By John Van Wagner
When and how pigs arrived in Bermuda is still open to debate. But by the time of the wreck of the Sea Venture on the island in 1609, they’d ruled, unmolested, with neither predator nor prey, for at least a century. And perhaps far longer. They can swim, after all.
They’re long gone, now. But they’re still etched in collective memory, on coins and stamps and figurines sold at gift kiosks throughout the island. Pritchard Bay and the far western reach in Sandy’s Parish have been re-named Hog Bay Park, its 37 acres now a refuge for flora, fauna, and, yes, porcine spirits.
The Sea Venture foundered on Bermuda’s coral in the midst of an epic Gulf Stream hurricane, an event immortalized by Shakespeare in his magical realist play The Tempest. Seventy marooned passengers en route to the ill-fated colony of Jamestown, Virginia were compelled to remain on the island for ten months.
Within the year, George Somers, one of the group’s leaders, reluctantly continued the journey to Jamestown. But the settlement’s demise sent him back to Bermuda, and this time his fate was grimmer. History says he died from a “surfeit of pig.”
Too much of a good thing, apparently. But who could blame him? Seared pig flesh is irresistible to human beings, as much so in the seventeenth century as now. Succulent pork, crispy bacon, sizzling sausage permeate every corner of the modern dining experience. “The other white meat,” in 20th century marketing parlance, brings the dullest bean casserole or salad to salty, fatty life. At luaus in affluent American backyards, whole carcasses are lowered into specially constructed pits and roasted to a crisp, feeding gatherings of inebriated hedge fund managers and all who love them, the cooked skin systematically sliced from the body while the head and face remain, cheerful eyes regarding the bacchanal with inert amusement.
It’s a mammoth business. Over 1.5 million pig carcasses are shipped to Canada from US slaughterhouses every year. Eight billion pounds of “muscle cuts and variety meat” are exported globally. The industry is a cornerstone of Big Food, now that adverse porcine dietary mishaps are few. It’s 2026, after all, and even the chronic conditions people invite through years of pork consumption—high blood pressure, obesity, arteriosclerosis—can be handled, albeit sometimes awkwardly, by modern medicine.
But George Somers was unlucky in his timing. His demise should give us pause. It likely wasn’t brought on by overconsumption. Rather, the culprit was probably trichinosis, yersinosis, Noah virus, Japanese encephalitis, or some other microscopic terror. The list of pathogenic threats posed by pigs is long and daunting.
Since biblical times, Judaic tradition has recognized this danger, and, with a keen common sense approximating wisdom, forbade pig meat from Jewish diets. Orthodox sects continue this proscription to the present day. It’s not an irrational rule. Pigs are filthy animals, joyfully so, famous for their rapturous rolls in mud pits and manure piles. If their biology doesn’t offer ample warning, their recreational proclivities should.
Perhaps a stronger reason to avoid pork is that they share 98 percent of humans’ DNA.They’re our genetic reflection, if in a somewhat bent, fun house mirror way. Holy men four thousand years ago couldn’t have understood this, but perhaps there was an intuition that informed the sacred text of Leviticus, an awareness of our uncomfortable biological proximity to pigs, of the taint of cannibalism in each morsel of rib, loin, tongue, and ear.
We see, and yet we look away. In a study carried out in 2009, pigs were able to interpret a mirror image in order to find a food bowl. They could understand that they were viewing their own reflections and use this information to solve their problems. Self-recognition is only found in the world’s most intelligent species. One wonders where humans fall on such a scale, if we’re even remotely as cognizant when we confront our own faces.
Studies aside, there are infinite anecdotal indications of pigs’ sensitivity, their ability to bond, to empathize, to sense and evince distress, and ecstasy. And there is language. Anyone who spends enough time with them can discern vocabulary, even music, in their utterances.
We hesitate to look closely, or to listen, afraid of what we might discover. Literature has long grappled with our nervous insecurity in the silently reproving face of Sus scrofa. George Orwell’s dystopian allegory Animal Farm examines porcine intelligence with a merciless looking glass, revealing the face of the human condition as it unmasks the horrors of twentieth century totalitarianism, using a taut verbal economy that leaves no room for vain hope.
It begins with a dream: Old Major, “the prize Middle White Boar” of Manor Farm in middle England, who presides over the enclosure from the heights of his wisdom and longevity, has in his sleep experienced a vision of the earth “when Man has vanished.”
“Is it not crystal clear . . . that all evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?” Old Major bellows to his compatriots the following day. “What then must we do? Why, work, night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race!” He concludes by admonishing the rapt audience of cows, horses, rats, cats and ravens: “Remember that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him.”
Old Major’s words transform consciousness, and soon after his passing, the revolution is on. The animals vanquish the farmer and set about the Herculean task of building a bestial utopia. The pigs take charge.
In the beginning, the nature of their intelligence, while providing the basis for their dominance, seems integrated into the interests of the community as a whole. But there are subtleties in the way the pig overlords think. Among their many powers of perception is a knack for rooting out and exploiting weakness, and its subsidiary qualities, gullibility and idealism. These animals aren’t equal, they’re exceptional: calculating, cynical, opportunistic, bloodless, fully transactional. Their unique insight into the nature of revolution, and the opportunities it presents for ambition and self dealing, are only evident to us, the readers, for whom such a mind-set is unnervingly familiar, as it is unmistakably human.
Still the ending shocks. After an imperceptible crawl towards crushing cruelty and oppression, Animal Farm reverts to “Manor Farm”—what it was, and maybe has always been: “No question, now what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, pre-adolescent boys stranded on a desert island struggle against nature, and one another, for survival and identity. Predictable chaos ensues, as the power struggle among the children propels them toward primitive ideation. The most reluctant among them to descend to bestial predation is a fat boy named Piggy, whose glasses provide the only metaphorical and practical instrument for preserving and reentering civilization.
But immediate needs trump wider perception: the boys need to eat; and therefore, they need to hunt. And they do so with the personalized ardor of “pig stickers” in New Zealand, who eschew guns for the more intimate thrill of a prolonged dog chase, followed by dispatch with a knife to the throat. When they succeed in drawing blood, the boys seal their pact with dark forces that, until now, had lived within each of them, in varying degrees, unseen, and unbidden. Only Piggy demurs, thus cementing his doom.
For the complement of children, rapidly descending into savagery, the slaughtered pig becomes an object of fear and veneration, a conduit to the mythical demon that dominates their lives: “This head is for the beast. It’s a gift.” Mounted on a stick in the jungle, the pig’s head becomes “the Lord of the Flies.” The pagan offering, initially a symbolic sacrifice, becomes the embodiment of everything the boys fear, and of all their aspiration.
It is this phantasm that Golding mined, the idea that what we revile, what we dread, what we devour, what we long to reject, and export, is who we are. How and when the word “pig” became an open-source epithet, an insult reserved for the most recalcitrant fascists and monopolists, politicians and policemen, libertines and generals, is open to question. It can be traced back at least as far as 1874, when it was published in a slang dictionary defining it as a “policeman, or informer.” Over the course of the next several decades, its use expanded to include every reprehensible actor or group in the human spectrum, mostly involving those who dominate, control, or convey an air of superiority.
And it delivers a singular sting. No one calls politicians cows or billionaires donkeys or even foxes. The Manson family didn’t write the word “GOAT” in blood on its victims’ walls. Smearing human beings with the imprimatur of the filthiest and ugliest and wiliest of the farm animals we butcher with mechanized efficiency has the potential to reduce people to what is most vulnerable and disposable, to mock, emasculate, and denigrate into an oblivion as absolute as that served up in the abattoir.
How the pig as a symbol of human degeneracy gained currency, when in fact the cerebral qualities they display reveal humility, playfulness, compassion, maybe even love, remains an ironic mystery. At its bitter zenith, the Black Panther party of the ’60s and ’70s distilled the view of the pig as a manipulative deceiver: “A pig is an ill-natured beast who has no respect for law and order, a foul traducer who’s usually found masquerading as a victim of an unprovoked attack.” This pronouncement might seem to some as the ultimate projection, a way to offload an unbearable burden of moral squalor. But it’s more than that. It’s the purest exercise in human alienation. To lay our demons on the defenseless “porkers,” even while we decimate and devour them, is to reject the part of us that we can’t reconcile with the divine.
The fear of death, unconscious though it may be, sits just beneath the psychic surface of daily life. It suffuses E. B. White’s classic Charlotte’s Web, in which Wilbur, the runt of the pig litter, is saved from execution by the farmer’s daughter, and subsequently by the savant spider Charlotte. White brings God into the picture implicitly, opening up his piglet main character to the possibility of salvation. But there is no overt mention of an afterlife, no Sugar Candy Mountain in this children’s tale—only the hope for connection. “Wilbur didn’t want food, he wanted love.” Death is only frightening to those in the story who have never valued life, who have never known the infinite comfort of a smile, a warm embrace, and the hope for generations to come. “Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.”
Yet outside of the literature’s fictional dissections, death’s rule is law. In one of humankind’s many theaters of dread illness, those who suffer from kidney disease endure the grueling daily tension of hope and fear. The eponymous organ weakens in an agonizing, slow-motion decline that results in years of debility. Death is always on an ever nearer horizon. On any given day 109,000 people await the life-saving gift of a kidney, as they endure the artificial cleansing ritual of dialysis, three times a week, for four hours a day. Eleven people die every day, hoping until the very last for that perfect timing, for some unfortunate teenage auto fatality with an organ card, or a compatible living donor willing to wager his own health and longevity to save another, testing the depth of his love, or, in some cases, his martyrdom.
But science, in its infinite inquisitiveness, is finding another way. The New York Times recently featured an article with the eye-catching title “For Patients Needing Transplants, Hope Arrives on Tiny Hooves.” Below the heading is a photograph of newborn piglets, perhaps only seconds old, in some undefined enclosure, bathed in a warm glow that resembles sunlight, squirming over each other as if in an attempt to recapture the communal womb. These babies are unabashedly adorable. And they are equally inauthentic.
For they are clones, born weak and compromised, with genes modified to produce organs specifically kidneys—that can replicate, in the closest possible approximation, their human counterparts. The biotech firms that breed them in disquieting seclusion in rural Wisconsin have made rapid strides in genetic engineering, opening new avenues of utility for pigs as a vehicle for man’s well-being.
They are born to die, so that we might live. The process is imperfect. The engineered embryos are extracted from the mother by Caesarian section, lest they retain infectious actors that could invade their human hosts. Even denatured and synthetic, they still carry the source of life and death for their genetic first cousins.
The article details the lives of the hopeful patients. These people are not yet old, but they are mostly dissipated—obese, diabetic, alcoholic, or recovering. They’ve run the gamut of organ availability and experimental medicine and spend a good chunk of their sedentary days on dialysis. And then the doctor sits the patient down and gives him reason to think life might not be at a flickering end. At first there is confusion, and some wariness: “Will I oink?” one of the possible beneficiaries inquires, unsure whether the doctor is joking.
The researchers believe fervently in their work, though they find themselves attached, inevitably, to the piglets. They give them names like Octavia and Rainbow Dash. The babies are indulged, much more so than piglets in any other environment. They are nurtured to maturity, sanitized, and then given over to finish the narrative cycle of human miracles. “We know they’re changing the world,” says one researcher, maybe more to convince herself than the interviewer.
Toward the end of the article, there’s another picture, of the mother pig. She’s in an isolation chamber, bathed in the same warm, unearthly light as her offspring. Her enormous bulk rests in fresh hay, supine but not asleep, recovering from her C-section. Her eyes are tiny, open, and empty, like punctures yielding to endless wells of resignation. She’s strangely pale under the heat lamp’s glow, devoid not just of her babies, whom she will never see or nurture, but of hope. And yet some viewers might see in her expression something beatific, filled with an awareness of the scope of her loss, her sacrifice, of the life she’s foregone to feed the desperate hopes of her tormentors. She is beyond sleep now, and one has the sense her eyes might never close again, for she is fully aware.
A thousand miles away, safe on a sanctuary farm tucked away within a county park, another expectant sow slumbers in the shade of a poplar tree. Her name is Ada, and she is exempt from harm. Nothing more is demanded of her than to spend her days on display for the families who stroll by to observe her life. She reduces the children to stitches when she urinates, scratches her hindquarters on the fence post, or collapses into the mud for a roll in the hot sun. With this performative display, she ensures herself a long and placid life.
Today she naps, sleepy from gestation and from the heat. But she is not idle. Her feet stir in tandem, moving in a rhythm more akin to swimming than trotting. Her eyes dart under her wrinkled lids, implying anxiety, as if she is adrift, frantically moving, scouring the endless scope of the ocean for some reprieve, the journey of her ancestors centuries before. And then her body relaxes, her brow unfurrows, and her sleep calms, as if she sees a shore, an island, a found paradise just within her reach. Her feet touch the sandy bottom with relief, and in her waking moments, she considers all that will happen, and all that will hatch.
John Van Wagner lives and writes in New Jersey. His work has been recently published in October Hill Magazine, Marrow Magazine, New Pop Lit, Every Day Fiction, Inscape Journal, and elsewhere.
