The Divine Pig

 Both Nicholas Kristof and Noah Smith (the blogger) devoted their respective columns this week to the atypical subject of pigs and animal cruelty. 

This was no coincidence. The subject may be outside the usual beat of both writers, but they turned to it this week because Congress is actively debating right now—as part of the Farm Bill—a measure with the hideously apt name of the "Save Our Bacon Act." 

Really, the proposed measure is a massive give-away ("pork," if you will pardon me) to the big ag industry; an attempt to rescue their profit margins in the face of state-level efforts to regulate the conditions under which pigs can be housed and slaughtered. 

Specifically, the state would use the federal government's commerce powers to overturn measures that voters in states like California and Massachusetts have recently approved to improve conditions for pigs in factory farms. 

The California law, for instance (already tested before the Supreme Court under the dormant commerce clause), required nothing more onerous than that pigs be housed in cages big enough to turn around in. 

If the new federal measures become law, even this tiny amount of progress and enlightenment would be reversed. Voters in the fifty states would not be permitted to mandate more compassionate treatment of pigs; instead, they would be required to tolerate the caging of pigs in cages so small they cannot even turn themselves about.

Noah Smith makes a convincing case that such conditions of life amount to animal torture. He describes life for an average sow in one of these facilities. She will never see her own offspring, because she cannot turn far enough in her cage to look behind her. 

"In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate [...] all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off," Smith writes. 

"The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come," he adds. "They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages." 

I can only think of Thomas Hardy's words—from a great poem about the evils of animal cruelty: 

Eternal dark thy lot, Groping thy whole life long; [...] Enjailed in pitiless wire... indeed, pigs in these facilities are every bit as "alive ensepulchred" as the blinded songbird in Hardy's poem. 

And I think of the ghastly and haunting imagery of Alfred Hayes's poem, "The Slaughter-House." 

Across the sawdusted floor,

ignorant as children, they see the butcher's slow

      methodical approach

in the bloodied apron, leather cap above, thick square shoes 

      below,

struggling to comprehend this unique vision upside down,

and then approximate a human scream

      as from the throat slit like a letter

the blood empties, and the windpipe, like a blown valve, spurts

      steam.

Noah Smith writes that "I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God, and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs."

Thomas Hardy would not have been willing to let the deity off the hook so easily for his own complicity in this. If there is a God (and Smith insists, in a footnote, that he thinks there is one), why has he not long since ransomed these pigs himself from this pit of torture? Why is his intervention limited to "disgust" and disapproval?

Why does he grant humankind "the will and power / To make his fellow mourn?" (Burns). 

Where is these pigs' guardian angel?—as Thomas Hardy would put it. As he said to the blinded bird: "So zestfully canst thou sing? / And all this indignity, / With God's consent, on thee!"

As Lord Byron once asked of a God that permits animal torture and demands the sacrifice of animal lives (in his poem "Cain," in which Byron partially redeems the first murderer in the Bible by also making him the first vegetarian): 

[W]hat was his high pleasure in 

The fumes of scorching flesh and smoking blood, 

To the pain of the bleating mothers, which 

Still yearn for their dead offspring? or the pangs

Of the sad ignorant victims underneath 

Thy pious knife? 

Instead of looking for a God in heaven who never seems to arrive in time; who never rescues his creatures—Hardy said that the divine was right before us: in the blinded bird itself. 

Who hath charity? This bird.

Who suffereth long and is kind, Is not provoked, though blind

And alive ensepulchred? Who hopeth, endureth all things?

Who thinketh no evil, but sings?

Who is divine? This bird.

Judith Shklar, in her Ordinary Vices, observes that for Montaigne, the pig was obviously a more virtuous animal than mankind. A pig thinks no evil; wills no harm to others. A pig has charity. 

They do not sweat and whine about their condition—as Whitman wrote of the animals— 

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Why is their reward to spend their whole lives "ensepulchred"? 

God cannot or will not save them; only human beings can. Only we can save these innocent and harmless—and divine—creatures from ourselves.