Would this little fella put you off your bacon roll?
The Pig And I Kristoffer Hatteland Endresen
Greystone Books €24.99
My favourite fact from this book wasn’t that pigs’ eyes are so far apart that their field of vision is 310 degrees. It wasn’t that their squeals can reach 130 decibels, almost as loud as a jet plane. It was that, contrary to the well known saying, pigs cannot in fact sweat. In this respect they, like Prince Andrew, have been unfairly accused.
The Norwegian writer Kristoffer Hatteland Endresen felt guilty about his relationship with the animal. Like Homer Simpson, he enjoys pork. When Homer’s daughter Lisa points out just how much he consumes, Homer replies that the pig is a ‘wonderful, magical animal’. Unlike the cartoon character, Endresen can see the irony in this, so he volunteered at a local farm.
The book recounts his experiences, as well as the history of mankind’s relationship with the creature Winston Churchill adored. ‘Dogs look up to you,’ said the politician, ‘cats look down on you… [but a pig] just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal’.
It’s a long relationship. The first known human drawing – scratched into Indonesian rock 45,000 years ago – is of a pig. The Romans used them in bizarre recipes, such as ‘suckling pig with a chicken sitting astride it wearing a helmet and carrying a spear’.
We see them as clever. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm it’s the pigs who become teachers, while a 2021 study by Pennsylvania State University tested them on a computer game in which you use a joystick to drag a dot into a coloured area. Pigs proved as good as chimpanzees, and in fact wanted to carry on playing even when they stopped getting the M&Ms that had been their reward.
Yet at the same time we see the creature as unclean and dangerous. The Koran forbids ‘the flesh of swine’, while the Old Testament says of pigs: ‘They are unclean to you.’ Endresen reads about a modern farmer’s wife in Russia who was eaten by her own pigs, and experiences their viciousness himself when he falls over in the pen one day and they begin to attack him.
One of Endresen’s most challenging tasks is helping with the artificial insemination. This involves squeezing tubes of fresh pig sperm into sows. Some people claim mimicking the boar as you stand behind the females increases their arousal and fertility. He and the farmer decide to skip this bit.
In the end Endresen spends five months at the farm. At the beginning, as he holds a newborn pig, he tries and fails to make himself say, ‘I’m going to eat you.’ Yet by the end, as he travels in the lorry carrying that same pig to be slaughtered, he has come to share the farmer’s lack of emotion about the animals. This is due partly, he thinks, to the simple effect of time, but also because he knows that the pigs have been well cared for, and lived a perfectly acceptable life. He continues to eat pork, agreeing with the farmer that ‘pigs are industrial animals, they’re not for cuddling’. But it’s a conclusion into which Endresen puts a lot of thought.
His discussion of modern farming methods and animal welfare is well researched, and at points branches into philosophy as he asks what it means to experience happiness, and how much we can ever truly understand how another species feels.
Perhaps the uncertainties and contradictions are best summed up by the rapper Snoop Dogg, who in 2012 converted to Rastafarianism without realising that its dietary rules are the same as those in Judaism. This caused him a problem, as he loves pork. ‘Me and Porky Pig,’ he explained, ‘we agree with each other.’