“The Save Our Bacon Act” has been condemned across many media outlets, including by New York Times personalities Nicholas Kristof and Ezra Klein. They oppose passing this law, which would empower the federal government to strike down state laws that prohibit caging mother pigs.
As summarized in “The Ezra Klein Show,” voters in California and Massachusetts decided that some things were more important than maximizing profit: They passed a law “[mandating] that a breeding sow must be able to turn around, lie down, stand up, and fully extend her limbs, and that there must be 24 square feet of floor space per pig … These are not conditions any creature would choose. But they are better than the conditions in which millions of breeding sows lived.”
The opposition’s argument centers on three issues: this act would jeopardize hundreds of state regulations, infringe on citizens’ rights and impose inhumane conditions on pigs. I want to address its cruelty and inhumanity from personal experience.
When I was growing up, my parents raised two pigs every year. We gave them names and, as kids, we enjoyed spending time with them. They were glad to see us and would grunt in joy when their backs were scratched.
One year, we got our piglets from a local farmer whose family interacted closely with their animals, making them extra friendly to humans. We took the pigs home, put them in their pen, and left to do errands. When we got home, we were surprised to find our little pigs had escaped their pen and were stretched out like puppies, asleep on our front porch.
We could tell our pigs were smart and relational. In an attempt to distance ourselves from our feelings for them, we spent less time with them as fall approached, knowing their end was near. My father made it a point to take us on an outing on the day the man came to slaughter them because no one in our family had the stomach to witness that.
Decades of research on pigs have shown that pigs are indeed highly intelligent. They have been shown to engage in abstract thinking, use tools, recognize their own names, dream and follow commands. Pigs are at least as smart as dogs and, in many problem-solving and cognitive tests, outperform them.
Again, in the early 1970s, my wife and I raised pigs for a few years as part of the 1960s back-to-the-land movement. But it became increasingly problematic. It came to a head the year the man who came to slaughter our pigs shot the first pig at close range with a .22 rifle. But on that fateful occasion, the shot missed the mark, causing the wounded pig to pirouette around, screaming in an eerie, human-like voice, while the other pig ran around crying in unison.
That was the last time we raised pigs.
By definition, because humans have evolved as a predatory, meat-eating species, we have difficulty morally justifying killing animals for food. During an interview on “The Ezra Klein Show,” Melanie Challenger, an environmental philosopher and historian, pondered how differently our moral system would be if we were descended from Canadian beavers.
But we are not descended from beavers; we are descended from the prejudices we inherited from our founding fathers, who were oblivious to the fact that animals feel pain, think and have emotions. But that’s not all.
In addition, they downgraded Black people and Native Americans to nonhuman status, along with anyone else without white skin. Women were relegated to an inferior status, much like slaves, owned by men and prohibited from voting.
How could we have been so insensitive back then, meekly following the herd while blocking out the indisputable evidence right in front of our eyes? We’ve made a lot of painstaking progress since then, but we still have a long way to go. And, sadly, we’ve lost ground during the Trump years.
While we wait for an American renaissance, many of us will continue to eat meat. At the very least, we can treat the animals that sacrifice their lives for us with respect and humane care.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.