That "Hog" Over the Fire Is a Baby Piglet

Originally published at The Previous Blog in October 2009. Reposted in part here in June 2010 as a companion to this post.

Many people assume, without ever really thinking about it, that the animals they’re eating were killed as adults. But just like most of our assumptions about nonhuman animals — from their capacities for thought and emotion and the bonds they build to how they live, suffer, and die on farms, in slaughterhouses, in labs, and elsewhere — this assumption too is wrong.  Not long ago, I shared a video with you, of Glenn Gaetz from Liberation BC pointing out that “We Eat Babies.” And he was telling the truth.

But we don’t use language that reflects this. And one example that always gets to me is the word “hog,” which most seem to associate with adult pigs. But whether a pig is defined a “hog” has nothing to do with his or her age — it’s about weight. A pig becomes a hog in the industry as soon as he or she has been fattened up enough to be “slaughter/market weight.” The truth is that pigs are generally slaughtered when they are between just 4 and 9 months old. In other words, they’re toddlers.

And the animals whose bodies and faces people even see being cooked at pig/hog roasts? Pigs killed for those purposes are among the youngest. That “suckling” pig whose carcass a friend or neighbor was excited to buy and roast for his backyard barbecue this summer? Maybe 2 months old, maybe 6 weeks. An “older” roaster pig may be just 3-4 months old.

Baby pigs’ flesh — like human babies’ — is more “tender,” and it’s not cost-effective to let pigs grow to full-size and adulthood anyway (and this is true for all types of pig farming, not just “factory farming”), so we just kill and eat the babies and call them “pork,” “bacon,” and “ham.”

Entire species whose members are never allowed to live out an even halfway normal life span (unless they are among the rarest of the rare who are rescued and taken to sanctuary) — a whole industry and diet and world of menus based on killing babies.