Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig Read online

  There have been city pigs as long as there have been cities, and the United States carried on the Old World practice. Colonial New England towns appointed “hog reeves” to corral unrestrained beasts, and a Massachusetts court in 1658 warned, “Many children are exposed to great dangers of loss of life or limb though the ravenousness of swine.” Though such fears were not without basis—consider the killer pigs of medieval Europe—the laws were generally ignored. As in earlier eras, pigs provided not only food but also the only functioning urban sanitation service.

  “Once more in Broadway,” Charles Dickens wrote of his 1842 visit to New York. “Take care of the pigs. Two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage,” searching out a meal of “cabbage-stalks and offal.” Dickens described the pigs as “ugly brutes” with “scanty, brown” hair and “long, gaunt, legs.” These were not chubby Corn Belt porkers but rangy scavenger types, fit for doing battle with stray dogs and mean boys, just as forest pigs could fight off the wolves that had hunted them in early America and medieval Europe.

  Loose pigs in the streets, according to another English visitor to New York, “would arouse the indignation of any but Americans.” In fact, English cities hosted plenty of pigs, and many people there were indeed indignant about them. In The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Friedrich Engels called attention to “the multitude of pigs walking about in all the alleys, rooting in the offal heaps, or kept imprisoned in small pens” in the working-class districts of Manchester. Living amid filth, though, was the price of having meat on the table. In the Potteries, a large slum within the wealthy London suburb of North Kensington, an 1851 census turned up three pigs for every one person.

  The upper classes conflated the poor with their pigs. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke wrote that if democracy prevailed, “learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” The phrase quickly became one of the era’s most popular epithets, a way of vilifying the lower orders by equating them with the most abject of animals. As the wealthy saw it, both the poor and their pigs bred quickly, lived in filth, and threatened the social order.

  The authorities could do little about the presence of the swinish multitude, whose members were needed to work the mills and mines, but they could banish the swine. In the 1860s and 1870s, public health measures forced most pigs from England’s large cities.

  Pigs roamed the streets of many nineteenth-century cities, playing a dual role as sanitation service and food for the poor—while also offending delicate middle-class sensibilities. Health concerns finally forced authorities to banish pigs, as shown here in an 1859 illustration from a New York newspaper.

  By that time most pigs had disappeared from New York as well. In 1849 a cholera epidemic prompted New York to take sanitation seriously. Hogs hadn’t caused cholera—a water supply contaminated by human sewage did—but they were swept up in the general cleaning frenzy. City officials, who in earlier decades had backed down from outraged pig keepers, stood their ground this time. New York’s professional police force, only recently created, led an effort that drove off more than 5,000 swine. Manhattan, at least in its more densely developed southern stretches, became pig-free. The poor had to find other ways to feed themselves.

  The common folk of the American South, unlike their counterparts in the industrializing North, managed to hold onto their pigs until well after the Civil War. This improved the diets of poor southerners but did not help their reputations. When travelers ventured into the South, they viewed poor country folk just as they viewed poor city folk: with contempt. Southerners “delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life, and seem not desirous of changing it,” one English visitor wrote. He was not speaking about the owners of plantations, who had grown rich on the labor of enslaved human beings. He was describing, rather, the plain white folk of the South, who lived humbly but ate well.

  Like the rest of the country, southern states preserved an open range during the colonial period, granting livestock free run of all unfenced land. Most states in the East and Midwest changed course by 1850 or so, giving deed holders full control over their land. The South, though, preserved its free-range customs until after the Civil War and in some areas until after World War II. Even the politically powerful railroads had to pay damages when their trains killed livestock. When a railroad company argued before the Georgia Supreme Court in 1860 that a plaintiff had been negligent in allowing his horse to wander into the path of an oncoming train, the justices rejected the argument. If this were true, the court wrote, then a “man could not walk across his neighbor’s unenclosed land; nor allow his horse or his hog or his cow to range in the woods.” The era of the “Private Property: No Trespassing” sign was still far in the future.

  In the South the common people’s “rights in the woods”—which allowed them to hunt, fish, and keep livestock on any unfenced land—were held sacred, because without those rights many would have starved. Despite the presence of cotton, rice, and sugar plantations, less than 15 percent of southern land had been cleared in 1850. That left millions of acres available for hunting and herding. The 1850 census revealed that, per capita, there were more swine in the South than in the Corn Belt, suggesting that nearly every southerner acquired a few pigs, notched their ears—the equivalent of branding—and turned them loose in the forest. And the census surely undercounted southern pigs, since owners could easily lower their tax bills by underreporting their free-ranging beasts. “You can keep as many pigs as you wish, and you need not feed them,” a German visitor wrote in a letter home. “We can live here like lords.” A prosperous farmer in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina described how impoverished men could move to the region and, with the aid of “free mast for their hogs,” build “a nice little happy home.” He concluded, “Truly, it is a paradise for the poor man.”

  The open range shaped the cuisine of the South. Pork and corn were staples on the East Coast during colonial times and in the West in the early nineteenth century, but these other regions diversified their diets after the pioneer phase passed. The South did not, instead preserving frontier eating habits into modern times. Large planters imported pork and cornmeal from the Corn Belt, while smaller farmers persisted in their old ways, surviving on the produce of their gardens, their pigs, and wild game. On special occasions, both rich and poor dug a pit, built a fire, and cooked a whole hog, low and slow, over the embers. Barbecue—both the word and the technique were adopted from the Taino Indians of the Caribbean—became popular in Virginia by the 1750s and spread west with the settlers. The barbecue became the standard southern outdoor celebration for occasions such as political rallies or July Fourth celebrations. As one English visitor to America explained, “A barbecued hog in the woods, and plenty of whiskey, will buy birthrights and secure elections.” Cattle and sheep were barbecued on occasion, but pigs proved most popular—they tasted best, and there were plenty of them ranging in the woods.

  Southern leaders began to close the range after the Civil War, and their main purpose was to take food out of the mouths of the poor. The abolition of slavery had created a labor shortage in the southern plantation economy. The planters needed field workers, and most freed slaves had no desire to work for their former masters. Under prevailing law, freed African Americans might have adopted the habits of plain white folk and earned an independent living through herding, hunting, and fishing. A newspaper editor in Virginia explained the implications of this for the southern economy. Laborers, he wrote, if “furnished with free food, would neglect agriculture.” That prospect frightened the white elite.

  Legislatures in every state closed the range on a county-by-county basis, starting in areas with the largest populations of freed slaves. A newspaper claimed that this change affected only “lousy negroes and lazy white men” and would be good for both: now they would find work as sharecroppers and tenant farm
ers. This was indeed the effect, although few, black or white, would find reason to celebrate it: like the enclosure movement in England, the closing of the range stripped the poor of a means of self-sufficiency and left them vulnerable to exploitation by wealthy planters.

  As poor southerners were forced into the Reconstruction economy, pig populations began to dwindle. Historians who examined six counties in Alabama and Mississippi found that, before the Civil War, residents had owned 2.1 hogs per capita. After the war, it was 0.4. The effect on the common folk was plain to see. If travelers to the South before the Civil War tended to mock southerners for their laziness, those who came after the war pitied these same people for their poverty, misery, and hunger. In the 1880s, one writer described the closing of the range as “another step in the oppression of the poor.”

  The banning of urban pigs and the closing of the southern range hurt the landless poor, but many people still had access to a little property. They couldn’t raise cattle or sheep, which required pasture, but they could keep a pig in a sty. In nineteenth-century England, perhaps a quarter to half of rural workers did so. “Life without a pig was almost unthinkable,” a Buckinghamshire man observed. “To have a sty in the garden . . . was held to be as essential to the happiness of a newly married couple as a living room or a bedroom.” Living so close to the home, the pig became a sort of edible pet, a source of companionship as well as food. The pig was “one of the best friends of the poor,” according to an English authority in 1806.

  Small-scale pig keeping followed age-old rhythms. Cottagers generally bought a spring piglet after it had been weaned, then fed it until early the next winter. Children were sent to gather wild plants in the spring and summer, and in the fall they collected acorns and beechnuts. Kitchen scraps were tossed into a wooden “pig tub” by the back door, and potatoes filled out the provisions. In their final few weeks, the pigs ate barley to harden the fat before slaughter.

  When raised close to home, swine sometime became objects of affection. “The pig was an important member of the family,” an Oxfordshire woman reported, “and its health and condition were regularly reported in letters to children away from home, together with news of their brothers and sisters.” One cottager kept a careful account of his expenditures on a pig he sent to market and, upon selling it, calculated that he had made three shillings. “Not much profit there,” he was told. “No,” the man replied. “But there: I had his company fer six months!”

  A Virginia farmer and his hogs in 1939. Hog slaughter functioned as a crucial seasonal ritual for centuries in Europe and America. Fattened on the bounty of summer and fall, pigs provided a crucial source of meat and fat during the lean times of winter. (Marion Post Wolcott; courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  The same fondness for swine could be found among wealthy landowners who raised enormously fat pigs for competition at agricultural fairs. No one enjoyed a pig’s company more than Lord Emsworth, hero of a series of comic novels by P. G. Wodehouse and owner of a prize-winning Berkshire sow named the Empress of Blandings. “Watching her now as she tucked into a sort of hash of bran, acorns, potatoes, linseed, and swill,” Wodehouse writes, “the ninth Earl of Emsworth felt his heart leap up in much the same way as that of the poet Wordsworth used to do when he beheld a rainbow in the sky.”

  E. B. White, who lived on a small farm in Maine, captured this affection in a more heartfelt way in an essay titled “The Death of a Pig.” Buying a spring pig, feeding it through the summer and fall, and slaughtering it in early winter “is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script,” White writes. “The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.” One year, however, White’s pig fell sick. He sought veterinary advice and administered castor oil and later an enema—“Once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles”—all to no avail. The pig died, White grieved, and his neighbors shared his sorrow. “The premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar, a sorrow in which it feels fully involved,” he wrote. “The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.”

  White, a man of means, had no need to worry about the loss of ham. For poorer men, the death of a pig was a financial as well as an emotional blow. According to an English observer, “A man had virtually one chance only of ever adding to his cash income, and that was by raising more than one pig.” A study of Oxfordshire suggested that raising pigs constituted 12 to 15 percent of a laborer’s income. “Pig clubs,” a sort of mutual insurance program, collected dues from members and paid out if a pig died of illness. In Middlemarch, George Eliot defines a happy village as one where “nobody’s pig had died.”

  Those pigs that survived illness were slaughtered right where they had been raised, a process that unnerved people more often as pigs became ever rarer in domestic life. In England most cottagers hired skilled pig killers, who would bring along knives and a scalding tub. The pig was lashed to a bench or held tight with a noose around its snout. Although sometimes stunned with a hammer, more often it was simply stuck in the neck and allowed to bleed out, with the blood caught in a pan and cooked into black pudding.

  Memoirs of rural life in England and America often describe such events. “The killing of the pig was the great event in the domestic life of the year,” one man remembered. Neighbors helped neighbors and shared in the bounty and fun. In Little House in the Big Woods, Pa removes the bladder from a freshly slaughtered pig, blows it up like a balloon, and hands it to his daughters, who joyfully bat it back and forth before returning to the labor of rendering lard and making sausage.*

  Pig killing was a communal ritual, a break in the rhythms of daily life, a sign of the passing seasons. It was a solemn occasion—the pig was a friend and did not want to die—and a time of celebration. This drama was peculiar to pigs because cattle and sheep were rarely kept around the house. Only pigs were coddled and then killed, their horrifying, humanlike shrieks piercing the neighborhood. One girl recalled that, during the slaughter, she would “creep back into bed and cry,” remembering how she had fed cabbage stalks to her beloved swine. The next day, however, she happily dipped her bread into pork gravy made from that same pig’s flesh. She was just a girl, she said, “learning to live in this world of compromises.”

  Thomas Hardy devotes an entire chapter of Jude the Obscure to the killing of a pig. Jude and his ill-matched wife, Arabella, have hired a pig killer who fails to appear, so they undertake the task themselves, lashing the pig to a stool with its legs in the air.

  “Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had this to do!” said Jude. “A creature I have fed with my own hands.”

  “Don’t be such a tender-hearted fool! There’s the sticking-knife—the one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t stick un too deep.”

  “I’ll stick un effectually, so as to make short work of it. . . .”

  “You must not!” she cried. “The meat must be well bled, and to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red and bloody! Just touch the vein, that’s all. I was brought up to it, and I know. Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least.”

  “He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may look,” said Jude, determinedly. Scraping the bristles from the pig’s upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat; then plunged in the knife with all his might.

  “’Od damn it all!” she cried, “that ever I should say it! You’ve over-stuck un! And I telling you all the time—”

&
nbsp; “Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!”

  . . .

  The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.

  “It’s a hateful business,” Jude says, but Arabella replies, “Pigs must be killed. . . . Poor folks must live.”

  In 1895, when Jude the Obscure was published, few would have disputed Arabella’s view. For all but a tiny fringe of the population, the slaughter of livestock counted not as cruelty but as necessity. Jude’s horror was a distinctly modern reaction, one that soon would grow more common. As people moved to cities and bought their meat at stores, home slaughter became rare and upsetting. Rather than forming part of the rhythm of home life, the act of killing animals now took place far away, in slaughterhouses. That distance, though, carried a cost. The walls of slaughterhouses hid not only the act of killing but also a multitude of other sins.

  * Inflated swine bladders were used as balls in many sports, which explains how the American football earned the slightly inaccurate name “pigskin.”