If you've read Charlotte's Web-E.B. White's poignant tale about a spider who saves a pig from slaughter by weaving the words "Some pig," "Terrific," "Radiant" and "Humble" into her web-or watched the new movie version, you likely cheered when Wilbur's life was spared. Don't dismiss your reaction as simply an emotional response to fiction. While Wilbur may be a fictional character, real pigs are indeed amazing animals.
Real pigs don't chat with spiders, but they do communicate constantly with one another in their own language. More than 20 vocalizations have been identified for different situations. Newborn piglets learn to run to their mothers' voices, and mother pigs sing to their young while nursing. They snuggle close to one another and prefer to sleep nose to nose. In their natural surroundings, pigs will spend hours playing, sunbathing and exploring.
Biologist and Johannesburg Zoo director Lyall Watson writes in his 2004 book on the species, The Whole Hog, "I know of no other animals that are more consistently curious, more willing to explore new experiences, more ready to meet the world with open mouthed enthusiasm. Pigs, I have discovered, are incurable optimists and get a big kick out of just being."
They are thought to have intelligence beyond that of an average 3-year-old child. Professor Stanley Curtis of Penn State University found that pigs can even play joystick-controlled video games and are "capable of abstract representation." Dr. Curtis believes that "there is much more going on in terms of thinking and observing by these pigs than we would ever have guessed."
Pigs who aren't confined to mind-numbing conditions on factory farms are clever, charismatic animals who enjoy life just as we do. James Cromwell, who played Farmer Hoggett in the hit film Babe, was so moved by the intelligence, sense of fun and personalities of the animals he worked with that by the end of the film he could no more eat a pig than he could eat his neighbor.
Many people share this view. When a reporter revealed that the pig who "posed" for photos for a reprint of E.B. White's best-selling children's book was destined to be sold for slaughter, concerned people from around the United States and Canada begged the owner to spare the pig's life. He reportedly received so many pleas that he decided to name the pig Wilbur and pledged to keep him forever in a specially built pig pad on his farm.
Despite the popularity of Charlotte's Web and Babe, as well as the evidence of these animals' intelligence and personality, the public has not yet fully absorbed the message that pigs are individuals, not dinner. On any given day in the U.S., there are approximately 60 million pigs living in filthy factory farms. A hundred million are killed for food every year.
Off the big screen, mother pigs spend most of their lives in individual crates 7 feet long by 2 feet wide-too small for them even to turn around in. Piglets are taken away from their mothers when they are as young as 10 days old. They're packed into pens to be raised for breeding or for meat. As a result, many display neurotic behaviors such as cannibalism and tail-biting, so farmers use pliers to break off the ends of the piglets' teeth and chop off their tails-all without painkillers. Once her piglets are gone, each sow is impregnated again, and the cycle continues for three or four years before she is slaughtered.
Each and every one of these pigs is "some pig," capable of suffering, fear and sadness. If you've forgotten the empathy you felt for animals destined for slaughter when you read Charlotte's Web as a child, see the movie and ask yourself why you eat "extraordinary" pigs like Wilbur, especially when there are great-tasting faux pork products, such as Smart Dogs, Gardenburger Riblets, Gimme Lean meatless sausage, and Yves Canadian Veggie Bacon, Deli Slices and Veggie Pizza Pepperoni Slices, available in supermarkets and health food stores. You don't need to weave an intricate web to save pigs-just make a few different choices when sitting down to eat.
www.PETA.org
Heather Moore is a freelance writer and a senior writer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Norfolk, Va., where she lives with her rescued dog, Carly. Heather frequently writes on animal rights and health issues as a freelance writer and for PETA. Her articles have appeared in IMPACT Press, Enlightened Practice Magazine, New Mobility, Satya, Wadi, Vivid, Writer?s Post Journal, and other publications, and her letters and op-eds have been published in USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Las Vegas Review Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News, Orlando Sentinel, Spokesman Review, and other leading papers.
I don't have a problem with your questioning if PETA thinks it ok for you to eat animals? Your comments about ham, bacon, and eat meat... sound silly, if you'll forgive my bluntness. It is kind of like the bumber stickers that, to paraphrase, say the vehicle owner loves cats...dead ones. It only displays the ignorance and perhaps, more importantly, the arrogance of the vehicle owner; I don't like your position so I dismiss it with what the owner thinks is a joke, while everyone behind them is laughing at their high school mentality. In reality, he comes off as a less than bright person that can only respond with childlike attempts at humor that lessen their cause.
I do NOT think it is immoral to eat animals, irrespective of what PETA thinks. My issue as a person that once became a vegetarian because of the cruelty of modern factory farming of animals was due to just that. All of the Earths creatures are part of a cycle to which we all belong. I object to the cruel, barbaric and maddening manners to which we subject animals. At the age of 18 I gave up eating veal (I'm now (43) because I could not morally or spiritually contribute to the torture of an innocent animal. Nor could I contribute to the torture of a human if only by silence, such as remaining silent about a person I knew was molesting a child and I elected to do nothing...I am stilll morally culpable as I would theroetically know but did nothing to stop it. We brutalize animals for the sake of profit and pump them full of antibiotics and steriods to maxamize yield, profitability, thereby creating additional physical health issues for the animals, which of course we treat with more chemicals...all of which we ingest. I believe all animals produced for human consumption, clothing, etc, should be allowed to live the life nature intended, such as crazing freely, living its normal life span, cage free (not shortened by chemically increasing its maximum yield to maxamize profability) and then euthenizing the animal painlessly and quickly, for their sake and ours. I don't ask you to adopt PETA's cause but do ask you to consider that there may be thousands of positions between PETA's and the cavalier attitude that animals have no feelings, no nerve sensations, and are just factory products we can manipulate as we see fit. If I'm so off base, get your child a pet for a year and then slaughter it in front of your kids and serve it to them and then ask them how they fee about it. See if they saw it as merely food. Then be truly daring and ask yourself how you feel about your kids reaction. We can eat animals, that is fine, but we don't have to torture and brutalize it simply because it maxamizes profits. That is why there is a fast growing market in things like, more expensive free range chickens. People want to eat animals and think it moral to do so. They just think it immoral to not let the animal live the life nature intended for it between birth and slaughter. Just think a little is all I ask.
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SoapBoxOne (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments)
on Friday, December 22, 2006 at 12:58:31 AM
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