If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Kenneth's post about the loss of his beloved dog has prompted in all of us, I know, an aching sympathy. We all understand what it means to love an animal. I do not think any of us could feel that love if we believed a dog was no more than some kind of insensate carbon-based furry machine. We instinctively know, just looking at a dog, that it feels love and pain and many other things that resemble our experience of life in important ways.
Pigs too are highly intelligent animals. All mammals, clearly, have much in common with dogs. So how can we do this to them?
”It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes,” writes Matthew Scully. ”And no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory.”
I am not going to post a photo of a pig factory. The sight makes me cringe.
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Dec '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Bacon. It can even turn vegans.
Aug '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Wandering around M St, did you fall into a BBQ by mistake ? Were you following a cat ?
Jun '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Hogs are plenty smart, but they're not good neighbors. If you're around wild hogs for any length of time, you don't care if they're comfortable or not. You pretty much want to kill 'em. They eat what you eat, and they get there first.
Feral Hogs in Missouri
Edited on Feb 12, 2011 at 2:24pmhttp://news.yahoo.com/video/environment-15749659/feral-hogs-in-missouri-16734999
Feral Hogs: The Pig Problem in Texas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntKyFWOoNI
Dec '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
etoiledunord: Hogs are plenty smart, but they're not good neighbors. If you're around wild hogs for any length of time, you don't care if they're comfortable or not. You pretty much want to kill 'em. They eat what you eat, and they get there first.
Edited on Feb 12 at 02:24 pm
They'll also eat you, given half a chance.
Dec '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
So, should a sheep rancher kill wolves and coyotes, which, after all, are dogs? Or is it more humane to let the predators kill and devour the lambs?
Does a bull elephant in must have the right to trample through a village's crops, sentencing the villagers to starvation, and possibly even trampling a few of the villagers to death directly? Or are the villagers ethically permitted to kill that magnificent wild creature in self-defense?
My cousin once showed up at a family dinner with a brisket. He announced, "This is Daisy. She was a good milk cow." The general philosophy of, "first we feed them for a while, and then they feed us," seems to me to be the right standard for animal husbandry: care humanely for your livestock, slaughter it humanely, and make good use of its meat, hide and other parts. Because in a very real sense, there would be far, far fewer pigs and cows and chickens in the world if humans didn't raise them to eat them.
Jul '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Claire Berlinski, Ed.:
”It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes,” writes Matthew Scully. ”And no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory.”
Ha! Tell me my next meal has to be the product of a soybean factory & you'll see plenty of cringing.
Edited on Feb 12, 2011 at 2:40pmAug '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
I have a friend who farms and he sometimes spreads the sludge from animal processing on his soybean fields. Being downwind is almost unbearably rank. The distance between your conviction and the trunk of our existence could be a mirage.
Dec '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Palaeologus
Claire Berlinski, Ed.:
”It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes,” writes Matthew Scully. ”And no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory.”
Ha! Tell me my next meal has to be the product of a soybean factory & you'll see plenty of cringing. · Feb 12 at 2:38pm
Edited on Feb 12 at 02:40 pm
In that soybean factory, unborn soya plants are cruelly torn from their wombs and subjected to horrific tortures, like being ground up alive.
At least we generally have the decency to ensure that our animals are dead before we start eating them. By contrast, we rip plants out of the soil (sometimes only their reproductive organs with their unborn children still in them!) and then boil or fry or bake them alive -- or flay their skins off them and devour their living flesh.
Some vegans even take pride in only eating food that is alive, believing that humanely killing it reduces the pleasure and nutritional value of eating it.
Jul '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Stuart Creque
etoiledunord: Hogs are plenty smart, but they're not good neighbors. If you're around wild hogs for any length of time, you don't care if they're comfortable or not. You pretty much want to kill 'em. They eat what you eat, and they get there first.
Edited on Feb 12 at 02:24 pm
They'll also eat you, given half a chance. · Feb 12 at 2:27pm
Dennis Miller had a stand-up bit in which he addressed the mink. As I recall, his conclusion was: If the roles were reversed, this little bastard would be wearing your pelt. So when you hit your knees tonight, thank your walking-upright God it played out the way it did.
Sep '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Claire you have a tender heart, but I would probably not make much of a farmer, factory or otherwise.
It is not wrong to have empathy for the pigs, but I think you have fallen victim to the unwholesome tendency to see animals as if they were humans. I think rating animals by intelligence is not a cogent argument either. What I take for your point of view is that it is OK to kill them and eat them but not OK to overcrowd them or cut off their tails before then. Once you have embraced the humanization can vegetarianism be far behind. There seems to me to be no middle ground. If they are smart how can you eat them.
Anyway I'm glad their are tender hearts out there. I'm also glad you are not in charge of our food.
Oct '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Sooo many sides to this consumption of protien thing. One is not fond of the factory style farming of critters. My dad was a meatcutter and am all to familiar the subject.
Knew some family farms were the kids raised cattle and such for food. Seemed a pretty healthy notion to let the kids name the animals, Burger, Steak and the like.
My condolences to Ken and the passing of his dog. Mine was a rescue pup and has proven to be something more than family.
As for hogs, better them than you...And you cannot out run one, think about that.
Jul '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
I have two pot-bellied pigs, brothers, going on three years old. They're probably pushing 190 to 200 lbs. They have an excellent sense of direction and can learn and follow commands easily.
Pretty cool pets.
Feb '11
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Wow...heavy. I went vegetarian for a while in the '90's but fell off the path later. Killing creatures for sport or trophies is evil, or at least pathetic and repulsive. I once went on a service call to a rich man's house in Houston, he had an entire gallery full of elephant-trunk lamps and leopardskin rugs and the like. Disgusting.
As for eatin' 'em, well, I think most humans, like other higher primates, strongly prefer some animal protein in the diet. Chimps hunt monkeys and rip them apart, alive. There's no easy way to get around the fact that their destiny is to become a chop or steak.
Jul '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Is it moral to inflict pain on sentient animals? I used to walk past recently-killed white pigs laid out on pallets in S.F. Chinatown waiting to be wheeled in for butchering. Their long-lashed eyes were closed as if in peaceful sleep. They had known death approached and, being more intelligent than dogs, suffered as much as would any creature with death imminent, including you and me. It is painful to think about such things -- avoid Peter Singer on this subject -- so I put such thoughts from my mind a few steps beyond where they lay. We had an omelet and bacon for dinner tonight. I understand it's wrong from a certain point of view. I also know the pig would probably never have lived its short life if it were not for the human appetite for its flesh. I'm sorry I saw the pigs laid out on the sidewalk because they made me think about this. But I've done nothing to alter my diet. So far.
Edited on Feb 12, 2011 at 5:56pmDec '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Palaeologus
Stuart Creque
etoiledunord: Hogs are plenty smart, but they're not good neighbors. If you're around wild hogs for any length of time, you don't care if they're comfortable or not. You pretty much want to kill 'em. They eat what you eat, and they get there first.
Edited on Feb 12 at 02:24 pm
They'll also eat you, given half a chance. · Feb 12 at 2:27pm
Dennis Miller had a stand-up bit in which he addressed the mink. As I recall, his conclusion was: If the roles were reversed, this little bastard would be wearing your pelt. So when you hit your knees tonight, thank your walking-upright God it played out the way it did. · Feb 12 at 3:20pm
A former boss of mine is an avid hunter: it's how he fills his family freezer. (For sport, he shoots clays.)
A friend of his was bow-hunting deer with his father when a wild boar attacked the father. Dad got off a shot before the boar had him down and had two of his fingers off. The son managed to take down the boar before it ate Dad.
May '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
I watched Food, Inc. a while back, and it changed the way I bought meat and poultry products. When I was six, my dad took me to a slaughterhouse, so I'd appreciate where my food came from. He grew up on a farm and regularly raised and slaughtered chickens, pigs and cows for family consumption. He wanted me to know food didn't just magically appear in styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic. My grandfather grew wheat for decades, but now leases his land to a rancher that raises Angus cattle. It makes me feel good when I visit to see cows grazing in green fields in the sunshine, and not housed in some containment facility being stuffed with corn. I don't have a problem eating meat, but I'd like the animals I eat to at least be treated humanely for the duration of their lives. Fair treatment isn't a priority for a lot of corporate farms that raise livestock. You have to pay more for the principle, but I think it's worth it.
Sep '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Stuart Creque
etoiledunord: Hogs are plenty smart, but they're not good neighbors. If you're around wild hogs for any length of time, you don't care if they're comfortable or not. You pretty much want to kill 'em. They eat what you eat, and they get there first.
Edited on Feb 12 at 02:24 pm
They'll also eat you, given half a chance. · Feb 12 at 2:27pm
Which puts to mind the old country saw, when asked where so and so is, "He went to [expletive] and the hogs ate him." And they would too.
Edited on Feb 12, 2011 at 10:05pmMay '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
Chalk me up for the Great Chain of Being. I'll eat any lesser creature, but there's a difference between a dog and a tomato.
Dec '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
By the way, well-managed range lets a rancher turn open space into protein. Getting protein out of soya and other crops necessarily requires plowing up the land; doing it efficiently requires changing the local ecosystem drastically, including introducing various chemicals and eliminating biodiversity.
May '10
Re: If Dogs Go to Heaven, How Can We Put Pigs Through Hell?
To much soy is bad for you. There are estrogen-mimicking compounds in soy beans that can reduce fertility in women, trigger early puberty and disrupt development of fetuses and children.
Give me the cow or the hog.