by Gordon Grice
So much for the safest way to hunt boar in medieval Europe. There were other methods for the brave, including hacking at the boar with a sword from horseback, if you could afford to lose your horse, and your life.
Pure hunting of swine has never vanished, but it gave way to a subtler relation, a sort of partnership with one party less than willing.
The partnership of human and pig must have started when we settled down. We stopped following the migrating herds and stayed in one place, somewhere with firewood and running water close by, and when we did, our fatal flaw began to show, the flaw that best defines us to this day: our habit of making trash. Old bones and gristle, unusable scraps of hide, the feces of human and dog (the dog was already with us), broken tools of wood or stone or bone, plants cut to make room for our shelters, the husks and shells of our food—we made middens. Smorgasbords for the scavenger.
Pigs came for our refuse, rooted out our corpses, raided our crops. We had set an accidental trap: everything we cast off or set around us drew pigs in, and when they came close in the night we could kill them. They were good eating. Almost every part of a pig is edible, from feet and tail to that gristly disk of a nose, though some parts have to be soaked or simmered longer than others.
Conversely, the pig finds us utterly edible. Theories about the religious origins of burial tend to overlook the emotional realities people faced. We didn’t want to witness the eating of our kin: that’s why we began to bury them.
The folk wisdom of the late twentieth century explains the Jewish and Moslem taboos against pork as a recognition of parasites in the meat, but a better explanation lies in the stony ground of Palestine. There, people could not always bury corpses simply by digging down through topsoil. Cavities gouged from layers of limestone exposed in cliffs; natural caves; hollows beneath the roots of great trees—these held the dead. The tombs were sealed with rocks. A family owned its tomb for generations, so that when the Old Testament says a man went “to lie with his ancestors,” the image is more literal than may be readily apparent. This is the land where pigs were called unclean, unfit to eat or even to touch, because in this place the pig, that rooter of human leavings, devoured corpses, and the problem of keeping swine from the dead was never entirely solved.
Other cloven-hoofed animals, like the cow, were considered edible, but the pig wasn’t, because it “cheweth not the cud”: meaning that it does not have multiple stomachs, meaning that it doesn’t restrict its diet to vegetable matter, meaning that to eat the pig is to eat the human flesh it may have eaten. The taboo colors our image of the pig. William Golding made a pig Lord of the Flies (the term itself is a biblical demon-god’s name) in his novel of human degeneration. You see the taboo evoked in horror fiction now and again, the pig as eater of human flesh, or the human mistaken for pig and eaten by his friends.
In the book of Isaiah, the sins of a heathen people include sitting “among graves” and eating “detestable things”—mice, the blood of “unclean” animals, and the flesh of swine. The link between pigs and graveyards comes up again in a peculiar New Testament story of exorcism. Arriving by boat in a country abutting the Sea of Galilee, Jesus meets a man possessed by demons. Three different writers relate this story, and the details about this man vary according to the teller of the tale. He is variously naked, given to self-mutilation, a howler in the night, and a breaker of the chains his countrymen tried to bind him with. No doubt in later times he would have been called a feral man, and in the twentieth century a schizophrenic or an autistic. Matthew claims there were two such men, whom he identifies as swineherds.
All the writers agree the possessed come to Jesus from the tombs of the dead, where he lives as an outcast. He describes Jesus’ attempts at exorcism as torment, and names himself “Legion” because many demons inhabit him. Striking a bargain with the demons, who are reluctant to be hurled into “the abyss,” Jesus allows them to possess a nearby herd of swine. The swine rush over a cliff and into the sea, where they drown—an odd outcome, since pigs swim well, but that’s how the story goes. That last image, the pigs stampeding toward a suicidal dive, seems silly if you picture stubby-legged, pink-skinned, heavy-bellied domestic pigs. But picture instead a fleet, bristling multitude, their jowls flecked with foam, their tusks set at a slight gape for ready use.
The local citizens’ committee, hearing of these goings-on from the formerly possessed himself, shows an appalling lack of gratitude by asking Jesus to leave town.
The madman of the tombs and his companions, the swine. The story influenced Western thought for centuries. In medieval Germany pigs were subjected to exorcism before they were slaughtered. Even today people claim to be possessed by demons or multiple personalities, and the script they follow—the priest demanding names, the torment of the raveling truth, the frantic bargaining of the evictees—is the story of the swineherd.
To understand the pig, we should now take a long detour into the lives of insects and salamanders.
One warm spring day during World War II they brought the snowplow out in a little Ohio town. It pushed great drifts off the streets and onto the sidewalks. The drifts were thickest beneath the streetlights, some of them three or four feet deep. They weren’t made of snow.
They were made of mayflies. Each was brown, slightly furry, with transparent wings that jutted above its back at forty-five degrees when they were at rest— though in death they broke off and scattered everywhere; you found them sticking to windshields and freshly washed dishes. If you had seen a mayfly in the day or two before the swarm, you might have taken it for a mosquito, if you paid any attention to it at all. They are plain-looking creatures made noticeable only by their quantity, though water pollution now thins their numbers and prevents the great swarms that used to occur in the Midwest.
A mayfly spends its youth as a wingless carnivore before it crawls up a stalk of grass from the bottom of a creek. It hangs there drying until its back splits open and a winged insect painfully extracts itself, leaving its old aquatic self a withering shell. The winged thing crawls up the stalk a little farther and clings there, still as the dead, through the cool night and the following morning. Then it, too, splits a seam along the back, and a fully developed mayfly emerges.
Through a seemingly miraculous bit of timing we don’t understand, the mayfly finds that all its fellows have emerged at the same time. The males swarm that evening, forming clouds that eclipse the moon. The females come to watch the swarm and leave with a mate. They couple on the wing. The male is dead before he hits the ground. The female finds water to drop her eggs into. She’s dead by the morning, her carcass feeding a fish or cluttering a road.
The mayfly’s apparently short life is not so short. The adult only lasts a day or so, but the naiad form, the gilled predator that lives at the bottom of a creek or pond, lives for months or even years. In other words, the mayfly’s lifespan is about the same as other insects, but an unusually long proportion of it is spent in childhood.
The same phenomenon of extended youth occurs in various corners of the animal kingdom. Some species of June beetle live for three years as burrowing white grubs before emerging as adults late one spring to fly around eating and mating for a week or two. Some butterflies spend all but a day of their lives as egg or caterpillar.
There’s a salamander in Mexico that never sheds its gills and fins for lungs and legs. While other salamanders eventually prove amphibious, this one stays merely aquatic. It even reproduces in its tadpolelike state. So the Peter Pan syndrome in animals doesn’t have to include a short adult life following an extended childhood; it can involve a permanent childhood, with the adult sexual powers awakening in that youthful state where they wouldn’t normally occur. The principle is called neoteny. This broad term includes such diverse phenomena as extended youth and the retention of a single juvenile trait into adulthood, and it can apply to both anatomy and behavior.
The reasons for neoteny depend on the particular case. In one of the butterf
ly species I mentioned, neoteny seems to occur because the predators in that ecosystem, mostly birds, eat a lot of flying insects, but not so many crawling ones. By reducing the time it spends as a vulnerable flyer, the butterfly improves its odds of surviving. The human form is basically that of an infant ape. Our big toes don’t rotate into the opposed position to give us the grasping feet of adult apes; they stay parallel to the other toes, the position seen in a gorilla fetus. This trait makes us better at walking over open ground. We also have long childhoods; we reach puberty later than apes do. This apparently allows our brains to grow larger, and a larger brain results in extra intelligence.
Neoteny affects many mammals. For example, it’s normal in felines to be trusting, friendly, and curious as infants. Trust makes the kitten or cub capable of accepting parental care; a friendly demeanor helps the parent want to care for the cub; and play allows the physically underdeveloped animal to develop hunting skills by practice. Most wild members of the cat family grow out of these traits, because they soon outgrow the need for parental care and education and are ready to live a solitary life in which having other big predators around is no advantage except at mating time. That’s why so many people who buy a young tiger or mountain lion as a pet get attacked when the cat reaches breeding age. No longer in need of a surrogate parent, the cat begins to see the human as an enemy.
But domestic cats usually retain their childish features into breeding age. They continue to like being touched by their human companions, whom they treat as parents, and they return the affection. They like playing with strings and other toys all their lives. This neoteny is a survival trait, because it allows cats to live symbiotically with humans and therefore to be fed reliably.
Neoteny doesn’t have to affect the entire animal. It’s possible for an animal to have one juvenile trait in an otherwise standard adulthood. Sometimes neotenous traits appear in unexpected groupings. Researchers who tried to domesticate white foxes to simplify the harvesting of fur were stymied by one such grouping. They found that the juvenile trait of docility, which they could produce after a few generations of selective breeding, was accompanied by the mottled coat of a young canid. Of course, a mottled coat defeated the purpose of using the animals for their fur.
We don’t understand exactly how neoteny works genetically. Some biologists think there’s a special gene for neoteny which controls how other genes express themselves. Whatever the mechanism, the fetal development of an animal group provides it with a treasury of resources that can be exploited when necessary. Environmental pressures bring out some helpful adaptation derived from some early stage of the animal’s development. This happens in a few generations, a much shorter span than that required for most evolutionary adaptations.
Neoteny is a component—maybe the main component—in domestication. Most domestic animals reach adulthood with a mix of what would be adult and juvenile traits in their undomesticated counterparts.
We share some neotenous traits with domestic pigs. A wild boar is hairier than a domestic pig; our closest relatives, the great apes, are more hirsute than we are. Domestic pigs and humans both have relatively short snouts, as wild piglets and baby chimpanzees do. I’m not sure these traits have any particular advantage for either of us. Other neotenous traits, however, definitely affect the pig’s status as a domestic animal. For example, the ability to mate and conceive at any time of the year is characteristic of pubescent mammals, rather than adults. The domestic pig is useful to us as food because it reproduces far more often than wild pigs with breeding seasons, and can therefore supply us with more meat.
The pig’s neotenous ability to retain fat—literally baby fat—also makes it useful to us as food. Wild pigs are leaner. (“There’s hardly any meat on a piney-rooter,” a former pig farmer told me, using a local term for feral pigs.) We even enhance the extended youth mechanically, by castrating young males.
When domestic pigs escape, or are turned loose to build a wild population for hunting, something strange happens. After a few generations, the pigs look like wild ones—the long legs and snout, the color, the hairy hide. They have reverted. It’s precisely the opposite of the domestication process, in which those wild characters are extinguished (or rather, submerged to smolder) in favor of fat-building body styles. The changes we make in swine undo themselves in the wild.
There are myriad myths from almost every culture that claim modern man is inferior to some earlier race—giants, angels, gods, men of gold. There are fictions, from Tarzan of the Apes to The Jungle Book to Lord of the Flies, that wonder how wild we could get if we were separated from our own kind. There are science fiction stories in which our precarious civilizations collapse, some catastrophe turning us loose from ourselves. These are all, I think, reflections of our deep unease. We know how close we are to the wild. Much of our success comes from neotenous abilities: varying our body fat with the climate, reproducing without season to stay ahead of our predators and competitors, leaving our skulls unsutured at birth so our brains can balloon. We have not exactly evolved from the ape; we are apes whose changes, whose minds, are made of childhood dreams.
Witness the dissection of a human body. Try not to notice the surface of the body: the curve of the nose, the color of the hair—in short, the characters that mark this man as an individual. Do not see him that way, because we are about to delve beneath the surface.
The first incisions: a diagonal across each breast, then a long one that begins just below the sternum and ends at the pubic bone. The opening of the ribbed flesh with shears and retractors—a surprisingly loud, untidy process. A tour of the organs: the lobes of liver, the veins covering the heart like ivy, the mass of the pancreas, the single stomach, the haphazard loops of intestine packed in a filmy membrane, the kidneys you have always pictured as distinct little beans but which are really mere protuberances on the back of the body cavity.
Now witness the slaughter of a hog. The iron jolt as twelve-pound sledge meets skull: more a vibration of the ground than a sound. The thin knife finding an artery in the throat, an artery whose analog right now shudders against your own voice box. The blood erupting in crisp jets; the hog hoist by its hind feet, the wait for the last tangled stream of the blood. A winch dips the carcass in a barrel of hot water, preparing the hide for the scraping that removes the hairs. A cut down the middle to open the viscera, the stroke of an axe to break the sternum and let the ribs swing out like saloon doors. The rest is familiar from the cadaver: lobes of liver and the rest, even to the single stomach in its caul of fat— not several stomachs, as horses and cattle and even the pig’s cousins, the peccaries, have. The intestines in their filmy membrane look, as human intestines do, like long sausage casings—of course, these will be. As the guts come tumbling out together (close the intestine with a string and cut the anus out to keep the filth clear of the meat), look for the kidneys, stuck on the back wall of the body cavity.
The second-century physician Galen looked into the body of the pig to know the human heart—the law forbade him to work on cadavers. Galen’s findings formed the unquestioned laws of anatomy for over a thousand years. The age of empirical science transformed the human way of thinking, revealing the lies in many things we thought we knew, but it didn’t change our model of human anatomy: we still know it to be close kin to the pig’s. Anatomists call the pig “horizontal human” because of what we share inside, just as the human cannibals of New Guinea called their victims “long pig.”
The resemblance crops up in a hundred uses. People training to be forensic entomologists are presented with murdered pigs wrapped in sheets or buried in shallow graves, and asked to find the time of death. They deduce as if the corpse were human, because the same insects recycle us both. Experimental pigs are murdered, dismembered with axes and saws, thrown into condemned houses, and the houses burned down. Doctors study the bones to know how the evidence of murder alters in fire, because our heated bones go through the same shifts of color as the pig’s. Resea
rchers try to find ways to pack more meat onto the frame of the pig. They’ve been splicing genes, adulterating the pig with the only domestic mammal that’s better at packing on pounds: the human. Doctors need proteins from human blood to treat hemophilia and heart attack, and gene splicing can make a pig’s milk rich in these proteins. Maybe you dissected a fetal pig in college biology and saw the human anatomy in miniature.
It is the kinship of pig and human that makes their meat dangerous to us. The parasitic worms we get from them are human parasites, equally at home in a horizontal or vertical gut. Our domesticated proximity, our insistence on feeding them our refuse and making them live penned in their own dung, gave them these gut-worms. They are like us inside, and also out. The array of pig colors includes smooth black, chocolate, rich tan, the sallow of ripe pears, pearl limned with pink—the colors of human skin. A human burned beyond his skin’s capacity to heal can be patched with living grafts of porcine hide, which does not sweat but will redden in the sun.
We humans eat 88 million pigs in a year, according to one estimate. Such consumption is a corollary of our own domestication, our insistence on settling and having buildings and books. Having outstripped the world’s ability to produce animals for our hunting, we must produce our own prey. To manage that, we breed pigs in great numbers and pen them on traditional farms or in mass confinements—“pig factories,” as some call them. I wanted to see how a confined breeding operation works.
The idea at the breeding farm was to keep from bringing in disease. We had to shower in, using shampoo and soap supplied by the company. We left our own clothes in the locker room and put on company clothes. A stock of undershorts, coveralls, and boots in many sizes waited on shelves outside the shower. They didn’t have my size in coveralls, though, and I had to walk around the place in a Quasimodo stoop.
