The Noise of the Pigs

Another update. Crumb Trail has a post on the pigs comment. He points out something –

It’s only funny if you know pigs. They scream for the fun of it, to socialize. Even the wild (feral) pigs that infest the woods around here scream at one another, other animals, the sky, the moon, whatever. They’re vocal like coyotes. Two pigs, or coyotes, can make enough noise in enough distinct ways that you might think there were dozens of them involved in some life and death drama unless you knew their ways. They scream more when they find something yummy than they do when they are being eaten alive by a predator.

Fair point. Pigs do scream a lot – I do know that. I did think of it while writing the comment – that pigs just are vocal, that they scream for anything or nothing. I thought of mentioning that, but the trouble is, the way I remember it (and I may remember it wrong – memory is not infallible) the screaming was concentrated at the end of the chute. So I didn’t mention it, lest I get myself entangled in one of my usual tangles of qualifications and clauses. But Crumb Trail does have a point.

But I’m not sure I think it’s what you might call a knockdown point. The fact remains that the pigs were just sent down a straight open chute instead of a twisting closed one of the kind that Grandin designs, and that they did have time to see hear and smell what was happening. I don’t see why that’s either necessary or useful, or why it shouldn’t be done differently. Therefore I don’t see the point of this part:

Those completley detached from the real world – from nature, food, birth, death and material reality in general – make consistently bad decisions due to lack of information and understanding. There’s nothing amusing about that since they do great harm while feeling innocent. This lack of grounding in reality, detachment from the world, is correctable like any other form of ignorance. In a very real sense they choose to remain ignorant by looking away from contrary information, preferring to see only things that reinforce their biases or perhaps being too emotionally engaged to become intellectually engaged?

Great harm. Hmm. I’m doing great harm by suggesting that humane methods of slaughter are preferable to inhumane ones? Why, exactly? And how? And where does ‘feeling innocent’ come in? And I’ll tell you one thing. If there’s anything I’m not detached from, it’s food. I love the stuff, I’m deeply attached to it, and I spend a lot of time cuddling and embracing it and making it part of my life. So there.

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