Part I: Evolution, Taxonomy, and Domestication52
as an achievement of their space-efficient management of the
reproduction of pigs-as-pork in a hard-fought battle against
starvation. Factory farmers claim that mass pigs-as-pork
production is space-efficient and both ‘feeds the world’ and
improves the human nutritional condition: e.g. ‘We can’t let all
these animals roam free – it’s not an economically sustainable
system . . . [although] we have to fulfill our obligations to these
animals, . . . is it fair for us to starve the world?’ (Dr Janeen Salak-
Johnson, Professor of Animal Science, University of Illinois,
quoted in Crary 2013).
This point of view in support of rational-instrumental ‘best
practices’ in factory farming is obviously hyperbolic (in defence
of these profitable operations), but hardly convincing in the
face of many credible arguments to the contrary that have been
advanced by contemporary animal welfare advocates. Most
important, the world’s human population is not starving for lack
of food. Enough food is produced globally to feed the estimated
total of 7.5 billion humans according to current FAO current
statistics (FAO 2015). From the point of view of agricultural
technology, food shortages for existing and growing human
populations – far into the future – can be solved by applied food
science and technology.
However, it is the prevailing perspective across the agricul-
tural sciences that any human food shortage ‘problem’ is not a
technical problem but a problem created by cultural, socioeco-
nomic and political issues (Buringh & Dudal 1987). The ‘food-
shortage’ narrative is in part a prevailing social construction of
the pigs-as-pork story that serves the interests of factory farm-
ing and works against the arguments of those animal welfare
activists who critique pork-producing factory farming for
depriving pigs-as-pork of healthy living space in factory farms
while awaiting their slaughter.
In sum, the factory farm lobby’s misinformation and disin-
formation add up to help explain the present-day general pub-
lic’s abject lack of concern and motivation to aggressively seek
a remedy for those factory farm conditions contributing to the
unhealthy welfare state of pigs-as-pork awaiting slaughter. In
sum, critiques by animal welfare activists of pork-industry fac-
tory farming lack credibility and are thus far proving ineffectual.How and why have pig–human relations deteriorated over mil-
lennia from the Paleolithic to the present alarming conditions
in the post-modern Holocene, and in spite of these dual ironies:
(1) there are now more pigs throughout the world than at any
previous era, and (2) the close proximity of pig populations and
human populations has never been more concentrated? The next
section of this chapter will briefly recap the story of the transi-
tion of pigs-as-pigs to pigs-as-pork that characterize the chang-
ing relations between pig and human relations in time and space.Space, Time and Pig
I have described in previous publications what I have observed
and experienced first-hand on Cheju Island, and then came
to believe to be a human–pig symbiotic (or mutualistic) agro-
ecological trait-complex embodied in the pigsty–privy’s func-
tional and symbolic architecture. I eventually interpreted the
pigsty–privy in the context of the profound achievement of
Korean Neo-Confucian ideology. The pigsty–privy was a sig-
nificant, insightful element of a ‘sincere’ (Kr. song) landscape
‘inhabited by a ‘virtuous’ (Kr. in) people (Nemeth 1987). I
accompanied my narrative description of the pigsty–privy in
that book with the following illustrative model, incorporat-
ing ideas inspired in part by reading the works of Nash (1967),
Stilgoe (1976) and Stevens (1974).
The wisdom of Neo-Confucian ideology applied to healthy
welfare state for humans and pigs inferred in Figure 5.3 is to carve
an axis mundi settlement out of the wilderness (far left) and sys-
tematically grow it from an incipient peasant (subsistence) land-
scape (visible productive agro-ecosystem) into a mature peasant
(subsistence) landscape (visible productive agro-ecosystem)
and then strive to preserve it as such into perpetuity (far right,
middle). Failure to preserve the mature peasant agro-ecosystem
might result in its reverting to wilderness (far right, top). Or,
choosing to modernize through industrialization (far right, bot-
tom) is to choose to fail: industrial modernization, as history
reveals, sets into motion disruptive changes that undermine the
productive achievement and dynamic equilibrium of the mature
peasant landscape. The outcome of the processes of industrial
modernization is the deliberate transformation of achievedFigure 5.2 ‘Factory Pharm’ featur-
ing pigs-as-pork by Sue Coe (2001).
Reproduced with permission..00712:31:35