A Leave of Absence

Although I admit that I haven't been the most regular poster recently, I can now say with confidence that I know I won't be posting for the next month or so, as I'll be traveling quite a bit. As always, there will be lots of pig-related news that I'll miss. Just this weekend, for example, news broke (again) over the controversy (again) over the U.S. Army's shooting of live pigs in medical drills. A spokesman for the military said  "It's to teach Army personnel how to manage critically injured patients within the first few hours of their injury." A representative of PETA responded that "Shooting and maiming pigs is as outdated as Civil War rifles." You can find the AP story here. More at the end of the summer...

Salon's Pork Week

Salon.com has been running a series of pig-related stories this week under the broader heading Pork Week. The week began with an essay called "Bacon Mania" by Sarah Hepola that sought to explain American's current fascination with bacon. On Tuesday, in "Belly of the Beast," Rebecca Traister described how she has started to cure her own bacon. Today, the entry is a video about Veritas Farms in New Paltz, New York, where they raise Gloucestershire Old Spot and Large Black pigs. The video "Not the Other White Meat" by Caitlin Shamberg and Rebecca Traister, is quite lovely in that the pigs seem quite happy to be pigs. Just be sure to turn the volume down at the start, as the clip is prefaced by an incredibly loud and irritating vodka ad.

It will be interesting to see what else they discuss in this "Pork Week." So far the stories have been interesting but fairly light, perhaps because they seem to take it as a given that Salon readers are familiar with the industrial production of pork and are looking for natural, free range and do-it-yourself alternatives.

Pigs and the Floods in Iowa, Part 2: Rescue!

An update about the Iowa floods from your occasional blogger (sorry about that--things have been a bit crazy. I'll try to get more up on the site before I'm far away starting in a couple of weeks).

A consortium of animal welfare groups helped rescue some pigs stranded by the floods in Iowa. You can find a YouTube video summarizing their efforts here. My favorite part was watching the volunteers work to get one of the pigs into the truck that will take it to a Farm Sanctuary farm.

You can find out more about this pig rescue effort courtesy of Kinship Circle, which has a Flickr page here (where the above photo by Molly Wald of the Best Friends Animal Society came from) with lots of links to news articles and places where you can donate to both Farm Sanctuary's Emergency Pig Rescue Fund and Kinship Circle Animal Disaster Aid Network. Sure looks like they're doing good work out there, work that is deserving of our support.

Pigs and the Floods in Iowa, Part 1: Shooting Hogs on the Levee

Continuing with the pigs and disasters theme that seems to have dominated the few posts I've managed to get up this summer (sorry 'bout that), one of my grad students e-mailed me an article about what has been happening to the pigs in the midwestern areas that have been ravaged by floods. The AP article (here) began by talking about the pigs that were shot by Des Moines County sheriff's deputies on Tuesday, June 17th. The pigs apparently swam away from their flooded farm and scrambled on top of a levee. Fearing that the pigs' hooves would poke through sandbags or worse, that they would root in the levee, the animals were shot. The county's emergency management commission chairman, LeRoy Lippert, tried to preempt any outrage about this, noting that the killing of pigs "happens every day. My gosh, that's what slaughterhouses do--that's how we get bacon and pork chops. It's just one of the casualties of the flooding situation." It will be interesting to see what the effect of the flooding in the midwest will have been on the region's hog farms.

Today's image is of pigs in the sea at Big Majors Cay in the Bahamas. Not quite the right image for this story, I know, but then no one took photos that I've been able to find of the pigs left behind as roadkill on the levee.

Pigs and the Earthquake in Sichuan

To follow up on the previous post, pigs also died in the hundreds of thousands in the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan province in China on May 12th. According to an article entitled "Economic Tremors of Chinese Disaster" by Leo Lewis in the Times (UK) Online (here), about 1 in 10 pigs in China is produced in Sichuan, making it the nation's biggest producer of pigs. He notes that an estimated 800,000 pigs have died as a result of the quake, but that such a loss only represents less than 1% of the province's pork production. 

There may be some effect on pork prices, which have doubled in China over the past year already. According to a great overview on the NBC World News Blog by researcher Ed Flanagan (here), about 65% of the 110 pounds of meat the average Chinese eat each year is pork, which has made the pork price increases--tied to an outbreak of PRRS ("blue ear disease"), underproduction as a result of low prices in 2006, poor weather, the use of feedstuffs in ethanol production, and the greater demand for meat as a result of growing incomes--quite burdensome. As it turns out, supply can't meet demand, even in a country that has half a billion pigs. 

Today's image accompanied an L.A. Times article (here) by Don Lee called "Fallout from China's Quake Could Include Inflation," which is also worth a read. According to the article, Liu Feng, a salesman at a pork-processor located about 130 miles from the epicenter of the quake, noted that "we cannot purchase pigs" due to damage to the region's infrastructure. Apparently the Sichuan Gaojin Food Co. normally bought 1,000 hogs per day, but as Feng complained, "Today we raised the price twice and the most we got was 200 pigs."

Tornado Hits Hog Farm in Oklahoma

By now probably everyone who has a television has seen the footage of the massive tornado that ripped through Oklahoma on Saturday, destroying three barns at a hog farm near the town of Lacey. If you missed the story, you can read the AP version here. If you are in to weather porn, check the raw video footage here. 

I was skeptical of the claim on CNN last night that none of the animals were injured or killed in this twister (no humans were hurt--they took shelter in time in the farm's windowless office). There's still no solid evidence about what happened to all the pigs in this natural disaster, but there's a good article here in the Enid [Oklahoma] News and Eagle that mentions the risk of starvation or dehydration of the sows and piglets in the farrowing operation at the Seaboard Foods hog farm. It would certainly be ironic if the farrowing units condemned by animal rights advocates turned out to help save the animals in this instance, as the article implies. 

The photo to the left of a sow and her piglets at the destroyed barn comes from the AP and was shot by Enid News and Eagle photographer Bonnie Vculek. Sadly, here is another photo (here)  that clearly shows that some of the sows didn't make it. While the damage has been roughly quantified in the millions of dollars, I'll be surprised if we actually hear about the animals lost. We'll see, I suppose. 

Hog Genius on National Geographic's "Wild"

The National Geographic Channel has produced an installment of their series Wild called "Hog Genius." I'm not sure when it will next air, or even if it has appeared yet, but you can find some great photos (including the one to the left of pigs walking through the snow) and a couple of video clips here on the Wild website. 

One clip shows a video game-based experiment in porcine intelligence at Penn State. In this experiment, pigs need to use a joystick to move a ball into an area on the screen for a food treat. They do this quite well, even as the area shrinks. The other clip demonstrates the problem-solving and performance skills of Vietnamese Pot-Bellied Pigs. It features a 10 month old pig at Top Hogs in Denver and Nelly from Valentine's Performing Pigs. If I get better information about a forthcoming air date I'll let you know. It's certainly worth a look on the web, however.