WHEN PIGS FLY

When a truck hauling pigs to slaughter crashed on a freeway, I was happy to be out of animal control and not have to try to cope with the problem. Dead, maimed and freaked-out pigs among traffic is not anything anyone could prepare for. Another story in the newspaper was about a HUGE pig that had had to be shot after escaping and running amok on a freeway. It took a backhoe to load it back into its truck.

Among the very first animal control laws were those to control pigs in the Boston colonies. The general rule of thumb with domestic animals is that pigs must be fenced IN (because it takes a very strong fence to keep them there), horses and cows must be fenced OUT (in the open range states), and sheep and goats must be accompanied by a herder and flagged out -- that is, not a fence but a signal that the herder should obey. Sheep need a herder to prevent predators and goats need a herder because it’s pretty hard to fence goats at all. These rules just grew and formed themselves around the nature of each species. Enforcement might range from neighbor protests to gunfire to a lawsuit for crop damage.

We learn as little kids about which species are “domestic” and which are “wild,” and then maybe as older folks we think about “feral.” (Animals once domestic that have gone wild.) But in general people are not very sophisticated about such categories and there are not enough of them to exactly fit the realities. Pigs are a good example. There are domestic AND wild pig species. There are feral pigs and since pot-bellied pigs there have been pet pigs. We eat them, pet them, teach them tricks, neglect them, make stories around them, turn them loose to go wild, manage them like range animals, treat them as industrial units, and use them as experimental subjects -- they can cross just about every category boundary we have without overly upsetting anyone. That there are still places on the planet where dog and cat meat or dog and cat skins are accepted parts of commerce horrifies many people. This is a huge violation of American taboos so that urban myths constantly circulate about pets bought from shelters for food. “It’s a giveaway when they begin to feel a puppy’s ribs and remark that they seem nice and fat!”

But pigs are attractive as food except in places where they are pariah animals who clean the streets by eating scraps, excrement, even animal carcasses and dead people. Dogs can serve this purpose, too, so they can share a taboo, the perception that they are unclean -- to be avoided even in terms of contact. The taboo on pigs, right there in the Bible, is thought to be due to their physiological similarity to humans which means they can pass diseases to humans. Or some have suggested that it takes a lot of water resources to keep pigs cool enough (the real purpose of the traditional muddy pig sty) and that in warm places where water is scarce, they are far too much of a luxury -- leading to the hogging of resources.

On the other end of the spectrum, Americans don’t like the idea of eating horses. In fact, if we treated horses the way we treat pigs, everyone would be upset. We romanticize wild horses and burroes, but not wild pigs or goats which are enormously destructive to wildlife. It was evidently a “wild pig” that recently pooped in the spinach, killing people with e.coli infections, though it may have been that he was only a “wild pig” at parties.

While I was an animal control officer, we never did have to deal with pigs though we were sort of prepared, since the shelter was built on the original county “poor farm” and had the pig barns nearby. I was delighted to find an article about how to make pigs go where they were wanted. The two main techniques were to pick up their rear trotters, converting them into a kind of wheelbarrow which could be steered around, or to put a bucket over their heads and back them up, using their attempts to get their heads back out to power them along. Someone on the staff -- maybe it was Oswald -- knew how to herd pigs through chutes by using a square of light plywood, which the pigs intepreted as a wall. Also, it helps to protect your legs from pig tusks.

Like any animals, even a rhino, baby pigs are cute and appealing, especially when they are pink and have a clever voice-over, like Babe. They are indeed as smart as Wilbur, Charlotte the Spider’s friend. Pot-bellied pigs seem to bond with people strongly enough to justify bringing them into the house (not an Indonesian hut but a Western-style house). When the craze hit Portland, one man who kept a sort of farm-in-the-city in his fenced yard, added a pig to his little flock of chickens. We had to invent a permit that split the difference between the fears of some neighbors and the assurances of the owner. But pot-bellied pigs can be winningly small or big as any pig. Where do you draw the line?

Pig poop, even composted, is close enough to human excrement to be objectionable for soil amendment in the city, but no one ever tried it in Portland. I don’t think there was a law against it. I bought some by mistake here in Montana and had to use it on the borders farthest from the house.

What I’m getting at is that knowing the species of an animal doesn’t really tell a person much. We are used to conventional representations and make our laws to fit them, but there are always exceptions that crop up. The best laws have escape clauses. Animal control officers who can use good judgment, sometimes even resorting to a blind eye, permit systems based on realities, laws that suit the community standards rather than philosophical ideals, and complaint and court systems that use both common sense and democratic standards -- all these make animal control effective.

On further thought, I do remember a pig case in Portland. There is a huge “wild” park that is technically within the city limits. In the Seventies, before street people began to build hooches in there -- taking urban crime in with them -- an old black lady who lived up the street from my mother had recognized an opportunity. Down south where she came from, one turned out pigs in the spring into the oak forest to forage for themselves. In the fall one rounded them up and sold them for a tidy profit. So she turned 300 pigs loose in Forest Park.

As I recall, we thought about the political ramifications, scolded her, gave her a time limit for getting them out, and hoped we wouldn’t get anymore complaints, since we had no desire to mount a pig roundup. But it sure did keep street people out of the forest. Maybe the issue should be rethought.