Much between the Oink and Curly Tail

A character in PBS's Call the Midwife remarked that dogs look up to us, cats look down at us, but pigs see us as we are.  That bit of wit may say more about our relationships with dogs and cats than it does about pigs.  Nevertheless, pigs probably deserve more credit than they usually get.  Just to start with, we virtually never hold up any quality of a pig for people to emulate.  We say humans should be faithful, and recognize dogs as being so.  In contrast, to call a person a "pig" or a "hog" is always an insult.

detail from
Gauguin's The Black Pigs

Despite that contrast between our attitudes about dogs and pigs, there may well have been a similarity between the way ancient ancestors of dogs and of pigs entered the circle of human culture.  Our domesticated pigs are descendants of tusked wild boars.  Scavenging in humans' waste heaps, those boars that were less aggressive would have been more likely to have been domesticated (just as dogs were from their wild ancestors).  Recent DNA studies have now revealed that the transition from wild boars to pigs was made in seven separate regions of the world, ranging from China to India to Central Europe.

The human-pig relationship, however, has been an uneven one ever since those domestications in Neolithic times.  The unevenness has extended far beyond the matter of pork-eating being a taboo in parts of Judaism and Islam, in contrast with it being the primary source of meat in New Guinea. The larger difficulty has been in humans' not having figured out what degree of wildness and tameness they want in the lives of their hogs.  For centuries in Europe, hogs were allowed to wander freely, perhaps getting some of their own food from the forests, but also being able to search out humans' garbage.  That freedom meant that hogs sometimes caused accidents or killed children, leading to the oddity of a number of hogs having actually been put on trial during the 14th century before being executed.

Today, we have other problems resulting from an opposite condition -- a reduction in the pigs' freedom.  The over-concentration of hogs in massive factory farms has led to unnatural concentrations of urine and feces, far beyond the ability of Nature to reprocess it into the ground. And beyond our ability to find a good way of dealing with it.

pig statue in Sweden

Yes, the history of human-pig relationships has been an awkward one.  Knowing something of human nature, it should not be surprising that people have sometimes pointed the finger of blame at the pigs, even though we ourselves have been ultimately at fault.  It is not just Charlotte in E.B. White's Charlotte's Web who might feel some sympathy for the pig. Perhaps we could give pigs more credit for all they have contributed to the human race -- from pork to leather to bristle brushes to even finding highly valued truffles.  I am doubtful, however, that pigs will be given full credit.  Even when we see a sausage in a bun with mustard, we linguistically honor our canine friends by exclaiming "hot dog" -- saying "dog," when it was the pig that made the real sacrifice.

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As you read this short history, did it bring any thoughts to mind?