The pig on your plate

by BARBARA J. KING

PHOTO/Cincinnati Zoo

That pigs are smart and sensitive is not in doubt. How can we justify continuing to kill them for food?

Domestic pigs, the kind portrayed in hot-pink neon above barbecue joints, curly tailed and carefree, have prodigious memories. In problem-solving with computers, they match wits with little kids and win. They are able to plan ahead, and they live in complex social communities. They recognise other pigs as distinct individuals.

Pigs aren’t just cerebral, though: they have heart. When others are in distress, they can express concern and act with empathy. A description of pig behaviours, derived from scientific experiments and compiled by Lori Marino of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy and Christina M Colvin at Georgia Institute of Technology is so impressive, you might think it was about chimpanzees, elephants or whales.

We eat pigs, though, and we eat them on a scale unparalleled in comparison with the rate at which we consume other brainy mammals. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, pork is the most consumed meat in the world.

Barbecue is a cultural obsession in many countries, as is bacon, whether served straight up or in more recent innovations such as bacon chocolate and bacon vodka. Plus, once satiated with real bacon, some might even retire to bed after brushing with bacon-flavoured toothpaste.

We value the taste of pigs far more than we value the lives of pigs. Exceptions include pig celebrities, whose personalities are known and cherished, and whom we assign to a different, protected, pet-like non-consumable status. Esther, a 650 lb ‘wonder pig’ who lives in a house with Derek Walter and Steve Jenkins in Ontario, Canada, is a ‘public figure’ on Facebook with more than 1.1 million followers.

Or consider Christopher Hogwood (named after the famed English conductor and musicologist), a pig who lived in a barn at the home of Sy Montgomery and Howard Mansfield in New Hampshire from his infancy until his death at age 14. Christopher grew to a size even larger than Esther, and through Montgomery’s memoir The Good Good Pig (2006) became a poster pig for porcine cognition and emotion.

Montgomery describes how a belly rub in the sun from her, or dinner leftovers from a local chef, plunged Christopher into a state of utter delight visible to all: he telegraphed this rapture through sound (‘unh-unh-unh!’) and body posture. At those moments, he became the ultimate mindful mammal, one who dwelled entirely in the present. But Christopher didn’t live only in the present any more than we do. He built nests, not in a rote instinctual way, but in fussy anticipation of his own needs for soft-hay comfort. His memory for individual humans – his own complex social community – was excellent. Two young children, once neighbours, continued to visit him at irregular intervals even after they moved to another state. ‘He still remembered the little girls next door,’ Montgomery told me, ‘when they had been away not only for a pretty long time, but during a period of adolescent growth in which just a few months will make a big difference – in what you look like, how tall you are, what your voice sounds like, what you smell like.’ Christopher’s ‘voice became softer and lower’ when interacting with people who were visibly sad, a feat of perspective-taking that suggests an empathy response.

Of course, storytelling about pigs as individuals invites people to think differently about pork and bacon. But what does science – the kind of science reviewed by Marino and Colvin – say? That question has preoccupied me for several years.


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