The Pig and I

 The Pig and I

The question today is about the farm-raised pig from its birth to eventual harvesting. What can we say from a moral, sanctity of life or existential basis?

This is an age-old problem of eating meat, particularly meat that is farm-raised. At first blush, you might think it is immoral to slaughter animals and eat them. However, this is only a more refined way of ancient hunting. We now even farm-raise salmon, shrimp, and other fish. Watching the nature shows, we feel pity for the seal attacked by killer whales, but that same seal consumes kilos of fish to reach its size. Or feel for the walrus, hunted by Eskimos, yet feeding on its vast gardens of mussels and clams to reach its multi-ton weight. Many are the contradictions of the morality arguments.

In the animal world, few babies survive their first year. Some predators live exactly where the prey travels or resides. Abstractly, the lion farm raises the gazelle, and consumes them as needed. Or consider the Nile crocodile that waits all year long for the wildebeest to cross its patch of the Mara River in Kenya/Tanzania, where it hunts and feeds to fill its belly for months to come. For baby turtles, at most 0.1% survive to adulthood. Life and death are the ways of the wild, and while natural it’s still brutal.

Onto the pigs…

If you live near Austin TX, you need only drive south a hundred miles, then to the west and you are into feral pig country. Here the pigs dominate and eat crops, causing havoc to all. Some of these pigs grow to 300 kilos and have become dangerous, even to humans. It is no wonder there is a bounty on them. Even still, all the pigs are highly vulnerable to injury, predation, and disease – mostly fatal. Yet, the newborn piglet is at the same risk as all wild animals. A very high mortality rate for the newborn is documented.  

Now to your question…

Now, let's come to the little piggy born on the pig farm. First, if not for the farm, it may not exist in the first place. It is nurtured by the farmer, fed, vaccinated, and allowed to prosper, piggy style. So it lives a life far beyond what it might experience in the wild – on average. However, eventually, all are harvested. This is the price they must pay for a relatively long life. More live a longer life without a care in the world, but few, if any, become huge predators. Is this but a small price to pay for an abundant existence in the first place?

The answer to the last question is a value judgment. Figure existence into your calculations.