Baileynorwoodrocks, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, guides the keeper in celebrating “The Day of Pigs,” by way of eating some of Phyllis’s typically delicious pork- based soup; and in reading about how the Chinese are building 27-story, hog-towers in an effort to meet the demand for pork from 1.44 billion Chinese people.
Elevators whisk pregnant sows to the top stories of the towers where they are fed special diets, medicated to protect from disease and apparently lounge about in huge swine maternity quarters.
What happens to the sows and their offspring after farrowing, of course, puts them all on a path to the chopsticks of hungry Chinese.
The hog towers represent only the latest iteration of the human species as hunter/gatherers delegating all of its hunting and gathering so the members have time for war, shooting down balloons and gabbing on their telephones.
Pigs living–and dying, in 27-story high rises impresses the keeper who remembers carrying water to the pigs behind the barn.
He will be having a second bowl of Phyllis’s creative pork soup while trying not to think about how pigs, or maybe dogs, even cats, are likely to replace humans as the dominant species.
