Part I: Evolution, Taxonomy, and Domestication54
of their ‘fair share’ of living space in the contemporary calculus
of land-use economics. Thus, land-use practices have changed
dramatically during the transition from agriculture to indus-
trialization that accompanied the ‘second agricultural revolu-
tion’, which accompanied modernization and the advent of the
Anthropocene in Europe.
Land means space in which production processes take place.
Almost all such [productive] processes demand some space . . .
the space requirement for . . . pig rearing is much less than most
other farming enterprises and this has earned them the title ‘fac-
tory farming’. (Hill 2014)
The animal welfare implications of Hill’s observation for
contemporary pork production is that space efficiencies and
economies for profitable pig-rearing in a factory farm require
a rationalization of space for pigs-as-pork production. This
rationalization of space in efficient factory-farm pork produc-
tion allocates minimal if any living space for pigs-as-pork.
The road from complex historic Holocene pig-as-pigs
husbandry to complicated pigs-as-pork factory farming in
the present-day Anthropocene (both in East Asia and in
Northern Europe) narrowed rapidly after the onset of the
Anthropocene (c.1700).Relational, Absolute, and Relative Spaces, and
Changing Pig–Human Relations
In contemplating ‘the nature of space’, David Harvey (1977)
introduces distinctions between relational, absolute, and
relative space. These can be discussed as consecutive lenses
associated with changing human perceptions of their material
surroundings as resources during their sequent occupancy of
the land for the purposes of agriculture (and animal domestica-
tion), beginning with the Neolithic:
At the beginning of the Neolithic period, pigs were able to root in
oak and beech forests which provided ample shade and wallows
as well as acorns, beechnuts, truffles, and other forest floor prod-
ucts. With an increase in human population density, farm acreage
increased and the oak and beech forests were destroyed to make
room for planted crops, especially for olive trees, thereby eliminat-
ing the pig’s ecological niche’ (Harris 1997).
This sequential ‘elimination’ of the ecological niche of wild
pigs during the early Holocene can be modelled as Figure 5.5.
Figure 5.5 suggests (from left to right) that a historical
sequence of expanding human settlements (‘urbanization’)
on a global scale has taken place during which the once unre-
stricted ‘free environment’ available for pig life in the wild, and
in human confinements, has been significantly compressed in
space and time since the onset of the Anthropocene to make
room for the efficient industrial agricultural production of
pigs-as-pork on factory farms in order to meet the demand of
rapidly increasing pork-consuming human populations. The
transition was achieved in large part by government agency that
legally ‘enclosed’ agricultural space in order to more efficiently
grow and sell agricultural products to finance manufacturing
smokestack industries, marking the onset of the Anthropocene
that coincides with the end of the European Medieval Period
(c.1500 AD).Relational Space
According to Harvey (1990), in pre-Modern times, people expe-
rienced relational space/time. I interpret Harvey to mean that
Neolithic farmers were close to Nature and its seasonal rhythms,
including the wild pigs that were increasingly encroaching on
their villages. In contrast, they inhabited complex, productive,
subsistence agro-ecosystems as peasant farmers without need-
ing to contemplate time and space as distinct abstractions. As
productive subsistence farmers during the historic Holocene,
any abstract thinking continued to be impractical to the condi-
tions of their everyday survival, and was anyway irrelevant to
the success of their productive agricultural lifestyles.
To farmers inhabiting ‘mature peasant landscapes’
(Figure 5.3) the time/space experience was cyclical (in contrast
to linear) and mental model of the cosmos was – as, for example,
in the Neo-Confucian cosmological model – a ‘gravity model’
centring on the nourishing axis mundi of ‘The Well’ of their
settlement and surrounded by the myriad things, including
pigs-as-pigs all ‘relating’ in space/time.Absolute Space
‘History of time began with modernity’, according to Zygmut
Bauman (2000a), a claim seemingly in tacit agreement with
David Harvey and other social scientists who have theorized
about the forces of Modernity and the Anthropocene that have
separated the concept of time from the concept of space, thus
replacing relational time–space with an absolute-space-and-
time paradigm, one that engenders and promotes scientific and
technological progress in the service of the Industrial Age.
Bauman observed that Enlightenment thinkers and scien-
tists in the West at the onset of the Anthropocene made pains-
taking efforts to express velocities, distances, accelerations of
observable objects in detail and numerically in order to system-
atically advance knowledge about these objects in the name of
Progress and Development. All this was made possible by cast-
ing space and time ‘as two transcendentally separate and mutu-
ally independent categories of human cognition’. Stevens’ (1974)
truth claim (see epigraph) ‘space prohibits so much and permits
so little’ in an absolute-space-and-time context made sense and
presented a challenge to Enlightenment thinkers, who taskedFigure 5.5 Spatial decline of wild pig habitat (depicted in black as declining
from left to right) during the Anthropocene. Grey areas from left to right depict
the rapid transition of ‘mature peasant landscape’ in Northwestern Europe.
Metropolitan regions centred on cities during the Anthropocene (represented
by the land-use efficiency of W. Christaller’s urbanizing ‘central place’ hexa-
gons) have all but ‘squeezed out’ at present any fair share of living space for
both pigs-as-pigs and for pigs-as-pork..00712:31:35