Winston Churchill said: Dogs look up to you cats look down on you, but pigs treat you like equals.
Pigs resemble human beings in many ways. Like dogs and other animals they share many of our feelings - compassion, fear, and their need for companionship and intelligence.
They are able to solve problems and have been shown to excel at video games that would be hard for a young child, and sometimes perform better than primates.
Karl Schwenke points out in his 1985 classic, In a Pig's Eye: "Pigs are gregarious animals. Like children they thrive on affection, enjoy toys, have a short attention span and are easily bored. Much like children, piglets do not develop in a normal way when they are deprived of the opportunity to engage in play. They are at least as intelligent as dogs and have been known to rescue their owners from drowning.
They also dream and see colours like us. It is now recognised that they know when they are going to be slaughtered. Like dogs, they are individuals.
The one big difference between pigs and dogs is the way we treat them. We play with our dogs, take them for walks - we rarely do the same with pigs. It is difficult to understand why they receive such a raw deal.
George Orwell's classic novel, Animal Farm, is generally considered to be a political fable about totalitarianism and
He was struck with the force of a revelation "that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat" and proceeded to analyze Marx's theory from the animals' point of view.
In the beginning of the book, as Major tells the animals on the farm, "No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in
And so, as farm animals, pigs now live in a world that has become very far removed from nature - and where the purpose of their existence is almost entirely defined by their death or exploitation, where animals are seen as objects and have to earn their keep along the world view of if it pays it stays. We confine pigs in factory farms in sheds where they are constantly impregnated, and where they stand on slats, not even able to move around. As piglets their tails are docked without anaesthetic and in the end, like the old horse in Animal Farm, their fate is the slaughterhouse.
But a visit to the Rustler's Valley community, near Ficksburg in the Free State, demonstrated again the symbiotic relationship between human- and non-human animals, where the pigs' keen sense of smell and natural inclination to root is used to the benefit of all.
The Rustlers' Valley community practices permaculture, a sustainable way of agriculture which is about "caring for the environment so that the environment can care for us." The use of pesticides and other chemicals is dispensed with by the inter-planting of crops with herbs that heal the soil and keep away harmful pests. In working with nature mechanical devices are dispensed with. New veggie patches are prepared by making use of 'pig tractoring.' A sty is erected over a patch of veld which is to be cleared.
The pigs then root to their hearts' content, clearing the ground of unwanted vegetation and spreading manure to feed the soil. As such, everybody is happy and the community is able to live off the land entirely.
