The Good Good Pig Read online

  Why? The answer was simple: pig manure. (This might not seem like a good topic of conversation for a dinner party, but we live in New Hampshire.) Meat, I would explain to my fascinated audience, makes pig manure smell bad. A vegetarian pig’s manure has a nice earthy smell to it, as well as a pleasant shape and texture, rather like a small loaf of braided bread. But add meat to the diet, and it stinks, gets all sticky, and falls through the tines of the pitchfork. It also ruins the compost pile. Do you add dog droppings to the tomato patch in the summer? Of course not. But a vegetarian pig’s manure is garden gold.

  At this point in the party conversation, invariably someone would ask, “Well, what are you going to do with him?”

  I generally bristled at the question. “What are you going to do with your grandson?” I wanted to fire back. “Looks to me he might dress out at maybe fifty or sixty pounds.”

  But Howard kept me in check. “We’re going to send him to the Sorbonne,” he would reply. And then we would explain that since I was a vegetarian and Howard was a Jew, with Christopher we would explore the largely uncharted territory of just how long a pig can naturally live. Possibly because Chris had no reason to be suspicious about our motives, we explained, he was an exceptionally gracious, well-adjusted, and cheerful pig.

  “Oh, you would love him!” we would promise. “Come see him anytime! And don’t forget to bring your garbage.” We promised “dinner and a show.” They brought Christopher’s dinner. Watching him eat it was the show.

  If he was in his pen when people arrived, the opening act was Christopher’s enthusiastic exit. “Look, Pig Man, you’ve got visitors!” I would tell him, and Chris would answer with excited grunts. My announcement was unnecessary; he could clearly hear and smell the people coming, as well as their slops, and he could hardly wait. When I opened his gate, he shot out like a squealing black and white cannonball. I would race him with the slops bucket to the Pig Plateau. Here I would pour out some slops, giving me time to hook the tether to his harness. Then we could all stand back—a step or two beyond the reach of his tether—and enjoy the spectacle.

  When it came to eating, Christopher was a performance artist.

  Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill. Seldom can you take such pleasure in another’s joy. Here is someone following his bliss. Pigs are quite literally made for eating—they were bred to eat and get fat fast. (Of all mammals, domestic pigs are the most efficient at converting plant food into flesh: a piglet can gain five pounds a day—a pound for every three pounds of plant food he eats; a calf needs to eat ten pounds for a similar gain.) Grunting, slurping, and snorting with delight, Christopher ate with the enthusiasm of a gourmand and the natural grace of an athlete. Food wasn’t just the number one thing on his list; we figured food occupied numbers one through perhaps fifty on his hierarchy of desires.

  We humans aren’t allowed to enjoy food this much. To do so is labeled the sin of gluttony, and its consequence, if we are to believe the magazines, is clogged arteries, shapeless couture, and guilt. For many of us, food is the enemy. But while Christopher was eating, it seemed he was communing with his Higher Power. It was a beautiful thing to see.

  No wonder our visitors often wanted to hand-feed Christopher. It was their way of joining in the fun. Long objects were safest: loaves of stale French bread, overripe bananas, overgrown zucchini—Chris didn’t bite, but it was wise to put distance between his eager mouth and your hand. (Small round foods, like cupcakes and apples, were best hand-fed when he was in the pen, when he would hold his mouth open so you could toss food in like a basketball.) These Chris would bite forcefully, but his next response depended on whether or not you let go of the other end. He liked you to hold on to the French bread, so he could tear away a bite-sized piece, using your grip the way human diners employ knife and fork. With denser, harder items such as zucchini and large carrots, he simply bit into them and expected you to keep the other half from falling on the ground. Not that he had an aesthetic problem with eating food off the dirt; he just liked the extra interaction when you fed him the next piece and, if it was big enough, the piece after that.

  Most of his meals, however, were too gooey or amorphous for hand-feeding; these we plopped into his bowl in the pen or poured onto the ground. The uninitiated might think that pigs just Hoover everything up. That was not the case with Hogwood. Unless the foods had commingled in the slops bucket to the point that they were indistinguishable, he carefully chose the items he liked best first, lifting them rather delicately, albeit noisily, with his flexible lips: pasta, pastry, cheese, and fruit. (From an early age, he had a sweet tusk.) Next best were carrots and starches, including rice and potatoes—especially if they had acquired, either in their original preparation or during their stay in the slops bucket, some kind of creamy sauce. Lastly, though still with flourish, he would eat the leftover kale, broccoli, spinach, and the like. If there was any trace of onion or a scrap of lemon or orange peel, he would leave this untouched. If the meal contained any unpeeled eggs, he would crunch them up and then slowly and delicately spit out the shells.

  When presented with an item so large or tough he could not immediately bite it in half—a pumpkin, for instance—Christopher would pick it up and shake it, exactly as a dog shakes a sock (and for the same reason: it’s a kill gesture, to break the neck of the imaginary prey). The shake-and-kill response was especially effusive when Christopher was presented with an unlikely meal of lobster—more precisely, lobster-flavored exoskeleton. One day, friends came with several guests and their big black dog to see what Chris would do with the remains of the previous night’s feast. Christopher picked up an enormous carapace as if he had been dining on lobster all his life. He shook it forcefully from side to side, sending forth a spray of melted butter and causing the lobster’s antennae and eye stalks to roust about in a gruesome, lifelike manner. Like a seal with a fish, he gave the lobster a brief toss before catching it again in his mouth, and then pulverized the red exoskeleton with his powerful jaws. Everyone was enthralled, but especially our friend the food writer. Even when he later became a professional chef, seldom did he get to see anyone enjoy a meal as much as Christopher did.

  And when presented with foods of even larger dimensions? Imagine our excitement when the family of a seventh-grade gorilla enthusiast, whom I had met on my first book tour, drove out from their home in Saugus, Massachusetts, to visit us. As a present, they brought a fruit basket full of melon balls, beautifully carved from the shell of an enormous watermelon, which must have weighed twenty-five pounds. As it happened, my friend Liz Thomas’s sixtieth birthday was the next day—and the day after that we would celebrate the birthday of her anthropologist mother, Lorna, who would be ninety-three. This presented a quandary, as it did every year. Liz was a bestselling author (The Harmless People on the Bushmen and Warrior Herdsmen on the Dodoth were still in print after three decades, and her newest books, a set of Paleolithic novels, were instant hits); she could afford anything she wanted. Surely Lorna, after ninety-three years, had acquired everything she wanted, too. I’d had no idea what to get for them, but now I had the perfect gift: I would invite them over to watch Christopher eat the remains of the watermelon.

  He did not disappoint us. Chris was already in position when Liz and Lorna drove up. Liz helped Lorna walk with her cane out to the Pig Plateau. I carried the huge melon from the refrigerator and placed the hollowed-out giant before him. Christopher bit into it joyfully. With a grunt, he picked it up. He shook it. Pieces of the watermelon flew in all directions, as dramatic as fireworks. With each new bite, sweet juice mixed with his foamy drool and flowed down his jowls like pink champagne on New Year’s Eve. And, of course, the action was accompanied by the festive chewing, grunting, slurping, and snorting of a happy pig.

  It was a huge hit.

  Liz and Lorna both loved animals. Liz had studied animals all over the world, and she and her husband, Steve, had shared their home over the years with a kinkajou (a South Amer
ican relative of the raccoon, with a grasping tail), a dingo, a team of huskies, two large iguanas, six orphaned possums, and at present two dogs and four cats. (Lorna was more than welcome there, too, but still insisted on living at her own house across from Harvard University—the better to finish her scholarly analysis of her family’s pioneering studies of the Bushmen. When Lorna wanted to visit New Hampshire, she drove the two and a half hours up to Liz and Steve’s house.) Lorna loved animals and they loved her, too: whenever Lorna came over to our house, our cockatiel would fly immediately to Lorna’s snowy white hair and ride around on her like an animated beret.

  Liz had been one of Christopher’s special friends ever since he first came to live with us. Like Gretchen, Liz was an indispensable consultant on matters porcine. It was Liz who had taught me how to induce Christopher to lie down. It didn’t work under all conditions—if Chris was in the middle of eating, for instance, no earthly force could stop him. But generally, Liz showed me, if you rub a pig along his inguinal region—the area of the belly just in front of the back legs, particularly along the nipples—he will almost irresistibly drop to his front knees, and then, with a thud, fall over onto his side, succumbing to a swoon of pleasure. This intimate caress is almost hypnotic for species across the mammalian spectrum, Liz told me—probably because it emulates the feeling of the mother licking her baby clean, which is often done after nursing. (I later discovered it’s effective even on rhinos, experimenting on a captive animal I met while visiting a sanctuary in Texas.)

  Of course, Christopher wanted you to keep rubbing his belly forever. In fact, doing so was tempting for everyone. Who would not wish to continue such an exchange of comfort and joy? Never could you find anyone more responsive to caresses. His bliss was contagious.

  “Good, good pig,” we would croon to our prone beast as we rubbed him, loving as a lullaby. “Good, good pig. Good big pig. Fine, fine swine. Good, good, gooood.” He would grunt back to us in exactly the same rhythm, slowing down as he lolled toward slumber.

  Belly rubs were usually the grand finale to all of Christopher’s public eating performances. And, of course, this is what we did after Christopher finished Liz and Lorna’s birthday watermelon.

  But first, Howard took a photo to commemorate the event. We lined up to face the camera in ascending seniority: Christopher, age one; me, thirty-three; Liz, sixty; Lorna, ninety-three. “We’re all thirty years apart,” Liz observed. “Yes, here we are,” said Lorna, “four generations.” It felt for all the world like a family photo. Except that only two of us were genetically related, and one of us had a flexible nose disk and a hairy tail.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Blended Family

  CHURCH PROVED ANOTHER VALUABLE VENUE FOR SOLICITING SLOPS.

  The minister was in on our scheme. “This is Sy Montgomery,” he’d introduce me to new members and visitors in hopes of securing edible garbage. “She lives with a pig. And I’m not talking about her husband.”

  We did get some takers that way, but a more reliable source of slops was the minister himself. Graham and his wife, Maggie, would come over whenever they had a compost buildup. Maggie adored Christopher and kept a photo of him as a piglet on the window sill above the kitchen sink in the parsonage. That first summer we spent with Chris, Maggie had started feeling sick from time to time, but she always felt better around Christopher. And I always felt better around Maggie and Graham.

  They were a little older than us, and both of them were scholars. Maggie had once been the dean of a women’s college (though when Graham was called to our congregation she had to switch to waitressing at the local inn’s restaurant). Graham had studied geology before switching to theology. Both of them read widely and thought deeply. Our discussions were always lively and sometimes profound—and often further stimulated by the edifying experience of watching a pig eat.

  “One of the first things Jesus did was to drive demons out of a person and cast them into swine,” Maggie remarked one day as Christopher chewed an overgrown zucchini she had brought from her garden. “I always thought that was no fair.”

  “Well, Jesus doesn’t go around just being a nice guy,” Graham said. “He’s an exorcist. We forget this today. But the real problem with humans is, we’re possessed with destructive spirits. So Jesus casts them into a herd of swine and sends them over a cliff.”

  “But what did the pigs do wrong?” I asked. “They were innocent bystanders. What did Jesus have against them?”

  “Jesus probably hated pigs,” Graham said.

  I was stunned.

  “This is a real challenge to my faith, Graham!”

  The minister laughed. In his sermons, he often stressed the value of understanding the Bible in its historical and cultural context. Jesus, he pointed out, was, after all, a Jew living in Israel under Roman rule—a time, place, and culture where swine were considered vile, filthy animals.

  Why this prejudice against pigs?

  It could have simply been practical. Maggie (a superb cook, with whom I often swapped recipes) suggested that possibly the taboo against pork was a divinely inspired health ordinance. Eating undercooked pork carries the threat of trichinosis. The Koran, too, forbids the eating of pork, possibly for the same reason. (But actually you can get trichinosis from any insufficiently cooked meat.)

  It could have been ecological. In The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig, the controversial anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that pigs were once popular meat animals in the Middle East (and in fact new data suggest that one of two subspecies of wild pigs from which all farm pigs arose was first domesticated there). But the Israel of Leviticus was no place for swine. By then, human overpopulation had destroyed Israel’s Neolithic forests of oak and beech to make way for planted crops, especially olive groves. Without free forage, pigs were too expensive to raise—especially since, unlike sheep, goats, and cows, pigs can’t provide their people with wool or milk. So Jewish lawmakers said, quite literally, to hell with them.

  Graham and I have continued this conversation about religious taboos on pigs for fifteen years now. Recently he suggested yet another possibility. Perhaps pigs reminded the ancient Jews too much of ourselves. “Pigs are so close to humans,” he said. “They’re quite intelligent. Their hearts are so like ours that we use their valves in medicine. Their flesh even tastes like ours—or so I’ve heard.” (I had, too. This fact inspired certain Polynesian cannibals to coin a term for Westerners who literally came for dinner: “long pig.”)

  “That may name our uneasiness with pigs,” Graham said. “There’s a sense that they’re too close to home, as though we are eating an element of ourselves.”

  Shortly after this talk I read a passage suggesting the Jewish prohibition against pigs was paradoxical. In his classic The Golden Bough, James George Frazer writes that pigs may have been originally venerated by the Jews. Until the time of Isaiah, he suggests, Jews considered both mice and pigs divine, their flesh eaten during sacramental ceremonies, in the spirit that Christians eat the Eucharist, the body of Christ, today. The very fact that pigs are now so reviled suggests they were once revered, and that overturning the old order required vehement injunctions.

  This could well be. For many cultures have—wisely, in my view—embraced the pig as a potent symbol of divinity.

  For their strength and cunning, wild pigs were emulated by warriors, invoked by wizards, consulted by soothsayers. In pre-Christian Europe, fortune-tellers looked into the fresh livers of pigs to see the future, for it was said their organs reflected the divine rays sent down by the gods. In Mycenaean Greece, the brave and ferocious wild boar was sacred to Ares, the god of war. Throughout Europe and Asia, gods were often associated with boars; in many myths, gods are slain by boars, as people surely were. Sows were revered for their fecundity. A white sow was the symbol of the Welsh goddess Cerridwen, a lunar deity worshiped as the Great Mother. Wild pigs were the favorite animals of the fertility god Freyr and his sister, Freyja, to whom Norsemen and Anglo-
Saxons made solemn sacrifices. As a baby, Zeus, the future chief of the Olympian gods, was suckled by a sow.

  The Chinese consider the pig lucky, a symbol of both fertility and wealth. Even today, children collect their savings in ceramic piggy banks, perhaps a nod to the wisdom of a culture whose sterling accomplishments include domesticating pigs nine thousand years ago (a separate strain from the Middle Eastern stock) and inventing ceramics. In China, it is said that the Heavenly Jade Emperor himself named the twelfth year of the lunar calendar after the pig, for this was the twelfth creature to cross the finish line in a divinely inspired race to which all the animals were invited. People who are born in the Year of the Pig are believed to be blessed with the porcine qualities of sincerity, honesty, and kindness. (Consulting the place mat in a Chinese restaurant, I was disappointed to see that, unlike such lucky souls as Albert Schweitzer, Julie Andrews, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, neither Howard nor I—nor Christopher!—was born in a Pig year.)

  Elsewhere in Asia, pigs are widely admired. A Hindu creation legend tells us the great god Vishnu took the form of a boar in order to lift up the Earth on his strong back from the waters of the primeval flood; he is often depicted with a boar’s head on a human body. In Papua New Guinea, many tribes measure their wealth by the number of pigs they have. Women sometimes suckle orphaned pigs along with their own infants. In some of these areas, the pigs are not eaten. Instead they are admired for their beauty and fecundity, and especially for their handsome, curving tusks.

  By the end of his first year with us, Christopher was yet to grow tusks. But already he was, I thought, very beautiful: his black and white coat glossy, his eyes bright and expressive, his black hooves shiny and trim. But his beauty was more than skin (or even lard) deep. Though we didn’t realize it at the time, Christopher was already bringing to us the blessings for which pigs have been credited for centuries: strength, luck, friends, and even family.