Thinking with Pigs

The Porcine Grip on the Human Imagination

This essay has its origins in my autumn research project, and a small portion of this content was presented at the Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar at the Classics Faculty. I'd like to thank Mathijs and Jonathan for running the seminar generally, Stephen the librarian for printing my handouts, and the people who listened for not heckling. However, the following essay contains more pigs, in a sort of "Director's Cut," if you will.

Lately, I've been preoccupied by the human relationship to pigs. Not only have pigs been on the human mind since basically the invention of art itself (see my earlier article "Human Narratives are Animal Narratives" for more on this), but the human-pig relationship seems particularly complex for a number of reasons. I think much of the tension comes down to the following factors:

1. Of all domesticated animals, the pig has one of the most one-sided relationships to human beings. People don't milk pigs, shear their fluff, or ride them (in non-comic contexts, anyway). The domesticated pig exists solely to be killed and eaten by people. How comfortable people are with this fact seems to vary depending on time period and personal perspective. At the same time, the existence of wild pig populations suggests that pigs do not really need us -- not in the way sheep, say, do.

Which leads us to...

2. Despite eating them, humans seem to have become aware quite early in history that pigs are quite intelligent.

And finally...

3. Pigs, when you think about this long enough, start to seem a lot like human beings. We are both land-dwelling, mammalian animals, with four major limbs and not particularly dense fur. Pigs and humans are both omnivores. There is also a rumour that pig-meat and people-meat taste the same, but I have no interest in testing that claim. What it does suggest, I think, is that the awareness of pig-human similarity has seeped into the collective Western consciousness to such a degree that a macabre piece of folk wisdom like that can actually gain traction.

If you want to get theoretical about it, you could also try fitting the pig into Claude Levi-Strauss' four-fold scheme of animal classification. Levi-Strauss (coiner of that great one-liner in human-animal studies "animals are good to think with") divided animals into four types: the metaphorical subject, metonymical subject, metaphorical object, and metonymical object. More simply, animals can be either substitutes for people (subjects) or things for people (objects). The difference between metaphorical and metonymical is more fuzzy, but I think is best expressed by saying that the metaphorical involves making an analogy based on one aspect, while the metonymical suggests a less direct and more general likening of two entities. Jacques Lacan would say that metaphor functions to suppress while metonymy functions to combine.

But where can the pig be placed in this? Certainly, its life as sausage-in-the-making would suggest that it belongs in the object category. Advocates for vegetarianism and veganism would also note that the objectification of the pig is enhanced by the fact that it has a different name once it is dead and in slices -- it is not "pig corpse" but "pork." Its broad similarities to humans would place it in the metonymic category. However, as I hope to demonstrate later, there are also plenty of times where the pig has emerged as subject, to the fascination and discomfort of human beings.

The story begins, as it inevitably does, with epic poetry and some drugs (but importantly not mind-altering drugs). Homer, writing of Odysseus' encounter with Circe, gives us the first case in literature of the dividing line between human and pig becoming terribly blurred. The sorceress, having intercepted Odysseus' comrades, feeds them a potion-laced wine-barley-cheese-honey mixture, with the following consequence:

They had the bodies and bristles and voices of pigs, but their minds remained unchanged (Odyssey 10. 239-40)

Fig.1: Circe with piglets, from Tiberius' villa in Sperlonga. The plaque says there should be three piglets, so number three has either been stolen or gone for restoration.

In one line, Homer sets the tone for much of the pig-related discourse which was to follow: even if it looks like an animal you could kill and eat, what is going on inside its head? Could it possibly be thinking thoughts similar to yours?

This was a line Plato was to experiment with repeatedly in his writing on statecraft. While other animals, notably bees and ants, became classic examples of political organisation, the pig makes equally prominent appearances as analogues to people. The Statesman is perhaps most interesting for its attempt at a complete taxonomy of all living things. The first attempt by the young Socrates and the Eleatic Stranger ends up with pigs and people being put in the same category.

This leads to an uncomfortable pause in the dialogue before the two philosophers decide to try again. However, the Stranger still takes the time to say that humans have just been compared to the "most noble and easy-going of creatures" which is high praise for an animal that had become something of a simile for ignorance.

We might even consider how pigs and humans fit into the divisions of animals in the Timaeus, where Plato again attempts to classify all organisms. Again, humans and pigs belong to the same broad category (both being land animals, rather than birds or fish). The human's distinguishing feature is that it is bipedal, so its head is closer to the heavenly bodies, signifying the superior quality of its soul. The emphasis on human bipedal-ness would eventually get Plato's Academy into trouble, since the definition of man as "featherless biped" enabled Diogenes the Cynic to bring a plucked chicken to the Academy and claim it was a man. They later tried to solve the problem by adding "with hard nails" to the definition, but it still wasn't very convincing. What would happen if pigs were also to become bipedal is not something that Plato considered, but would get a thorough treatment by George Orwell.

Most famous, however, is the City of Pigs in Republic 2, when Socrates considers what his ideal city would actually be like to live in, leading to this exchange:

“If you were founding a city of pigs, Socrates, what other food than this would you provide?”

“Why, what would you have, Glaucon?” I said.

“What is normal,” he replied. (Republic 372d)

(Was it the reference to acorns?)

Curiously enough, Socrates does not dispute the pig analogy, but instead describes a city according to Glaucon's wishes, which he labels "the fevered city." The conclusion is that the pig-like life is actually closer to justice than that of the "cultured" human beings Glaucon envisions.

Fig. 2: Boris Johnson also considers a certain City of Pigs as an ethical exemplar, although not quite in the same way as Plato.

I'm afraid that after Plato, the philosophical outlook for pigs begins to get bleaker. Aristotle didn't have much time for pig-based social analogies, and when he did devote some time to them in History of Animals, he said:

The pig is an exception, it cares little for grass or fruit, but of all animals it is the fondest of roots, owing to the fact that its snout is peculiarly adapted for digging them out of the ground; it is also of all animals the most easily pleased in the matter of food. It takes on fat more rapidly in proportion to its size than any other animal; in fact, a pig can be fattened for the market in sixty days. Pig-dealers can tell the amount of flesh taken on, by having first weighed the animal while it was being starved. Before the fattening process begins, the creature must be starved for three days; and, by the way, animals in general will take on fat if subjected previously to a course of starvation; after the three days of starvation, pig-breeders feed the animal lavishly... If a pig be weighed when living, you may calculate that after death its flesh will weigh five-sixths of that weight, and the hair, the blood, and the rest will weigh the other sixth. When suckling their young, swine, like all other animals, get attenuated. So much for these animals. (History of Animals 8)

So much for pigs, indeed. If anything, this illustrates how Aristotle took seriously his own dictum that "animals exist for human beings" (see Politics 1.7). Far from being a model, or a rational soul in bristles, a pig is simply pork. This view of the pig as an object reached a peak with Chrysippus the Stoic, who reportedly said that "pigs have a soul in place of salt to keep the meat fresh until we want to use it."

However, as with all trends in philosophy, there was something of a counter-movement in the Hellenistic and Imperial eras, when authors began to reexamine the world of myth, but from alternative perspectives. We could perhaps blame this on the Hellenistic era's preoccupation with the strange (marble statuette of an ant, anyone?) but I'd like to think that pigs were finally getting their moment again.

Bion's poem, known variously as "The Corpse of Adonis" or "Adonis Dead," represents one of literature's first moments of the pig talking back to its humanoid counterpart. The goddess Aphrodite commands a team of Cupids to catch and tie up the pig that has gored her boyfriend Adonis. When the pig makes its appearance, it actually offers a speech in its own defence:

The beast replied, “Cythera, I swear by you yourself, by your man, by these fetters of mine, and by your hunters, that I did not mean to strike that handsome man of yours. When I saw his statuesque beauty my passion was unbearable and I was mad enough to kiss him on his thigh that was bare. Deal harshly with me; take these tusks and cut them off and punish them, Cypris: why should I have tusks that are so extremely passionate? And if you are not satisfied with that, cut off these lips of mine, too: for why was I so bold as to try to kiss him?” (22-39)

As if a pig practising rhetoric wasn't enough, the creature then leaves the forest to become a full-time devotee of Aphrodite. The end result is charming, if disconcerting: are we to suppose that pigs really have passion, like human beings? Do the gods think about pigs, even when human beings probably wouldn't?

Some answers to these questions are offered by Plutarch, who writes the next big talking-pig piece in Greek literature. Plutarch chose to go back to the pig story that started it all, by which I mean the Odyssey. Returning to Circe's Island at an unspecified later date, Odysseus demands that Circe deswine (yes, I have seen that word in print and didn't just make it up) the last of the Greeks in her custody. She agrees, on the condition that he can persuade the pigs that it is better to be a human than an animal.

Enter the spokespig Gryllus. Aside from the jokey name (it means "Grunter" or "Oinker" in Greek) this pig is completely serious, with the rhetorical skills of a sophist, and a familiarity with Platonic, Aristoelian, and Cynic philosophy. Not only are animals happier, he says, but they are actually more moral than human beings. Human beings have substituted their natural capacities for goodness with logismos, or calculation, leading them to pursue all kinds of things that are unnecessary to life (brooches, purple cloaks, condiments, etc.)

Gryllus also makes the rather interesting claim that of animals, only humans are omnivores. The point of saying this is that, of all living things, only humans are massively confused about what they should be eating, signalling how out-of-touch they are with nature. Odysseus may have a really nice cloak and a major poem written about him, but he is mistaken when he thinks that his life is better than Gryllus'. We seem to have come full circle to the pig as a subject, defined not by how it is like a human, but by how it is unlike a human. Plutarch's writing suggests that we may have had the wrong yardstick for happiness and intelligence all along.

One of the rare pieces of material culture which exemplifies the playful if fraught relationship between humans and pigs is an inscription from Edessa, commemorating a pig that died in a traffic accident. The unlucky animal is described as "friend to all" who was unfortunately run over by a wagon on the way to a festival of Dionysus. Curiously enough, the relief does not specify that the pig was a sacrifice at the festival, but makes it seem as if it was just tagging along for some fun.

Fig.3: The sculptor, in a questionable decision, decided to render the pig both before and during the accident.

Both through the act of commemoration and the description of the pig in the epigram, the animal begins to develop a personality in the viewer's mind. Not only is it a friendly pig, but it participates in public life much like any human being. A creature that could be the sacrifice is represented as going to watch the sacrifice, in an inversion which completely blurs the line between animal and human.

Commentators are divided over whether this entire funerary inscription is an elaborate joke, or whether it was actually set up for a man whose name translates to "piglet." Given the tradition of Imperial epigrams addressed to animals, I'm inclined to read it as an animal, even if it may be a fictional one. We get a similar sort of play in the Testamentum Porcelli, a late Latin text which purports to be the last will and testament of a piglet. While this text is definitely fictional, and was probably composed as either a joke or a rhetorical exercise, we still see the interplay between the opposing impulses to humanise the animal and to turn the animal into dinner. The piglet, caught by the chef, begs for one hour to write his will. Having bequeathed his acorns, wheat-grains, and barley to his relatives, he takes the time to enumerate which body parts he leaves to which humans. What is curious is that the pig does not think of himself simply in terms of his meat: he leaves his ears to the deaf, his tongue to the talkative, and his skull to the argumentative ("pig-headed" is apparently a very old expression.) At the same moment that he reconciles himself to becoming a meal for humans, the piglet leaves us with the suggestion that pigs have sensory experience and thoughts similar to ours.

The Gryllus probably marks the high point of the tradition of thinking with pigs in antiquity, although Aelian does recycle some of Plutarch's examples a century later in his Historia Animalium. However, the pig hasn't ceased being a signifier for humans.

I've already teased George Orwell's Animal Farm a few paragraphs ago, and it would be remiss of me not to say a bit more about how Orwell reworked Plato's idea of the City of Pigs into something altogether more disturbing. Actually, using animal characters was his wife Eileen's idea, as she had an interest in folk tales and thought he could do something interesting with the genre. (That he chose pigs as the dominant animal in his book becomes even more interesting when you consider that his nickname for Eileen was "Pig." I'll leave that one for the psychoanalysts.) Rather than using animals as counterpoints to human beings in the way Plato or Plutarch does, Orwell adheres much more closely to the template of animal fables, where the animals cease to contrast with humans and become humans. Thus, the bipedal pig.

I also can't help thinking of the use of pigs in Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which does have a tremendously Homeric tone, when you think about it for a bit. The whole premise of entering an island kingdom governed by a sinister witch who turns visitors into pigs with drugged food is all very Odyssey 10. However, I think Miyazaki was sensitive not just to the magical aspects of that narrative, but its emphasis on identity and the self. In "Spirited Away," the evil witch Yubaba turns humans into pigs as one means to erase their individuality, the assumption being that to be a mere animal is to be a thing without a name or a distinct self. However, the twist is that Chihiro, the protagonist, can still identify which pigs are her parents, even when they are all drawn to look identical. I find this to be a nice echo of the line of Homer which started this essay, that while the external appearance of a creature might change, the inner essence remains constant.