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From “Swine of the Times: The making of the modern pig” in the May 2006 Harper’s
My interest in pig sex began over drinks at a bar in Burley, Idaho. My friend Becky was telling me that she couldn’t stand her job at a big hog farm outside of town. Each day she faced an unending line of sows filing into the room where she worked. Occasionally one of the 200-pound pigs broke ranks, knocking Becky down.
“Sometimes they get nervous when you stimulate them,” she said.
I set down my beer.
“Stimulate?”
“Yeah, for artificial insemination. Usually if you bring a boar around they’ll get in the mood. But if not you just have to get in there and start rubbing away.”
At my urging, my friend obligingly laid out the intricacies of coaxing sows to conceive, along with equally piquant methods of harvesting boar semen. It all seemed like an awful lot of trouble for something creatures normally do without encouragement.
I love my prosciutto, my bacon in the morning, and although I’m not usually squeamish about the realities of agriculture, I’m not sure I had ever thought of my food as something that depended upon artificial insemination. It began to make perfect sense, of course, when I started to gather the facts. The science of pork production has made major strides in the last twenty years, and one wouldn’t expect to find pigs mating the old-fashioned way at state-of-the-art hog facilities. But, as I was to find, artificial insemination (“AI,” in the industry) is more than a sign of modernization. It has served as the enabling technology for a process that has transformed pigs from affable, potbellied forest dwellers to panicky, torpedo-shaped clones that cannot survive outdoors but nonetheless produce monstrous, lean hams.
Previously, any concerns I might have had about hog farming always vanished right about lunchtime. But when I discovered the ubiquity of this breeding technique I became curious: If it takes human-aided swine masturbation to bring the Christmas ham to the family feast, what else is involved in producing America’s pork? Although artificial insemination is by no means the worst indignity inflicted on the modern pig in the course of this transformation, it is a fair symbol for all the other indignities we have visited on it.
Read the rest of “Swine of the Times: The making of the modern pig” for free…
“[But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution?] Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal “drift” and episodic genomic “shift.” But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China’s natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers. In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million U.S. hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.”
“Archbishop Discourages Wine, Harvard Closes Clinic and School Sends Boy Home for Wearing Mask”; Stylish particulate breathing masks (via); Pork Magazine; Bacon vodka
“The case is particularly sensitive because of a series of attacks on Asian fishermen in the [Keswick, Ontario,] area in 2007– given the name ‘nipper tipping’ by locals– which led to a high-profile investigation by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Five such cases in 2007, ranging from violent car chases to fishermen on piers being pushed into the water, led to criminal charges. As a result of the publicity, many other Asian anglers came forward to say they had been abused or harassed while fishing in the Lake Simcoe area.”
“More than four-in-ten Americans (42%) say they heard a lot about the arrest in Massachusetts last week of a man suspected of robbing and killing a woman he met through the Craigslist web site. That is the same percentage that say they heard a lot about President Obama’s friendly greeting for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at a recent regional summit. More than a third had heard at least a little about the arrest (35%) and the Chavez encounter (34%). Republicans were more likely than Democrats to have heard a lot about Obama’s handshake with Chavez (51% vs. 39%).”
“Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.”
Ratio of the number of cicada eggs per square mile of southern New Jersey to the number of stars in the Milky Way:
Jeffrey Lockwood, University of Wyoming (Laramie)/American Museum of Natural History (N.Y.C.)
A Singaporean company unveiled Kissenger, a pair of plastic lips mounted on a large plastic egg, which transmits real-time interactive kisses to a distant lover. “I am not interested in the sexual uses for it,” said the device’s inventor. “We’ve taken several steps to minimize the creepiness.”
The practice of sexualized eyeball licking was causing conjunctivitis in Japanese sixth graders.
