And if we find them sometimes difficult, because they can, like humans, have tantrums, it simply means that they are prone to powerful emotions. Early behavioralist Ivan Pavlov, after a month of fruitless attempts to obtain gastric juice from a vociferous pig, declared:”It has long been my firm belief that the pig is the most nervous of animals. All pigs are hysterical:” But let us bear in mind that this same comment has been made numerous times about women and, in both cases, it is an example of pure ignorance. What is clear is that pigs are much like us in ways that matter. There is nothing shameful in recognizing the similarity.
The resemblance extends to the expression in the eyes of pigs. Many people have found it disconcerting to look into the eye of a pig. This is because one gains the startling impression of seeing another person looking back at you. Pigs have small, rather weak eyes and appear to be squinting, as if they are trying to get a better take on the world. They seem often to wear a wistful look. Dick King-Smith, the writer who created Babe (turned into the much-loved film) and who used to be a pig farmer,” said on a television show, “Many times I’ve looked into a pig’s eye and convinced myself that inside that brain is a sentient being, who is looking back at me observing him wondering what he’s thinking about:’ When I recently visited Carole Webb’s Farm Animal Rescue in Cambridge, England, I was introduced to Wiggy, a gigantic boar (a male pig) weighing nearly a thousand pounds. As I came into his stall, he was busy picking out soft hay with which to line the straw in his self-made bed. He grunted when I walked in, looked up, and fixed me with his eye. It was uncanny, like meeting a person in the street whom you feel you know but cannot place. I looked away for a moment, embarrassed by the naked intimacy of his glance.
Juliet Gellatley, in The Silent Ark, describes visiting a factory-farm shed where she saw a large male boar, “his huge head hanging low towards the barren floor. As I came level with him he raised his head and dragged himself slowly towards me on lame legs. With deliberation he looked straight at me, staring directly into my eyes. It seemed to me that I saw in those sad, intelligent, penetrating eyes a plea, a question to which I had no answer: `Why are you doing this to me?”‘” If we are to consider pigs as sentient beings with intelligence and a full range of emotions, perhaps we should feel guilty when a pig gives us that look knowing he will soon be off to his death.
Not many people have been able to get inside one of the factory hog farms that blight the Midwestern and Southern United States today. Matthew Scully did, though, and he has written one of the most scathing yet compassionate books about animals in the entire literature: Dominion. I cannot recommend it highly enough. He watches an expectant mother “nose at straw that isn’t there to make a nest she’ll never have for another litter she’ll never raise:’ And he reminds us that “in exchange for their service they get exactly nothing, no days of nurturing, no warm winds, no sights and sounds and smells of life, but only privation and dejection and dread:’ After visiting one such place in America, Scully writes: “How does a man rest at night knowing that in this strawless dungeon of pens are all of these living creatures under his care, never leaving except to die, hardly able to turn or lie down, horror-stricken by every opening of the door, biting and fighting and going mad?’” He reminds us that “a child playing with a toy barnyard set, putting all the little horsies and piggies outside the barn to graze, displays a firmer grasp of nature and reality than do the agricultural experts .. :’
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