Mark Regan Essig

Dear Pig are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?

The complete history of the pig. How the pig has fed us, delighted us, assisted us, repelled us, and finally shamed us. Reminded me very much of Cod by Mark Kurlansky in that it is very thorough, well written and engaging from the get go. The pig through the ages and how it has adapted to everything we have asked of it. How it helped us conquer the West and the East and the North and the South. How the pig has marched beside us on our genocidal forays to other lands. How other creatures perished in the heat and humidity or the cold but not old pig.

How pig has come to be reviled by religions and lauded by farmers.

There is a lot in this book and I was dreading the end because it is inevitable when laying out how this animal has served human kind so well and for so long that its present state has to be told as well.

And what do we do to thank the pig for its eons of faithful service? We keep it in metal cages where it is unable to turn, lay or even shake its head. And we do this knowing that pigs are highly intelligent, social creatures. What does that make us? and who really are the lesser beasts?

A brilliant read!… (mais)

I don't know that we learn too much from studying history through the lens of the pig. Yet this book was still full of mildly interesting factoids. The pig was more important in early societies, and in early America, than I knew. The book gets less interesting in the second half, when the focus turns to modern American pig farming.

> Cows gestate for nine months and produce one calf; sheep and goats require five months and give birth to one or two offspring. A sow, on the other hand, gestates for less than four months and produces eight or twelve or even more piglets, all of which grow to slaughter weight far more quickly than a calf or a lamb. Born at 3 pounds, today's piglet balloons to 280 pounds by six months of age, at which point it is also ready to breed.

> The Chinese character for "home" is formed by placing the symbol for "pig" under the symbol for "roof": home is where the pig is. … The practice was widespread—the same Chinese character designates both "pigsty" and "outhouse"—and has survived into the present on Korea's Cheju Island. In the 1960s more than 90 percent of farmers on the island used a pigsty-privy

> In humans, the somatosensory cortex—the part of the brain responsible for sensation—is wired primarily to the hands. In pigs, nearly all the touch-sensitive nerves terminate in the nose.

> the poor often raised pigs in order to gain control over their own food supply. A powerful central state, intent on controlling all aspects of the economy, would have seen such dietary autonomy as a threat to its control and a potential source of sedition

> This explains why certain animals came to be declared unclean: they are predators and scavengers that eat the flesh of animals from which the blood has not been drained. Unlike Adam and Eve, the Israelites were no longer vegetarians—even so, they could eat only vegetarian beasts.

> Any meat can be cured with salt, but lean meats like beef tend to become tough when so preserved. Cured pork, with its generous veins of fat, remains tender.

> Jesus himself had little love for pigs. While traveling among the Gaderenes near the Sea of Galilee, he came across a man possessed. He said to the demons, "Go," and the demons went out of the man and entered a herd of pigs: "Behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters." The swine numbered 2,000, and yet no one mourned their loss. Jesus would rescue one lost sheep, but he sent thousands of swine to their deaths.

> The court records of medieval Europe record dozens of cases in which pigs were tried and convicted of attacking children.

> When archaeologists dig up castle sites around England, they find that pig bones begin to dwindle not long after the Black Death and are replaced by those of fowl, especially wild birds, which had become the new marker of wealth

> the pig is the perfect animal for colonization, breeding quickly and providing abundant meat in the difficult years when the land is being tamed. One writer explained that in pioneer-era Minnesota, only when farms were well established could settlers start to raise cattle and "emancipate themselves from the benevolent tyranny of the pig."

> Feed conversion is a complex process, but one key is having lengthy intestines, the better to extract every bit of nutrition from food before it exits the body. In wild boars, the ratio of intestinal to body length was about 10:1. In the common woods hog, it was 13:1. In improved Corn Belt hogs like Berkshires and Poland Chinas, it was 18:1. Whereas woods hogs took two or three years to reach market size, the new types reached slaughter weight at eighteen months or less.

> The best estimates suggest that in antebellum America, five times as many hogs were driven as all other animals combined. In 1847 one tollgate in North Carolina recorded 692 sheep, 898 cattle, 1,317 horses, and 51,753 hogs … The largest cattle drives, from Texas to Kansas, involved as many as 600,000 cattle a year, but they lasted just fifteen years or so. Hog droving, by comparison, involved hundreds of thousands of animals during peak years and on some routes lasted nearly a century.

> Henry Ford said that the idea of the assembly line was inspired by a visit to a slaughterhouse.

> Fat was nearly as valuable as meat. Lard served as the primary cooking fat in the United States until the middle of the twentieth century and was exported in bulk to Latin America and Europe. The highest quality, leaf lard, came from around the organs and was used for baking. Lesser varieties were turned into industrial oils and grease. Some lard was separated into two parts, lard oil and stearin. The oil was used in lamps—it competed with whale oil in the pre-kerosene era—while stearin was turned into candles and soaps. … Prussian blue—a dye used by printers—was derived from blood, as was albumen for the photographic industry.

> not until the 1950s did per capita beef consumption surpass that of pork. … Beef was best eaten fresh, not salted, and artificial refrigeration at home was uncommon until after World War I. For a butcher to sell fresh meat from a nine-hundred-pound steer, he needed the large customer base that only an urban area could provide— and even in 1900 only two out of five Americans were city dwellers.

> Americans in the nineteenth century got most of their meat and fat from pigs. In his 1845 novel The Chainbearer, James Fennimore Cooper notes that a family is "in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork-barrel." (This sentiment underlies our expression "scraping the bottom of the barrel.")

> in 1820 some 20,000 hogs lived in Manhattan, about one pig for every five people

> Southern leaders began to close the range after the Civil War, and their main purpose was to take food out of the mouths of the poor. The abolition of slavery had created a labor shortage in the southern plantation economy.

> packers started injecting brine into the ham with needles. Later they invented "vein-pumping," which involved blasting brine from a high-pressure hose into a large vein in the ham and allowing the animal's circulatory system to spread it through the meat. Such methods cut a three-month cure down to a week, then later to just a few hours.

> in 1920 and found that nearly a third of cities with populations over 100,000 used swine feeding as their primary garbage-disposal method; an even higher percentage of smaller cities did so

> In the 1950s, a 180-pound hog carcass yielded 35 pounds of lard. By the 1970s, a pig of the same size produced just 20 pounds of lard. … In the 1930s, pigs gained a pound of weight for every four pounds of feed they ate. In the 1980s, that pound of gain required three and a half pounds of feed.

> A 250-pound hog excretes 7.8 pounds of feces and 2.65 gallons of urine per day, about four times as much as a human being of equivalent weight. The 60 million pigs in the United States in 1995 produced almost as much waste as the country's 266 million people. Strict rules governed the disposal of human waste; not so the pig waste.… (mais)