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

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

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

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

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

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.

A Tennessee Hog Killing

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.

Dick King-Smith's Recollections of Pig Farming

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."

Crimes of a Canadian Pig Farmer

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...