The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge!

Pigs and the Ebola Virus

2009-01-30T12:01:00.000-08:00

For those of you obsessed with worst-case scenarios, the New York Times ran a story (here) on January 23, 2009 about the confirmation of the transmission of the Ebola virus from a pig to its human pig handler in the Philippines. While this strain of the virus, Ebola Reston, is not dangerous to humans, the development is potentially troubling because humans are in contact with pigs much more often than they are with monkeys and apes, the known hosts of the Ebola virus and the vectors for the spread of hemorrhagic fever in Africa. Ebola Reston is normally a monkey virus; scientists think that it was spread to the pigs by fruit bats. The article indicates that scientists aren't particularly worried about this news. As one expert on pathogens noted, "It's probably a rare event that pigs get infected."

Bacon Explosion

2009-01-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

I suppose it's an index of how busy I have been that I failed to notice that a recipe for something called the "Bacon Explosion" has been sweeping the internet. Thanks to a piece in Wednesday's New York Times food section by Damon Darlin (here), I now feel up to date. The "Bacon Explosion"--two pounds of pork sausage wrapped in two pounds of bacon--was created by Jason Day and Aaron Chronister of the Kansas-based BBQ competition team Burnt Finger BBQ. It contains about 5000 calories and 500 grams of fat, and is either something that will make your mouth water or turn your stomach in disgust. The NYT article is largely dedicated to the mechanics of the recipe's spread throughout the country via the internet and text messaging. More germane for my purposes, of course, is the recipe itself, which reflects both the surging popularity of bacon and a carnophallic backlash to vegetarians, the health conscious, and friends of animals.

The image of the "Bacon Explosion" on the smoker comes from the bbqaddicts.com website where the recipe first appeared. The NYT also has lots of instructional photos and video in case you want to make one of these for Sunday's Super Bowl.

Why (Domesticated) Pigs are Pink

2009-01-28T09:26:00.000-08:00

According to a recent article reporting on the work of geneticist Greger Larson, pigs developed their bright coat colors after domestication. When you think about it, this is really a no-brainer, as the coats of wild pigs and boar provide camouflage in the forest, and humans are the ones that created "breeds" that reflected what looked good to them over the long process of domestication. Accordingly, as Larson notes, the brightly colored coats reflect "the real human penchant for novelty."

The study does reveal in detail the mechanism for changes to coat color: mutations to the gene melanocortin receptor-1 (MC1R). These mutations account for pigs that are black, or pink, or spotted, all colors and patterns that would have a hard time surviving in the wild. Interestingly, a pink pig doesn't produce any melanin, making pink a "default" color.

Today's picture is one of my own, of wild hogs corralled at the Ocmulgee Wild Hog Festival in Abbeville, Georgia. These suckers would be hard to spot in the woods, that's for sure. The New Scientist article summarizing work published in PL0S Genetics can be found here.

Pigs and Politics II: The Pork Barrel

2008-10-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

While most of the talk this presidential election cycle has been about "earmarks" (itself a term related to agriculture in that an "earmark" is made to show ownership of cattle, pigs and sheep), what's really being argued over is traditional "pork barrel" politics. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of the term--spending used to benefit constituents of a given politician in return for votes or campaign contributions--to the 1870s, when references to "pork" were common in Congress. It cites the Defiance (Ohio) Democrat in 1873 for first referring to the "many previous visits to the public pork-barrel." The term is decidedly American in origin.

Today's photo (found on Flickr) was taken by Bill Barber at Yorktown and depicts soldiers' rations: salt pork, beans, and hard tack. It's amazingly difficult to find a photo of an actual barrel of pork, as that means of preservation which led to so much interesting language ("scraping the bottom of the barrel" and so on) has long disappeared.

Pigs & Politics

2008-10-07T13:01:00.000-07:00

I was out of town when the whole pointless "lipstick on a pig" controversy (I hate to use a word that actually dignifies what was one of the more banal moments in contemporary American politics) occurred. By means of making up the omission, there is a brief post on Gawker (here) that was sent to me by a number of friends. It addresses some of the recent ways the epithet "pig" has been hurled by and at women...

La Piganino

2008-10-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

This 1867 lithograph by an unknown artist satirizes amateur musicians and the contemporary vogue for all things Italian, according to David Tatham, who included this image from his personal collection in his wonderful The Lure of the Striped Pig: The Illustration of Popular Music in America, 1820-1870 (Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, 1973). His book is full of amazing images, many of which would be of great utility for the nineteenth-century cultural historian. In fact, I'm planning on getting a lot of use out of them in my American Cultural History course this semester. But back to La Piganino--what an amazing image! The fine folks at Porkopolis (here) note that this mock instrument is part of a long tradition of animal instruments, including the Cat Piano (image and story here). Note the musical pig in the picture in the background. More on the pig and whistle, and for that matter, the whole Dedham Striped Pig controversy, later...

The Learned Pig's Return

2008-10-01T17:51:00.000-07:00

My six week trip to Alaska and the Yukon turned into a longer absence from this blog than I had anticipated. I missed a bunch of pig news in the interim, but, I suppose, most of you heard of the pig in Australia named Bruce (left) who aggressively kept an elderly woman trapped in her house for ten days. When she tried to drive the pig away with a broom, the pig simply "snapped it in half with his mouth." If you missed this "when animals attack" story there is a good version here via MSNBC.

A Leave of Absence

2008-07-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

Although I admit that I haven't been the most regular poster recently, I can now say with confidence that I know I won't be posting for the next month or so, as I'll be traveling quite a bit. As always, there will be lots of pig-related news that I'll miss. Just this weekend, for example, news broke (again) over the controversy (again) over the U.S. Army's shooting of live pigs in medical drills. A spokesman for the military said "It's to teach Army personnel how to manage critically injured patients within the first few hours of their injury." A representative of PETA responded that "Shooting and maiming pigs is as outdated as Civil War rifles." You can find the AP story here. More at the end of the summer...

Salon's Pork Week

2008-07-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2008-07-07T17:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-25T10:26:00.001-07:00

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.

Pigs and the Earthquake in Sichuan

2008-05-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

To follow up on the previous post, pigs also died in the hundreds of thousands in the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan province in China on May 12th. According to an article entitled "Economic Tremors of Chinese Disaster" by Leo Lewis in the Times (UK) Online (here), about 1 in 10 pigs in China is produced in Sichuan, making it the nation's biggest producer of pigs. He notes that an estimated 800,000 pigs have died as a result of the quake, but that such a loss only represents less than 1% of the province's pork production.

There may be some effect on pork prices, which have doubled in China over the past year already. According to a great overview on the NBC World News Blog by researcher Ed Flanagan (here), about 65% of the 110 pounds of meat the average Chinese eat each year is pork, which has made the pork price increases--tied to an outbreak of PRRS ("blue ear disease"), underproduction as a result of low prices in 2006, poor weather, the use of feedstuffs in ethanol production, and the greater demand for meat as a result of growing incomes--quite burdensome. As it turns out, supply can't meet demand, even in a country that has half a billion pigs.

Today's image accompanied an L.A. Times article (here) by Don Lee called "Fallout from China's Quake Could Include Inflation," which is also worth a read. According to the article, Liu Feng, a salesman at a pork-processor located about 130 miles from the epicenter of the quake, noted that "we cannot purchase pigs" due to damage to the region's infrastructure. Apparently the Sichuan Gaojin Food Co. normally bought 1,000 hogs per day, but as Feng complained, "Today we raised the price twice and the most we got was 200 pigs."

Tornado Hits Hog Farm in Oklahoma

2008-05-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

By now probably everyone who has a television has seen the footage of the massive tornado that ripped through Oklahoma on Saturday, destroying three barns at a hog farm near the town of Lacey. If you missed the story, you can read the AP version here. If you are in to weather porn, check the raw video footage here.

I was skeptical of the claim on CNN last night that none of the animals were injured or killed in this twister (no humans were hurt--they took shelter in time in the farm's windowless office). There's still no solid evidence about what happened to all the pigs in this natural disaster, but there's a good article here in the Enid [Oklahoma] News and Eagle that mentions the risk of starvation or dehydration of the sows and piglets in the farrowing operation at the Seaboard Foods hog farm. It would certainly be ironic if the farrowing units condemned by animal rights advocates turned out to help save the animals in this instance, as the article implies.

The photo to the left of a sow and her piglets at the destroyed barn comes from the AP and was shot by Enid News and Eagle photographer Bonnie Vculek. Sadly, here is another photo (here) that clearly shows that some of the sows didn't make it. While the damage has been roughly quantified in the millions of dollars, I'll be surprised if we actually hear about the animals lost. We'll see, I suppose.

Hog Genius on National Geographic's "Wild"

2008-05-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

The National Geographic Channel has produced an installment of their series Wild called "Hog Genius." I'm not sure when it will next air, or even if it has appeared yet, but you can find some great photos (including the one to the left of pigs walking through the snow) and a couple of video clips here on the Wild website.

One clip shows a video game-based experiment in porcine intelligence at Penn State. In this experiment, pigs need to use a joystick to move a ball into an area on the screen for a food treat. They do this quite well, even as the area shrinks. The other clip demonstrates the problem-solving and performance skills of Vietnamese Pot-Bellied Pigs. It features a 10 month old pig at Top Hogs in Denver and Nelly from Valentine's Performing Pigs. If I get better information about a forthcoming air date I'll let you know. It's certainly worth a look on the web, however.

FDR on the Proper Use of Pigs

2008-05-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

At the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money the other day the "Presidential Statement of the Day" came from Franklin Roosevelt in a speech to farmers in Washington, D.C. on May 14th, 1935. As part of his response to the concern that food needed for relief may have been destroyed wastefully, he noted:

The crocodile tears shed by the professional mourners of an old and obsolete order over the slaughter of little pigs and over other measures to reduce surplus agricultural inventories deceive very few thinking people in this country, and least of all the farmers themselves.

I have always supposed, ever since I was able to play around, that the acknowledged destiny of a pig is sausage, or ham, or bacon, or pork. It was in those forms--as sausage, ham, bacon, or pork--that millions of pigs were consumed by vast numbers of needy people who otherwise would have had to do without them.

I'll have to dig a bit to see what this specific issue was about. I'd note here that the timing of the LGM post happily coincides with the passing of the Farm Bill by the Senate yesterday. While I'll eventually post separately about what this iteration of the farm bill means for America's pork producers and pigs, for now, the NPPC (National Pork Producer's Council) seems pleased, describing the bill as "favorable" to the industry. You can find their press release here.

Drunken Pig Monument in Ukraine

2008-05-15T15:57:00.001-07:00

In a story that almost seems too good to be true, a monument to a drunken pig is supposedly to be unveiled in the town of Komsomolsk in central Ukraine. It will portray a pig lying on its belly with its snout in a trough and will be located adjacent to a cafe. According to the sculptor, Oleg Ryabo, "This monument symbolizes those people who make pigs of themselves by drinking far too much." Thanks to Dave from the more-consistently posting Axis of Evel Knievel for the reference to the Russian News and Information Agency (here).

Roger Waters Has Lost His Pig (Again)

2008-04-29T20:06:00.001-07:00

The big news from the Coachella Festival out here in California over the weekend wasn't the return of Portishead but the disappearance of Rogers Waters' inflatable pig. The giant flying pig, which goes back to Pink Floyd's stage shows in support of their Animals record (1977), broke free from its tethers and drifted off. It's not only recognizable because it's a gigantic pig, but because it says "Don't be led to the slaughter. Vote Democrat November 2nd" on it. It also has a check mark next to "Obama" on the bottom. When I first heard that, I wondered if the pig really was Waters' pig--perhaps it was a marketing stunt. There's a good account of the show and the pig here via a blog at Entertainment Weekly (a better source than Reuters this time). Either way, the festival organizers are offering a great reward for its return: $10,000 and four tickets to the festival for life.

By the way, this isn't the first time the pig has floated away. While shooting the cover for Animals at Battersea Power Station it also got loose. See my earlier blog entry, with video, here.

UPDATE: The pig has apparently been found (here). It landed in at least two pieces at the Hideaway Golf Club in La Quinta, California. No word whether the finders will want to use their festival tickets, but hey, the money's really good in these recessionary times.

"Big Idiot Buys a Pig"

2008-04-24T18:02:00.000-07:00

Although it's not obvious from this blog, I have a deep and abiding interest in old and strange music. My favorite recent release in this vein is Dust-to-Digital's Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days, drawn from the extensive collections of old 78's of Seattle residents Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor. There are all kinds of songs and performances from all over the world on this set, including He Zemin & Huang Peiying's "Big Idiot Buys a Pig" (ca. 1930), which may be one of the greatest song titles ever. I have no idea what's going on in this 78, nor do I know how to add music tracks to this blog, but thankfully the review of Victrola Favorites at Dusted Magazine has this track available for folks to listen to via a stream. So click here and start listening, then go out and pick up this amazing release.

The "Everything's Better with Bacon" Flickr Pool

2008-04-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

My friend Sean e-mailed me concerning a photo pool on Flickr about bacon. You too can fritter away valuable time by perusing the tons of photos in the "Everything's Better with Bacon" group (here). There are over 1400 "members" contributing almost 2300 images of bacon and bacon-related items to this Flickr site. The photo to the right is from (and of) Mr. Bacon Pants, who tells the tale (here) of his participation in the Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival, held in Des Moines, Iowa last month on National Pig Day. There is a Des Moines Register article previewing this event as well that you can find here.

Jimmy Buffett's Swine Not?

2008-03-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

It has been a crazy semester, which has meant that I have not been as attentive to this blog as I would have liked. Now, at least, it's time for our much-needed spring break, and as we're headed to Key West for some of it, I figured I'd mention the forthcoming novel by Jimmy Buffett called Swine Not?, which tells yet another story of a pig in the city.

Buffett's novel, apparently based on a true story, concerns the adventures of Rumpy, a pot-bellied pig brought to a New York City residence hotel by his Tennessee family (more information here if you'd like it). Helen Bransford provides the illustrations for Buffett's story, including the image above of Rumpy with some of his pigeon friends. If you happen to be a Parrothead (I am not a Buffett fan, actually, though I've been to the Keys enough to kinda see the appeal) it might be worth picking up when it's released in May.

The more interesting question is why the urban pig seems so appealing (think of the Eloise books, Babe: Pig in the City, etc.). Today these texts play off the rural-urban and nature-culture dichotomies, but once upon a time pigs were ubiquitous in the streets of cities and there was nothing romantic about that at all. More on that later once I've found a way to scan some of the illustrations about the perils of pigs in the streets from an early nineteenth-century children's book I've found.

"Great Movie Pigs" Slideshow

2008-03-08T15:04:00.000-08:00

I was contemplating a post on the rising popularity of pigs in movies (the most recent appears in the ads for Disney's College Road Trip), when I happened to look at today's L.A. Times online and found a great feature and slideshow put together by Susan King called "Great Movie Pigs" (here).

The famous pigs depicted on the site include Babe, Napoleon, Porky, Miss Piggy, Hamm, and Wilbur, among others. King's feature is accompanied by a few quotes from animal trainer James P. Warren (he's worked on Charlotte's Web and College Road Trip, among many, many other films), who notes that "If you look at all of those films, they tend to use smaller pigs. They go for the cute look--the little pug nose. I think they are so animated when the move and how they look at the camera. What they can offer is so much, it's very appealing."

Breaking the Association of Pigs and Truffles

2008-03-02T09:41:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times ran a nice article (here) this morning about the spike in truffle prices in France, largely due to a drought that has reduced the size of the annual harvest. The article is accompanied by a picture of a truffle hunter and his dog, not his pig. It goes on to note, sadly, that "truffle-hunting pigs--bigger, hungrier and harder to manage--have largely fallen out of favor." Perhaps this headline in The Onion--"Airport Security Pig Finds Concealed Truffles"--was a sign of the times. For a brief history of why pigs have traditionally proved so good at finding truffles, see this 1982 article by Walter Sullivan in the New York Times.

Pigs and the Blood Thinner Heparin

2008-02-29T20:59:00.001-08:00

My mom had a knee-replacement surgery last year and one of the drugs she was given to prevent clots was called heparin. She had to be tested regularly to make sure she didn't have too high or too low of a dose. I hadn't given the medicine much thought until I read this morning's New York Times, which had a front-page article by Walt Bogdanich headlined "Blood Thinner Might Be Tied to More Deaths" (here). My mom is not taking heparin at the moment, but I was still interested. To my surprise, I learned that most heparin is derived from pig intestines. In fact, as Bogdanich notes, some of the recent problems associated with heparin perhaps stem from the unregulated Chinese family workshops that scrape the mucous membrane from pig's intestines then bake it into a crude form of heparin that is later refined. Near the end of his article, Bogdanich writes "the Chinese heparin market has been in turmoil over the last year, as pig disease has swept through the country, depleting stocks, leading some farmers to sell sick pigs into the market and forcing heparin producers to scramble for new sources of raw material." Not all heparin comes from pigs, of course; much of it comes from bovine tissue as well. There have been over 400 adverse reactions to heparin, although it's not clear how many deaths have resulted, as the people receiving this anticoagulant are often awfully sick to begin with. While the health issues are obviously paramount here, I'm sure glad my mom is not a vegetarian or vegan, although if she were, how would she know about the source of this medicine and what other options might there have been?

The photo above accompanied a Wall Street Journal article "Making Heparin is a Dirty Job," which I found here. It is an interesting and kinda disgusting account of Chinese heparin factories.

Wooly Pigs in the Pacific Northwest

2008-02-28T14:55:00.000-08:00

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.

Tigers & Piglets: An Urban Legend Explained

2008-02-26T14:55:00.000-08:00

One of my students sent me an e-mail over the break with photos of a tigress nursing piglets in little tiger costumes. According to the e-mail, forwarded under the title "A lesson in world peace among divergent cultures (and religions)," this scene took place at a zoo in California. Before the images and the "story," it reads: "Once more my faith in animals grows stronger. We could learn so much from them. Imagine!" After the photos, this version of the e-mail ends with "Now, please tell me one more time... Why can't the rest of the world get along?"

I told my student that I'd seen these before and wanted to check out the story. Thankfully, Snopes.com came to the rescue yet again, letting me know that these were real photos, but with an inaccurate description. You can read the full story here, but in brief, I received an even more recent e-mail than the one Snopes addressed; they discuss one that made the rounds in which the tigress was supposedly given these piglets as a treatment for depression after losing her own cubs. As it turns out, these images come from the Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Thailand, where this is apparently a common form of visual entertainment for zoo patrons.

There have been a lot of problems at, and concerns about this zoo: the Animal Welfare Institute has noted that this zoo has been investigated for illegally breeding and selling its tigers for use in Chinese medicines and that somewhere around 80 to 100 tigers died at the zoo due to an outbreak of avian influenza. I guess this type of creation of a story and a heavily-forwarded e-mail around an image isn't all that surprising--just look at how much has been made out of Barack Obama's decision to be a good guest on a visit to Kenya.