Chapter 5: Space, time and pig55
themselves with advancing knowledge and technology that
could make industrial productivity – including the machine-
aided production of pork – more efficient (and profitable).
The separation enables industrial production because it ena-
bles Modern humans to rationalize land use even in agriculture,
and to productively fill space with objects more densely, mean-
while expanding the space that could be so filled in a given time
(Bauman 2000b). Increased efficiencies of this magnitude are
characteristic of human agro-ecosystems in the machine age
that have enabled the advent of factory farming coinciding with
unbridled consumerism that coincides with a increases in pur-
chasing power and increasing pork consumption worldwide.
Factory farms have successfully increased mass pork pro-
duction. Success in mass, mechanized pork production has also
increased human alienation (of pork consumers and producers)
from Nature. The alienation has both accompanied and allowed
changing human perception of pigs-as-pigs (characteristic of in
relational time–space) to pigs-as-pork in absolute-time-and-
space. Sue Coe (in Figure 5.2) depicts the outcome of this change
of human perception on the welfare state of pigs-as-pork ena-
bled during the Anthropocene era of absolute space conceived
in the service of industrial food production.
Relative Space
Bauman envisioned ‘liquid modernity’ literally as a ‘watershed
change’ that rendered Modernity’s space and time separation
more and more irrelevant as the Anthropocene progressed.
During the transition from absolute space and time to relative
space/time, it became fashionable among many ‘post-modern’
thinkers like Harvey and Bauman that absolute space ‘annihi-
lates’ absolute time, and vice versa.
Paraphrasing Bauman (2000a, 2000b, 2007): absolute space
decreasingly set limits to human actions and agency because of
the instantaneity of communications: the instantaneity of time
in the era of post-modernity devalued space. Because all parts of
space could be reached in an instant, no space had special value.
There was no longer a need much less a reason for humans in
post-modernity to bear the cost of perpetually supervising rela-
tive spaces, the sort which could be abandoned and then revis-
ited in an instant.
In sum, key thinkers about time and space have increasingly
conceptualized Modernity (and the Anthropocene) in philo-
sophical and political terms as the age of the emancipation of
absolute space from absolute time. This cognitive ‘trick’ enabled
pigs-as-pigs during the agricultural era of relational space–time
to become pigs-as-pork in the instrumental-rational Industrial
Age (Anthropocene).
Pig–human relations in the present age of relative space–
time (which Harvey terms post-modern and Bauman terms
‘liquid modernity’) are ripe for change, and any change would
seem to foster an improvement in the welfare state of pigs-as-
pork. In this present post-modern era of corporate forming,
mass communications and consumerism run amok, pigs-as-
pork remains as much a cause for celebration as it was early
in the Anthropocene when Charles Lamb in 1823 wrote his
‘Dissertation on Roast Pig’ (which presumed pigs-were-pork in
ancient China).
Quo Vadis Sus scrofa?
Will improved welfare conditions for pigs-as-pork emerge dur-
ing this present age of liquid modernity and relative space–time?
While their welfare state in factory farms at present remains
dire, there are reasons for optimism.
Although shock artist Sue Coe exaggerates for effect in sup-
port of animal welfare activisms how humans allocate no living
space for pigs born and raised in factory farms and bound for
the slaughterhouse, she is not all that far off the truth. The pigs-
as-pork business-like approach to pig production during the
Anthropocene ‘has resulted in increased confinement of pigs
in highly capitalized, specialist houses [factory farms] where
emphasis was placed firmly on production efficiency. Some
of the methods adopted to maximize production efficiency
included minimizing space allowance per animal’ (Spoolder &
Waiblinger 2009, p. 229).
No space for pig-life means that pigs-as-pork ‘living’ in fac-
tory farms are essentially ‘dead on their hooves’ in anticipation
of a ‘shelf life’ for human consumption in the local supermarket.
The impossibilities of all their possibilities is a realistic defini-
tion for the living death of Sus scrofa form domesticus. Those alive
today will never experience normal pigs-as-pigs lives as that
possibility remains foreclosed – at least into the near future –
under present ‘best practices’ governing pigs-as-pork welfare in
factory farms; for example,
Ultimately, calm and consistent handling saves time . . . The qual-
ity of human–animal interactions depends to a large extent on the
ability and the willingness of handlers to reduce stress in their ani-
mals (Spoolder & Waiblinger 2009; Figure 5.6)
An important role of research is to determine how best to
achieve appropriate balances between production efficiency and
animal welfare within intensive pig production . . . promoting
welfare through allowing pigs to perform natural, species-specific
behaviors invariably means increasing environmental space and
complexity, and thus increasing capital cost of housing (O’Connell
2009, italics added).Figure 5.6 ‘Schweinelebensraum’ (Living Space for Pigs-as-Pigs). An original
futuristic drawing by Timothy Sanderson inspired by the counterfactual con-
jecture ‘If pigs could fly.. .’..00712:31:35