Farmer Jones' Pigs

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...

Salon's Pork Week

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

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

Wooly Pigs in the Pacific Northwest

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.

Anxieties About Hog-Farming Odors

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

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.