild Boar) Attack

2007-12-23T19:53:00.001-08:00

According to the BBC (here), a 198 pound wild boar somehow got into a clothing shop in the French city of Poitiers, charging at customers and police before being taken out. Fifteen people were evacuated from the store, which was closed for two hours. While I'm sure there are better accounts in French, which I don't read, the BBC piece notes that for some reason wild boars were being relocated in the area by forestry workers. I, of course, thought of wild hogs yesterday on the drive to Hilton Head for the holidays, as we crossed the Ocmulgee River and traversed good wild hog territory.

Good luck with your own last minute holiday shopping, everybody...

The $800 Holiday Ham

2007-12-20T17:01:00.000-08:00

The Newport News (Virginia) Daily Press ran an excellent article (here) the other day about the arrival of Jamon Iberico in time for Christmas. After years of bureaucratic wrangling, Don Harris, proprietor of LaTienda, a Spanish food importer, managed to finally get USDA regulators to sign off on the importation of these legendary hams made from free-range, black-footed Iberico hogs that are fattened on acorns.

I first heard about these pigs (and hams) in Peter Kaminsky's book Pig Perfect (2005). At $87 per pound, I guess I won't be sampling any Jamon Iberico anytime soon, although Harris notes that they are hoping to eventually sell packaged slices of this ham for regular folks. According to the article. about 100 people have put down deposits on these hams, with 300 on the list for an even better version, the "Jamon Iberico de Bellota," which should arrive next year and sell for $1500 each.

To promote Spanish artisanal pork, Harris' company has set up a website, jamon.com, which is "dedicated to the fine art of the ham." The photo above is by Philippe Desmazes, AFP/Getty Images. The caption reads "A man checks Iberian hams hanging in a drying room at the Embutidos y Jamones Fermin farm in La Alberca near Salamanca. The Spanish Jamon Iberico (Iberian ham) is the name which is given exclusively to hams from the Iberian pig breed. The secret of the tase of Iberian ham is down to the pigs diet of acorns which they live on all year round."

DIY Bacon, British-Style

2007-12-19T16:51:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Guardian featured an article by Tim Hayward (pictured above) about his efforts to cure his own bacon at home. The essay, perfect for do-it-yourself-ers, begins by noting an increase in the amount of bacon being eaten by Brits, something attributed to the emergence of "premium and organic bacon." Noting that "my granny salted pork in a council house," Hayward figures "If she could do it... then so could I." After a week of carefully tending to two kilos of boned loin from an organic Tamworth, Hayward seemed delighted with the results. It does, however, seem like a bit of work...

Neglect of a Pet Pig in Minnesota

2007-12-17T21:36:00.000-08:00

According to a report on L.A.'s KNBC.com (here), a woman in Minnesota named Michelle Schmitz is pursuing charges against another women with whom she entrusted her pot-bellied pig named Alaina Templeton (left). Apparently while in the other woman's care the pig grew from 50 pounds to 150 pounds. I'm not sure why one would expect a pig not to grow, but apparently that isn't really the issue here, for the pig-sitter left the pig's collar on, which wound up embedded in its neck, requiring surgical removal. The pet-sitter is facing a charge of animal neglect and a claim from Schmitz for the resulting $1,000 veterinary bill.

Speaking of neglect, as hopefully someone has noticed, I've fallen quite a bit behind on this blog in the last couple of weeks. Things have been a bit crazy, suffice to say. I'll try to make some progress here now that I'm finally approaching the end of the semester. Just in time for the holidays and the joys (believe it or not) of sporadic internet access. More soon, then...

Modern Marvels: The Pig on the History Channel

2007-11-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

The History Channel will be showing a program on the pig this Saturday, December 1st. According to the description of the program (here) in the "upcoming episodes" announcement,
It is said that the pig is as smart as a three-year-old human. The pancreas, heart valve and intestines of the pig have been transplanted into human bodies, yet the primary use of the pig is for food. Watch the pig transform into bacon, ham, ribs and sausage, using a high tech water knife, at Burger's Smokehouse in Missouri. Then Chef Chris Cosentino re-creates old world dishes from pig parts and culinary artisans attempt to duplicate long-vanished pork specialties like prosciutto and acorn-fed pigs.

Should be interesting.

By the way, sorry for the lag in posting. I have either been traveling, sick, or both over much of November. Once I'm back from this weekend's conference in San Diego I should be able to resume regular blogging. Best...

Pork With An Attitude in Memphis

2007-11-12T13:55:00.001-08:00

My colleague David just returned from a trip to Memphis and Nashville. On Beale Street in Memphis he snapped this photo of a great sign. Can't go wrong with "pork with an attitude," unless the place is a BBQ joint, which I'm assuming is the case...

Pork: The Catch of the Day

2007-11-09T14:37:00.000-08:00

A couple of guys fishing off of Oahu this Thursday were surprised to find a pig swimming out in the ocean. According to the story (here) from KITV4 in Honolulu, they lassoed the struggling pig and "yanked him on the boat." At the website linked above you can see a slideshow of pictures of this feral pig, who was released by the fishermen when they got back to shore. The picture at right is one they took of the scared and exhausted feral pig. What a story he or she will have to tell!

The Giant Peccary, Found at Last!

2007-11-07T17:56:00.000-08:00

My surfing pal Sean, while recovering from a recent and painful stingray bite (I guess it's really a sting, hence the name), found a Daily Mail article for me about the recent discovery of a new species of "giant wild pig" (actually a Giant Peccary) in Brazil. You can read the article here. Skin and bones from this animal were brought to a Dutch biologist, Marc van Roosmalen, who has subsequently caught the animal on film. Interestingly, the existence of this animal was somewhat known. Locals had a name for it ("Caitetu Munde," which means "great peccary which lives in pairs") and it was mentioned in an early 20th century account of the Amazon (titled White Gold) by a rubber-industry worker named John Yungjohann. Regardless, please join me in officially welcoming the Giant Peccary!

The Three Little Pigs

2007-11-06T22:00:00.000-08:00

One could spend the better part of a day just tracking down and reading the apparently countless number of versions of The Three Little Pigs that are out there. To get a sense of how many there are, just try a search at amazon.com sometime or browse your local children's bookstore.

My sense is that there are three main categories of these books: the traditional story, postmodern revisions, and regional variations. For the traditional story, check out the Little Golden Book edition or the Disney board book (pictured left). Postmodern twists on the story include Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and Barry Moser's version, complete with tongue-in-cheek humor and innuendo for the adults stuck reading the story to their little ones. The regional variations include titles like Three Little Cajun Pigs, the bilingual Los Tres Cerditos, and The Three Little Javelinas. In case you are curious, I only own a couple versions, including my favorite, David Weisner's innovative, deconstructionist, Caldecott-award-winning The Three Pigs (pictured above), described here in an interview at his publisher's website.

Pigs, Bacon & Aesop's Fables

2007-11-05T19:44:00.000-08:00

A conjunction of several e-mails to yours truly, featuring another great pig-related tattoo, one that goes nicely with Lisa's recent submission of one of Aesop's fables:

The Pig and the Sheep

A pig found his way into a meadow where a flock of sheep were grazing. The shepherd caught him, and was proceeding to carry him off to the butcher's when he set up a loud squealing and struggled to get free. The sheep rebuked him for making such a to-do, and said to him, "The shepherd catches us regularly and drags us off just like that, and we don't make any fuss."

"Not, I dare say not," replied the pig, "but my case and yours are altogether different. He only wants you for wool, but he wants me for bacon."

"A Visit to the Republican Pig Pens," 1899

2007-10-30T12:39:00.000-07:00

My colleague Eileen pointed me to the multimedia histories available at the Ohio State University Department of History. One of the political cartoons there with pigs in it was this one, "A Visit to the Republican Pig Pens," which comes from The Verdict, a pro-Democracy and anti-McKinley paper, on 24 July 1899. Hanna is, of course, Mark Hanna, the Ohio industrialist who managed McKinley's 1896 presidential campaign. I'll leave it up to the rest of you Gilded Age historians to make sense of the rest; after all, I'm really an early 19th century guy...

This will be the last post for about a week, as I'll be traveling to give a paper at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts meeting in Portland, Maine. I'm looking forward to some real fall weather, that's for sure...

Ian Falconer's Olivia

2007-10-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

The most popular pig in children's literature in this decade has to be Olivia, Ian Falconer's strong-willed heroine of eight books. My two favorites are Olivia Saves the Circus (2001) and Olivia Starts a Band (2006). According to a 2003 article by Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today, Falconer has no good answer for why he chose a pig: "I have no idea. There seems to be a lot of pigs and ducks in kids' books. Pigs are shaped like little kids. Their bodies are smaller than their heads. Pigs are supposed to be intelligent, smarter than dogs, but they're a bit awkward. Their trotters are like little kids' arms that don't work very well yet."

The U.S. Postal Service included Olivia in a 2006 stamp series of Favorite Children's Book Animals (above). Note that two pigs made the cut, Olivia, and Wilbur from E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.

You can find a conversation with Falconer about his creation here on the Simon & Schuster site.

A Tennessee Hog Killing

2007-10-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

The Southern Foodways Alliance has an "member contributions" section online. One great contribution to it comes from Evan Hatch, who photographed the annual hog slaughtering held at Ronald Lawson’s farm in Short Mountain community near Woodbury, Tennessee, in January 2003 (here). Hatch provides a great essay on this vanishing tradition, one that draws heavily on my main source for traditional hog butchering, Eliot Wigginton's The Foxfire Book (1972). Hatch's photo to the right depicts the men scraping the hair off the hog after its scalding.

"Pigging Out and About" BBQ Tour

2007-10-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

I was taking a look at the Oxford American site (their annual music issue is out now and is a must have) and found a link to The American Table Culinary Tours, a group that leads "field trips" to important sites for American cuisine. The one that caught my eye was the September 2007 Memphis barbeque tour "Pigging Out and About" (here), led by Lolis Eric Elie, author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbeque Country and editor of Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbeque, and folks from the Southern Foodways Alliance. I imagine everyone had quite a good time. There are some excellent-looking tours of Detroit cuisine and Kentucky bourbon scheduled for 2008, by the way.

The Colonial Ham

2007-10-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

David Shields, an important and innovative literary scholar based at the University of South Carolina, has a great essay on the history of American ham called "The Search for the Cure" in the current issue of Common-Place (here), an online journal of early American history sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass.

Shield's essay traces the various means of curing hams in the colonial period, tracing the histories of "two schools of ham production: the dry-cure sect, who would increasingly view themselves as purists and traditionalists, and the wet curists, who regarded themselves as experimentalists in taste, economy, and scientific agriculture, yet whose pork brined in a barrel was the staple of the common household." It's a great read, especially for those of you interested in the history of American foodways.

Today's image comes from an on-line article by Patricia Mitchell on the history of the Smithfield ham. The image is of a circa-1930 Baltimore newspaper advertisement that features a peanut-shaped hog and Smithfield cured meats. Mitchell's essay can be found here at foodhistory.com.

A Bacon Candy Bar!

2007-10-24T10:29:00.000-07:00

Here's another product in the line of thought that says everything is better with bacon: Mo's Bacon Bar, a milk chocolate bar with chunks of Applewood smoked bacon in it. Lisa found this on Boing Boing (here), although the best description comes from the website of the manufacturer, Vosges, where the owner and chocolatier, Katrina Markoff, writes this about her invention:

Crisp, buttery, compulsively irresistible bacon and milk chocolate combination has long been a favorite of mine. I started playing with this combination at the tender age of six while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of fried bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup. In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point, for on that plate something magical happened: the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate.

You can get your own for $7.00. Let me know if any of you try it.

Arnold Lobel's Pigericks

2007-10-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

Arnold Lobel's The Book of Pigericks (1983) contains 38 limericks about pigs, framed between two semi-autobiographical limericks about an old pig with a pen who looks surprisingly like a porcine version of Arnold Lobel himself (see the cover to the right). The limericks themselves are silly, perfect for the 4-8 year olds who are the target audience. For example:

There was a rich pig from Palm Springs
Who had passions for bracelets and rings.
He displayed his collection
Around his midsection
By means of strong wires and strings.

Yet another find in my attack on the CSULB Children's Collection.

Lewis Carroll's "The Pig-Tale"

2007-10-22T12:35:00.000-07:00

California State University Long Beach has an outstanding children's literature collection, where I've been going through lots and lots of pig-related books. One pleasant surprise was the discovery of Leonard B. Lubin's 1975 adaptation of Lewis Carroll's "The Pig-Tale," which originally appeared in Sylvie and Bruno (full text here) in 1889. It concerns a pig who is grief-stricken because he cannot jump. A frog comes by and offers to teach the pig how to jump for a fee. The frog jumps easily onto an old water pump, and urges the pig to "bend your knees and take a hop." The result:

Uprose that Pig, and rushed, full whack,
Against the ruined Pump:
Rolled over like an empty sack,
And settled down upon his back,
While all his bones at once went 'Crack!'
It was a fatal jump.

The Frog winds up in a dismal mood, of course, because he would never get his fee.

Lubin's illustrations are quite charming, with the animals in formal Victorian-era costumes. The story of the pig is interspersed with verses about little birds, also nicely illustrated, if perhaps a bit too surreal and fantastic for some. I couldn't find any examples of Lubin's work on "The Pig-Tale," so y'all get an image of Lewis Carroll instead. Sorry.

Helen Hill's "Your New Pig Is Down The Road" (1999)

2007-10-15T12:46:00.000-07:00

One of my regrets is that I missed my chance to see the films of Helen Hill when they were shown at REDCAT here in Los Angeles earlier this month. Hill was an important filmmaker and activist in New Orleans who received national attention for all the wrong reasons when she was killed (and her husband wounded) in January in their home in the Marigny. The reviewer for the L.A. Weekly who previewed the REDCAT retrospective referred to Hill's 1999 film Your New Pig Is Down The Road as "exuberant, with brilliant flashes of cheerful daisies superimposed on a baby pig--a love letter [to Hill's husband, Paul Gaillunas] perhaps unlike any other." I really wish I gotten to see it. There is lovely site paying tribute to Helen Hill here that lists other upcoming screenings of her playful, homemade animated films.

Today's image is of Hill, Gaillunas, and their pet pig Rosie in New Orleans in a clever parody of the Lucky Dog carts one sees all over the French Quarter. I found it here at the site of John Porter, another Super 8 filmmaker.

All Pigs Are Beautiful

2007-10-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

Dick King-Smith has also written a children's book about the characteristics and habits of pigs called All Pigs Are Beautiful (1993). It is illustrated by Anita Jeram and is available in the U.S. from Candlewick Press. As the frontispiece notes, "There are little pigs and big pigs, pigs with long snouts and pigs with short snouts, pigs with ears that stick up and pigs with ears that flop down. But all pigs are beautiful." Several pages of the book, ideal for ages three and up, by the way, are dedicated to the story of King-Smith's beloved pig Monty. In a tacit critique of industrial agriculture, King-Smith observes that "the luckiest pigs, like Monty, live outside."

I'll be at a meeting starting tomorrow in New Orleans. I'm looking forward to getting back to a place I used to live, albeit briefly. I'll be posting again next week about my trip to Cochon and the opening of my friend David Rae Morris' exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. So see you next week. Laissez les bon temps roulez!

A "Very Small Animal" Named Piglet

2007-10-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

Piglet, one of the most famous fictional pigs in children's literature, made his debut in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh in 1926. This "Very Small Animal" lived in house in a large beech-tree with an old, broken sign next to it reading TRESPASSERS W. Throughout these stories, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard, Piglet is easily frightened, but nevertheless continues to try to be courageous. My favorite adventure of Piglet's in the original book involved his being trapped in his tree during a flood. As he notes, "It's a little Anxious to be a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water."

The first of the Disney adaptations of Winnie-the-Pooh appeared in 1966. Piglet was absent, replaced by Gopher, which, according to director Wolfgang Reitherman, was believed to have a "folksy, all-American, grass-roots image." After protests by fans, Piglet was reintroduced in 1968's Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. Disney still makes film and television programs with Pooh and Piglet, most recently Piglet's Big Movie (2003). There is a lot of Piglet merchandise out there, unsurprisingly. You can get a sense of the ongoing legal battle between the Milne family and Disney from a BBC article here.

Speaking of children's toys, I still have my childhood Steiff bear, identical to the growler model that the real Christopher Robin Milne had (see picture; Piglet is the very small animal in the middle, to the left of the stack of books). I too called my bear Pooh, although it hasn't survived in nearly as nice shape as Milne's. You can see the original toys at the New York Public Library, by the way. I must have seen the Disney films in the late 1960s, but I've largely forgotten them. I certainly prefer the original look of Ernest Shepard's Piglet and his friends.

Blue Ear Disease (PRRS) Outbreak in Asia

2007-09-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

There was a great article (here) in the Seattle Times last week about another outbreak of Blue Ear Disease among pigs in China. It begins with the story of Lo Jinyuan (pictured left), who told the reporter regarding his pigs that "before we knew something was wrong, they were all dead." Blue Ear Disease, also known as Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS), has apparently infected at least 290,000 pigs, with a still as yet unknown number of deaths. An outbreak that began in May 2006 killed an estimated one million pigs, pushing pork prices up 87 percent and contributing to rising inflation throughout China.

Most media coverage notes the difficulty of getting accurate information about this epidemic in China. It seems that the Chinese authorities have only been really forthcoming when it was alleged that they were responsible for the spread of Blue Ear Disease to Vietnam and Myanmar. According to a recent article in Reuters, China denies being the source of the outbreak in these other nations, noting that the strain of PRRS they've discovered is 93% similar to the strain that has caused problems in the U.S. since the 1980s. Indeed, PRRS has been a major problem for the American pork industry. The National Pork Board estimates that PRRS costs a whopping $560 million annually in the U.S. alone. You can learn more about this porcine virus here at The Pig Site and at the Pork Board's PRRS website.

Dick King-Smith's Recollections of Pig Farming

2007-09-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

In his autobiography Chewing the Cud (2001), Dick King-Smith recalls his experiences as an "amateurish" pig farmer at his Woodlands Farm outside of Bristol, England from the late 1940s through the 1960s. As he writes, "The pigs suffered more than the other livestock from my love of trying to do things on the cheap" (82), such as converting an old barn into a piggery and using old chicken houses as farrowing units for his sows. King-Smith kept his pigs outside in a three-acre wooded area that he skillfully fenced with wire and coffin boards. After about five years of buying pigs from Mr. Hamper, a local breeder who was only "distinguishable from his larger pigs by virtue of wearing clothes and standing on his hind legs" (87), King-Smith started breeding his own pigs. He kept up to ten Saddleback sows, all serviced by a Large White boar named Monty who came to a tragic end in 1959 after gorging on dirt and mud. He also talks of the challenges of keeping newborn piglets alive, many of whom were squashed accidentally by their mothers. Interestingly, he notes that "the times when we never lost babies were when a sow farrowed completely naturally out in the Wood" (95). Most of the pigs were sold at market, although "once a year the butcher came and killed a bacon pig for our own needs" (98).

King-Smith really enjoyed his pigs and complains about how the pig is "linked always with gluttony, obesity, and squalor" (82). He is a big believer in porcine intelligence, something one can see by looking into a pig's eye. As he concludes, "The expression in the eye of a dog is trusting, of a cat supercilious, of a cow ruminative, of a sheep, vacuous. But the look in the eye of a pig is, quite simply, knowing. Other beasts think, This human is looking at me. The pig thinks, I am looking at this human. There is all the difference in the world" (82).

King-Smith got the idea for The Sheep-Pig (1983) while tending the Guess-the-Weight-of-the-Pig stall at the village fair. As he recalls it, "I must, I suppose, have thought as I stood upon the village green, recording people's guesses and taking their money, that it was a shame that such a lovely little pink pig should end up, once he was big enough, in the deep freeze. Suppose fate had something quite different in store for him? Suppose he should go and live on a farm, with a sheep-dog as his foster mother? Suppose he should want to do what she did? He couldn't be a sheep-dog. But he could be a sheep-pig" (6-7). King-Smith's book won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction (he used the £250 prize to buy a new armchair) and later was adapted into the popular film Babe (1995) by director Chris Noonan.

The picture on the book jacket is of King-Smith with Monty, his "pig of pigs."

The Ossabaw Island Hog on the Menu

2007-09-27T13:07:00.000-07:00

My east coast pork connection e-mailed me last week with news of the Il Buco Pig Roast in New York City. The celebration included a porchetta panini, apple ricotta fritters, farmer's market panzanella, and slow-roasted Ossabaw pig. He hadn't heard of the Ossabaw pig, which is a rare breed found only on Ossabaw Island, Georgia. The folks at Slow Food USA have a page dedicated to this rare breed, which you can find here. Information can also be found at the site of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (here).

An Origami Pig

2007-09-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. has an exhibit up through June 2008 entitled Origami Now. On the main page you'll find this lovely work, "Wilbur the Piglet" (1991), by master origami artist Michael LaFosse. Thanks to Lisa for sharing this with me. And, dear readers, please accept my apologies for the gaps between postings lately. I'm back on campus again after sabbatical and have been busier than expected teaching and administrating in addition to keeping up my work on all things porcine.

A Self-Cannibalizing Ham

2007-09-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

Speaking of cuts of meat, here is another in an ongoing series of images of self-cannibalizing pigs. Thanks to Angela in Alaska for this creepy "ham," which perhaps brings the pork and the pig too close together. Perhaps that's not a bad thing, however, since English is the language that has separated the meat from the animal, a process that dates back to the Norman invasion, interestingly enough. These days the distancing obviously goes way beyond the linguistic, as very few Americans ever see a live pig anymore.

Pig Wall Art

2007-09-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

Birthday gal Lisa sent me a link to the website of Tonky, one of several companies that make high-tech stickers for your walls. They are of note because of their pig (left), which you can get in two sizes: 41" x 23" or 14" x 10". It also comes in lots of colors, although perhaps pink is the best. Note, of course, that they've chosen an illustration that emphasizes (but does not label) the cuts of meat of the pig.

David Lee's The Porcine Canticles

2007-09-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

"Loading a Boar"

We were loading a boar, a goddam mean big sonofabitch and he jumped out of the pickup four times and tore out my stockracks and rooted me in the stomach and I fell down and he bit John on the knee and he thought it was broken and so did I and the boar stood over in the far corner of the pen and watched us and John and I just sat there tired and Jan laughed and brought us a beer and I said, "John it ain't worth it, nothing's going right and I'm feeling half dead and haven't wrote a poem in ages and I'm ready to quit it all," and John said, "shit young feller, you ain't got started yet and the reason's cause you trying to do it outside yourself and ain't looking in and if you wanna by god write pomes you gotta write pomes about what you know and not about the rest and you can write about pigs and that boar and Jan and you and me and the rest and there ain't no way you're gonna quit," and we drank beer and smoked, all three of us, and finally loaded that mean bastard and drove home and unloaded him and he bit me again and I went in the house and got out my paper and pencils and started writing and found out John he was right.

Thus begins the wonderful The Porcine Canticles (1984) by Utah poet David Lee. It is a moving and funny collection of poems that I can't recommend highly enough. Pick up a copy from Copper Canyon Press now that it is back in print. You won't regret it.

Does This Ad Strike Too Close to Home?

2007-09-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

The Trojan condom company launched a new ad campaign over the summer called "Evolve." It is of note because, in the words of the corporate press release (here), it uses "animated images of pigs to humorously represent self-centered, immature, and thoughtless behavior. The 'hero' transforms from a pig to a man when he demonstrates responsibility by choosing to use condoms." The campaign is ostensibly designed to encourage self-respect among men and respect for their potential female sexual partners and uses pigs to represent that lack of humanity. The pigs for the commercial were created by Stan Winston Studios. You can find two short videos about the making of the commercial here on the main Trojan Evolve website. The ad campaign was created by the Kaplan Thaler Group. Its chief creative officer, Linda Kaplan Thaler, notes that "Some people may be initially surprised by the imagery, but we're really using the pigs as a metaphor for selfish behavior to call to attention a very important subject."

The Fox and CBS networks have refused to run this ad. According to the New York Times article "Pigs with Cellphones, but no Condoms" (here) about the controversy, Fox rejected the spot because "Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy." CBS wrote, "while we understand and appreciate the humor of this creative, we do not find it appropriate for our network even with late-night-only restrictions." Many commentators have pointed out the hypocrisy here given the often salacious nature of the programming and the ubiquitous ads for erectile dysfunction treatments that run on these networks.

Few commentators I've seen have had anything to say about the porcine content of these ads. Most have simply agreed that the campaign is funny and clever. Some bloggers have concurred with the presmise that most men are pigs, especially when young, in groups, and out drinking in bars trying to pick up women. I wonder, though, if it's the way this campaign makes the metaphor real that is ultimately creating people's discomfort. After all, it's one thing to say that men are pigs, but to show it with quasi-realistic animatronic animals perhaps mobilizes our fear and disgust about our kinship with non-human animals. As Erica Fudge notes in her wonderful book Animal (Reaktion, 2002), this kind of metaphorical use of the animal highlights the "failure of humanity" and can provoke a desire to wipe out this kinship through mastery, control, and domination. I guess we'll have to see if the sales of Trojan brand condoms rise as young people seek to bolster their human-ness.

Anxieties About Hog-Farming Odors

2007-09-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

Concern with the odor and filth that can surround hog farming operations is not limited to our own times, obviously. While you can find all sorts of ongoing conflict over concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), such as a debate this week over a permit for a 4,800 hog operation in Missouri (see the article here in the Marshall Democrat-News), it's nice to take a historical view too. The fine folks at Crooked Timber Books in Digby, Nova Scotia sent me a review of what looks like a wonderful book by Emily Cockayne entitled Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England (Yale University Press, 2007) that made a brief reference to Lewis Smart's piggery on Tottenham Court Road, whose noxious fumes "dirtied newly laundered linen and tarnished plate."

While pigs were ubiquitous in both urban and rural settings in early modern Europe, it is the scale and intensity of modern industrialized agriculture that bothers people these days. After all, more pigs means more waste and greater potential environmental impacts from hog-farming. For an overview of this conflict in one U.S. state, see Carolyn Johnsen's Raising a Stink: The Struggle over Factory Hog Farms in Nebraska (Bison Books, 2003).

A New Study of the History of Pig Domestication

2007-09-04T18:54:00.000-07:00

I hope everyone had a lovely Labor Day weekend (if you were in the U.S., of course, where the first Monday in September has been an official holiday and unofficial marker of the end of summer since 1894). I returned to the office and the first day of classes today to have several of my colleagues ask whether I'd seen this article in the L.A. Times. In "Pig study illuminates ancient human activity," Thomas Maugh reports the new findings of Greger Larson and his team, who previously demonstrated the independent domestication of pigs at as many as nine sites throughout the world. (You can find the BBC News report about that study here; about the new research here; about their work on the Pacific here).

As I understand it, additional mitochondrial DNA analysis led them to complicate the 'multiple origins of domestication' argument by showing how pigs domesticated in the Near East were taken to Europe by early farmers, who then domesticated their own wild boars which eventually replaced the imported animals. Migrating farmers then took the European pigs to the Near East where they pushed out the original domesticated animals. The researchers used these pigs, as Maugh put it, as "an excellent proxy for tracing human movements" to support the hypothesis that farming was introduced to Europe by migrating Near Eastern farmers between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. According to Maugh's excellent summary of an increasingly complicated history involving archeology and genetic research, Larson and his team now want to extend this analysis to pigs in Asia to see how far these European pigs might have been taken.

In tracking down the news of this new research I discovered that Oxford University Press will be publishing a collection of essays in November entitled Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction. You can check out the table of contents here. It will be great to have much of the complex and interesting work on domestication synthesized, although based on today's post, there seems to be more and more discovered all the time.

Image above by J. Veitch from the BBC webpage.

The Bacon & Porkchop Show

2007-08-31T08:50:00.000-07:00

Another link from the editor of Porkopolis, this time to an animal act called the Bacon and Porkchop Show. According to an article in the Greeley, Colorado Tribune (here), John Vincent's performing pot-bellied pigs have been on the road for fifteen years. Although the pig known as Bacon died last year (see photo at right of Bacon raising the American flag), he has been replaced by a rescued pig called Mudslinger. The act also features a chocolate lab and five trained parrots. Vincent apparently uses popcorn to motivate his pigs (recall that oreo cookies seem to be the universal treat in pig racing setups) and notes that "Pigs, like most animals and humans, are products of their environment. If you're nice when you train them, they'll be nice pigs." This, of course, reminds me that I still have to create a post about pig training methods going back to William Frederick Pinchbeck and his 1805 book The Expositor. You can find more information about Vincent's show at the Top Hogs, Dogs, and Parrots site.

Armando Romero's "Pork Flakes (The Gladiator)"

2007-08-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

I was visiting the Museum of Latin American Art here in Long Beach with my pal Lisa over the weekend when we saw this amazing painting as part of their exhibition "La Presencia: Latin American Art in the United States." There was no label for the painting on the wall, which was a bit strange. I looked at the exhibition catalog and didn't find it either, but did see a work in a similar style. Once at home, I got to work and finally tracked down Armando Romero's work. You can see five other of his works, most of which seem to be satires of master paintings, on artnet here. Based on what's there, this painting from 2006 is the odd man out, perhaps connoting a new direction in his work. All I know is that I love it.

Pigs & Medieval Studies

2007-08-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

In the Middle, a medieval studies blog, has had several recent postings about pigs by Karl Steel, one of their contributors. You can find them here sorted by keyword. One post concerns anthropophagus pigs--pigs that eat human flesh. I've mentioned this theme a couple of times, as it's one that comes up in HBO's late-lamented Deadwood and in the on-going trial of accused Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton (for the latest news about his defense, see this BBC account). There is also a post about the Testamentum Porcelli, a satirical last will and testament from a pig that was popular with the kids back in the fourth century. If you happen to read Latin, you can find a copy here. If, like me, you haven't worked on your Latin since high school, there's a great 1987 article about it called "The Testament of the Piglet" that you can find here in J-Stor.

Thanks to the great porkopolis.org for the reference. Today's image comes from my friend Lisa from her trip to Nantucket. Painting and artist unknown, for now at least.

Big Norm

2007-08-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

A reader tipped me off to the story of Big Norm, supposedly the world's largest known pig at an estimated 1600 pounds. If you are visiting upstate New York you can make a personal visit to see Norm in Hubbardsville. For most of us, though, an on-line visit (here) is better. You can buy shares in Big Norm (to help pay for his upkeep) or pick up a t-shirt.

By the way, the Guinness Book of Records believes that a Poland-China pig called Big Bill which died in 1933 is the largest pig ever, weighing 2552 pounds. In other news, the world record for the highest jump by a pig is 70 cm (27.5 in) and was achieved by Kotetsu, a pot-bellied pig on 22 August 2004 at the Mokumoku Tedsukuri Farm, Mie, Japan. You can find a photo here at the Guinness site.

What's Organic About Organic Pork?

2007-08-22T19:34:00.000-07:00

The Ask Umbra column at grist.org took on the vexed issue of what constitutes organic pork last week. You can find the full discussion, with lots of comments, some interesting, some asinine, here. She points out that just because pork might be produced under organic guidelines, these rules "do not guarantee that a pig has experienced any piggy fun such as snorfelling merrily through the grass, making its own bed from straw, biting its farmer, or staying far from its own excrement. It is possible to meet the organic guidelines, and pass the yearly inspection, but still run a variant of a confinement operation."

The column mentions other possible standards, including those devised by the Food Alliance and the Animal Welfare Institute. I'd add that it's worth looking at the niche pork site (a project of the National Pork Board) and the Niman Ranch pork page as well. I like her recommendation about visiting a farm to check on the way they treat the animals that become the meat you eat, but that's something awfully difficult to do for the vast majority of us. Besides, there's not that much one is allowed to see in an era of concentrated operations with full biosecurity.

Spider Pig in The Simpsons Movie

2007-08-21T17:14:00.000-07:00

I've been putting off making reference to The Simpsons Movie for quite a while. So, as many of you will know by now, the plot is driven by Homer's acquisition of a pig after a commercial shoot at Krusty Burger. Homer keeps the pig at home and stores its waste in a rickety silo that Marge insists he get rid of. He dumps the silo in the already polluted Lake Springfield, further contaminating it and leading to the EPA's invasion of Springfield which sets the rest of the action in motion.

Homer names his friend "Spider Pig" after he makes it walk on the ceiling. Later, the pig is called "Harry Plopper" in a parody of, well, you know. There was a special pig-centered movie trailer made for the film that is well worth seeing. A version of it can be found here. The trailer includes the great line "The other white meat has a taste for vengeance."

Homer's song "Spider Pig," a takeoff of the 1970s "Spiderman" tune, is probably stuck in millions of people's heads this summer. The lyrics: "Spider pig, spider pig, does whatever a spider pig does, can he swing, from a web? No he can't, he's a pig." There's an overly orchestrated version in the film's credits and on the official soundtrack.

"Spider Pig" has made it into the news in an odd way. One Australian guy is running a petition on Facebook to get 100,000 signatures so that his wife will let him name their forthcoming child "Spider Pig" (here). By the way, what's the deal these days with children's names down under? A couple in New Zealand, Pat and Sheena Wheaton, were trying to name their baby boy 4Real. After the court turned them down, they chose "Superman." Hmm.

Addendum: Some joker has added "sus arachnia" to the list of the species of pigs on the Wikipedia entry for "pig." Might serve as a good example for our students when things start back up in a few weeks...

Bacon Bracelets

2007-08-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

Another bacon-related item. Thanks to Sean for pointing me to this one. According to the Hipster Haircuts blog where he found it (here), the bacon is printed on a leather band, so it's non-vegan. For more on bacon, also see the blog I Heart Bacon (here).

Gummy Bacon (Strawberry Flavor)

2007-08-19T16:52:00.000-07:00

A new item in the famed Archie McPhee catalog. You can order your own gummy bacon here. I'm now wishing I'd stopped at the Archie McPhee store in Seattle when I drove by it earlier this summer. They've got lots and lots of toys, gifts, and novelties.

"Pig Racing is a Lot Like Life"

2007-08-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

NPR's Weekend Edition ran a nice end-of-summer piece about pig races at the Montgomery County Fair that you can listen to here. There's a good interview with Cody and Gabrielle Boger, proprietors of the Ham Bone Express pig races. I find it interesting that in all the pig races I've heard of the "prizes" the pigs are racing for are invariably oreo cookies. Cody Boger notes that they use two-month-old Yorkshires that they return to the farmer at the end of the season.

Thanks to Lisa for tipping me off about this story.
Photo by Laura Krantz, NPR.

A Sacrifice for Human Culinary Pleasures

2007-08-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

Here's another image my friend Sean found for me, an advertisement for sausages from Auvergne. I'm not quite sure what to make of this, other than to say that it is a bit on the disturbing side in the way it presents the relation between cochon and saucisson. I guess that's the French for you... You can find a contemporary picture of said dry sausage from Auvergne here.

KCRW's Flying Pig

2007-08-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

KCRW, my favorite local radio station (I'm listening right now via iTunes, in fact), is using this flying pig with poor eyesight on its Summer 2007 merchandise. Since I always subscribe in the spring fund-raising drive, I probably won't wind up snagging a t-shirt or hat, but you can via their website. Hey, perhaps they'll see this post of support and sign me up for a regular slot running short commentaries on animal issues. It would be great to get back on the radio, as it's been a long time since my WGTB days...

Il Porcellino in Sydney & Elsewhere

2007-08-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

My pal Kelly, who is contributing Rhinoceros for the Reaktion Books "Animal Series" (here) was recently in Australia, where she saw a statue of a wild boar on Macquarie Street outside the Sydney Hospital. According to the sign attached to the sculpture of "Il Porcellino," if one drops a coin in the box (to benefit the sick in the hospital) "legend says that if you rub the nose of the boar you will be endowed with good fortune." Kelly suggested that this probably wasn't a custom original to the Aussies, and she was correct. The statue in Sydney of this wild boar is a copy of the Italian original that can be found in the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. According to the Sydney Hospital web site (here), the copy was presented to the hospital in 1968 by the Marchessa Clarissa Torrigiani in memory of her father and brother who had both been renowned surgeons at the hospital.

The photo to the right is of the "Il Cinghiale" ("Il Porcellino," or "piglet," is the statue's nickname) fountain in the Mercato Nuovo in Florence. Apparently, the wild boar was first sculpted and cast by Pietro Tacca in 1612, based on a marble Italian copy of a Hellenistic marble original that has been lost or destroyed. There are five copies of "Il Porcellino" made in 1962 in different locations, including one at the Derby Arboretum in England that replaced one destroyed by bombing during World War 2. According to the Public Art Around the World site (here), the other modern copies are in California, Florence (presumably the one above the the public can touch), and Canada (one in Waterloo and one in Victoria).

Kids & Pigs

2007-08-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

Today's photo comes from the normally crusty proprietor of the wonderful yet dismal Axis of Evel Knievel, the blog that got things rolling for me a couple of years ago. This cute picture of Audrey's first encounter with a piglet made me think of both the biophilia hypothesis and a recent interview on grist.org (here) with Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. While I'm not worried about Audrey, as she'll be growing up in Alaska and its outside all the time, the photo did make me ponder the ways in which today's kids might face an increasing disconnect not just from nature but from animals as well. While this is less likely to be the case with pet animals, especially dogs and cats, who seem increasingly central to middle-class identity in contemporary America, I'm not sure that aside from the occasional petting zoo or field trip to a dairy (a highlight of my elementary school education) that kids have too much exposure to farm and food animals other than in their processed (and increasingly abstracted) form. Do kids make a connection between the chicken and the nugget? the piglet and the pork chop? What might be the implications? Just a few random thoughts, poorly linked together, for today...

(Spurious) Soviet Pigs in Space

2007-08-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

My local brewmaster Sean forwarded me a series of photos supposedly documenting an old Soviet effort to put pigs into space. In the sequence of stills, which you can find here (you might have to click on the image to enlarge it), a pig is given a drink, strapped into its capsule, then launched upwards via a large cannon to return to earth and root around. These images, especially that of the odd-looking mortar used to launch the pig, seemed too good to be true. After poking around a bit it seems that these are stills from a 2005 Russian mockumentary entitled Pervye na lune (First on the Moon), directed by Aleksey Fedorchenko. You can find information about the film at its official site (in Russian) here. The Soviet space program was well-known for its use of dogs in early flights. You can find a pretty good wikipedia account of that program here.

The Little Pig's Ramble From Home

2007-08-08T12:24:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Public Library has an excellent collection of children's books, some of which are discussed on-line in an essay by Ruth McGurk (here). In a section in her essay on the moral lessons imparted by children's literature, McGurk uses The Little Pig's Ramble from Home (ca. 1850) as an example of the kind of children's book that urges youth not to put on airs. In this text and illustration, Jack Pig wears a wig and a top hat but receives his comeuppance when he discovers how pigs are "dressed" at the butcher's. A cautionary tale indeed!

Crimes of a Canadian Pig Farmer

2007-07-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

The big (and incredibly horrifying) story in Canada this week is the trial of Robert Pickton, a British Columbia pig farmer, for the murder of six women. The authorities have accused Pickton, 57, of killing 26 of more than 60 prostitutes and drug addicts who disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside from the late 1980s until late 2001. One of the Crown witnesses, Andrew Bellwood, testified late last week about how the accused told him of his method of luring, killing and disposing of the bodies of these women. You can read the Toronto Star account of Bellwood's graphic testimony here. According to this testimony, Pickton slaughtered the women as he would his pigs, then fed his victims to the animals to dispose of their remains. Shades of Mr. Wu's pigs, used to dispose of bodies in HBO's Deadwood.

I'll be able to follow this on-going trial next week, as I'm off to Seattle and Vancouver until July 27th. While I'm gone, keep up with all the bad news in history via Axis of Evel Knievel. Its proprietor took today's photo while on his vacation earlier this month...

The Five Little Pigs

2007-07-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

This is "the little pig that went to market" from "The History of Five Little Pigs" as presented in Joseph Martin Kronheim's My First Picture Book (1893). You can find the images and text here via Project Gutenberg. Suffice to say that this version is much more complicated than the nursery rhyme our parents would recite as they wriggled our toes. In fact, here's the story that accompanies this illustration:

"There was once a family of Five Little Pigs, and Mrs. Pig, their mother, loved them all very dearly. Some of these little pigs were very good, and took a great deal of trouble to please her. The eldest pig was so active and useful that he was called Mr. Pig. One day he went to market with his cart full of vegetables, but Rusty, the donkey, began to show his bad temper before he had gone very far on the road. All the coaxing and whipping would not make him move. So Mr. Pig took him out of the shafts, and being very strong, drew the cart to market himself. When he got there, all the other pigs began to laugh. But they did not laugh so loudly when Mr. Pig told them all his struggles on the road. Mr. Pig lost no time in selling his vegetables, and very soon after Rusty came trotting into the market-place, and as he now seemed willing to take his place in the cart, Mr. Pig started for home without delay. When he got there, he told Mrs. Pig his story, and she called him her best and most worthy son."

The version we all remember ("This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home, this little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy had none. And this little piggy went 'wee wee wee' all the way home") was first published in 1728. The moralizing in the many longer adaptations of this nursery rhyme is pretty amazing. There are tons of adaptations of "This little piggy..." in popular culture, including Agatha Christie's Poirot novel Five Little Pigs (1942) and a clothing store in Santa Monica called This Little Piggy Wears Cotton.

Greased Pig Chases

2007-07-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

Despite looking around a bit, I have no idea how long greased pig chases have been going on. I've found an 1859 engraving by Richard Doyle of a greased pig chase (see it for yourself here) but not much other information about them. I remember seeing one myself at a festival at Stone Mountain back in the 1970s, but I haven't seen or heard of one since. This is perhaps more due to the fact that I have lived in cities all my life, as the greased pig contests I've read about on-line have all taken place at rural fairs and gatherings. For example, this image was taken at the Alger County Fair in Chatham, Michigan in August 2005. (The original can be found here.)

There have been several successful protests against this treatment of pigs. In fact, according to PETA, greased pig chases are illegal in Minnesota and Rhode Island. (See their "Ax Animal Acts" page here at PETA Kids.) As they note in their Get Active Center (here), "Pigs are intelligent, social animals with high cognitive ability. Being chased around or mishandled by participants in raucous greased-pig contests is terrifying for them." I would surmise, then, that these animal entertainments are on the way out and are certainly less likely to be found in urban and suburban areas. Yet one can find advice on how to compete in one of these contests on line as well. In a "how-to" Wiki (here) someone has provided a list of the eight steps involved in catching a greased pig. This advice is also appended: "Chasing a greased pig is a cruel sport for the animal. make sure you're aware of the ethics of such an event before participating. However, also bear in mind the event probably has a significant cultural or traditional origin, so be careful about admonishing people about it."

Girls Gone Hog-Wrestling in Indiana

2007-07-10T15:01:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure whether greased pig chases and hog wrestling still existed as regular events at summer fairs and festivals, but at least the latter does. The Evansville (Indiana) Courier and Press (here) recently ran a photo essay about the hog wrestling competition for girls sixteen and under that was held at the Gibson County Fair. Apparently a team of four girls has 60 seconds to capture a hog in a mud pit and put it in a barrel.

The article followed the exploits of four 12-year-olds who competed under the team name "Pork Dorks." They managed to get their pig into the barrel in 58 seconds, just under the deadline. 21 other teams participated, but I could find no account of the winning time or of how many teams managed to beat the clock. There was also no evidence of any protests about this event, which certainly has the potential to be stressful and harmful to the pig.

Scanning the web there appear to have been a number of greased pig chases at 4th of July events. More about some of those (and animal activists' efforts to end these entertainments) later...

A Disgusting Pig-Related Traffic Tie-Up

2007-07-09T16:35:00.001-07:00

While looking at the past week or so of pig news (via a Google News search) I found several media accounts of a traffic accident in Chicago on July 1st that shut down the Edens Expressway for seven hours. According to the AP (here via Forbes), Hassan Ware was driving too fast for conditions, flipping his truck and spilling pig ears, pig feet and grease all over the roadway. This greasy mess was hard to clean up--the transportation workers used sand, foam, and rock salt to make the road safe for travel. Yuck.

Today's image of live hogs being transported (not parts, thankfully) comes from Alison V. Smith of the Dallas Morning News.

The Old Woman and Her Pig

2007-07-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Old Woman and Her Pig was a popular story for children, albeit one that is largely forgotten today. The story itself is a cumulative one, in which the woman tries to get her recalcitrant pig to go over the stile (see image above) so she can get home. She tries to get a dog to bite the pig, but it won't, so she tries to get a stick to hit the dog, but it won't, so she asks fire to burn the stick, but... (you get the picture). There are several different versions of this tale on-line, perhaps the easiest to read is a 1902 version here. The version from Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales can be found here.

I was a bit surprised to find that there are still several re-workings of this story in print. Perhaps the most recent is a 2007 version by Margaret Read McDonald and John Kanzler, although the reviewer for School Library Journal notes that they "cut out some of the action of the original and watered down the story so that the tale seems rather pointless." I guess the violence of the original (including the hope that the rope will hang the butcher that won't slaughter the ox) just doesn't fly today. My favorite edition, one well worth tracking down, is Paul Gladone's 1961 version of the story. I'm grateful that we have such a great children's literature section at Long Beach State.

Another Pig Tattoo

2007-07-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

Matt at the Deglazed Blog (here) shares my interest in both pigs and The Simpsons and has charted the creation of his own tattoo that brings the two together. You can find his posting "Kitchen Inked" about his tattoo here. His posting includes the famous clip from "Lisa the Vegetarian" where Homer Simpson refuses to believe that bacon, ham, and pork chops come from the same animal. Here's a photo of Matt's tattoo. As Mr. Burns would say, excellent…

Anecdotes of Tame and Wild Swine

2007-07-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

This image comes from one of the many editions of William Darton's A Present for a Little Boy (an 1825 edition is available on-line here). In a section entitled "Anecdotes of Tame and Wild Swine" the story is told of a little girl at Wanscomb, in Kent, "who, in attempting to take away one of the young pigs, received from the sow so severe a bite, as to occasion the loss of her arm." The girl apparently fell into the sty (not visible in this dramatic engraving) and would have been killed were it not for the intervention of a neighbor. The lesson drawn from this tale: "pigs are swine and not all of a temper; nor are the same hogs equally kind at all times." I'll post more from various editions of this book, including the author's comments on the "learned pig," soon.