Chinese Pigs

Support Compassion in World Farming

 

 

I. 

 

The pig has historical, cultural and even astrological significance in China. 

 

And whilst the pig hasn't always had the best of reputations amongst Westerners, the Chinese have traditionally associated this intelligent and sociable animal with positive things, such as wealth and happiness. 

 

And good eating: for whilst the Chinese consume pretty much anything under the sun, it's pork that has long been the main source of protein in their diet. 

 

In a country of 1.4 bilion people, that means a lot of pigs have to be reared each year; which means in turn that industrial farming has to be elevated to a whole new level - in fact, to multiple new levels ...  

 

 

II.

 

The world's biggest single-building pig farm has just opened in Hubei province, central China; a 26-story Tötungszentren, with a capacity to slaughter 1.2 million pigs each year. This is the Communist Party's solution to the people's insatiable demand for pork. 

 

The first few thousand unlucky sows were admitted to the farm - if we can still use this term - at the beginning of last month. When fully operational - and when a second building of equal size is finished - this pigsty in the sky will house around 650,000 animals, who will be monitored from a central control room and fed via 30,000 automatic feeding spots, operated at the click of a button. 

 

Temperature and ventilation will be controlled by an artificially-intelligent computer system. Waste material will be treated on site and used to generate energy in the form of biogas. Workers will be required to be screened for disease and subject to multiple rounds of disinfection before they can enter or leave the farm; not that they can leave apart from when taking a weekly break.

 

Supporters say this high-rise production model is cost efficient, biosecure, and environmentally-friendly, compared to traditional farming methods. They tend not to comment on the welfare of the poor pigs in such stressful and unnatural conditions. 

 

Critics, on the other hand, argue that large-scale intensive farms ultimately increase the likelihood of serious disease outbreaks - as well as increase the potential for infectious pathogen mutation, which just might cause us to get sick and die:

 

"China is not the only country facing challenges from emerging zoonotic diseases, but it has become clear that the country faces bureaucratic, societal and ecological factors that magnify them into global threats" [1].

 

Which is a sober note to end on - though one that might make any pigs dreaming of a way to extract a symbolic revenge upon a human order that treats them with such cruelty and contempt, squeal with delight [2].       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from an article by Michael Standaert and Francesco De Augustinis, The Guardian (18 Sept 2020): click here.

 

[2] See the post entited 'Zoonosis: Revenge of the Animals' (19 Sept 2018): click here.

 

For an earlier post in which I write in praise of the pig, click here. 

And What are Chickens For in a Destitute Time?

Hühnergeist (SA/2021)

 

 

A sub-species of a good-looking bird from Southeast Asia known as the red juglefowl, chickens were originally reared for fighting or ceremonial purposes and there are numerous references to them in myth, folklore, and literature. Indeed, once upon a time, such sacred animals had greater divine status even than man and only they were worthy of sacrifice [1]. 

 

But then someone had the idea of eating them ...

 

And now they are reared and slaughtered in their billions as a cheap source of food and the intensively farmed chicken has just about the most miserable (if mercifully short) life of any bird on the planet - hardly a day goes by without some fresh horror being revealed (to a largely indifferent public). 

 

These intelligent and sensitive creatures are not just killed, but negated as beings in their very birdhood by the system within which they are enframed. That's what Heidegger meant when he suggested a metaphysical equivalence between mechanised food production and the manufacture of corpses in Nazi extermination camps [2]. 

 

And it's surprising, I think, that there are critics who still find this idea morally insensitive and/or philosophically absurd. What would it take, one wonders, to have them acknowledge the essential sameness that reduces all life - be it avian or human being - to raw material ...? 

 

To argue, like Žižek, that there is no malevolent will to humiliate and punish birds by the farmers - whereas this plays a key role in the treatment of prisoners prior to their murder - may or may not be true, but I don't see that intentionality alters anything; you still end up with a lot of dead chickens [3].

 

I can't help hoping that, one day, the spirit of these birds will come home to roost ... Then we'll understand that our destiny has never been separate from theirs [4].    

  

       

Notes

 

[1] See Jean Baudrillard, 'The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses', in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser, (The University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 129-141. The line I'm paraphrasing is on p. 133. Later in the text, Baudrillard develops this point and writes: 

 

"Whatever it may be, animals have always had, until our era, a divine or sacrificial nobility that all mythologies recount. Even murder by hunting is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to an experimental dissection. Even domestication is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to industrial breeding." [134]  

 

[2] See Martin Heidegger's Bremen lecture of December 1949 entitled Das Ge-Stell in volume 79 of his Gesamtausgabe (1994). The English translation of this volume, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, is published as the Breman and Freiburg Lectures, (Indiana University Press, 2012), and the above text appears as 'Positionality'.   

 

[3] In other words, we should speak of impact rather than intention.

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, 'The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses', Simulacra and Simulation, p. 133.