This Hog: How Does It Profiteth Me?

From 1985 through 1990, I worked as an writer in the office of information services at Utah State University, the state's agricultural college.  USU had eight colleges, perhaps still does, and at that time I was responsible for publicizing research in three of them: Agriculture, Science, and Engineering.  I also wrote for Agricultural Experiment Station publications.  

Each college had a "week," in which their activities and programs were front and center.  The engineering college had egg toss competitions, for instance.  Not long after I arrived, I was called upon to report on agriculture week.  One of the events consisted of dividing the quad into a grid, like a Bingo card, and selling chances on the squares.  A cow was then turned loose on the quad, and the resultant cow patties indicated the winning squares.  I had come from a stint at the Tombstone Epitaph, in which I reported on a cyanide leak at the mines, and the drastic measures used in treatment of cyanide poisoning.  The contrast was not lost on me.

Ag colleges are known familiarly as cow colleges, or moo U's, but of course they also sport their share of chickens, sheep and hogs, and other domestic animals that are the subjects of scientific study.  The studies invariably have practical applications.  "What good is this information?" I learned to ask.  Because that's what the public is perceived as wanting to know.

Jane Smiley's 1995 verisimilitudinous novel, MOO, is set in a midwestern agricultural college.  One of her characters is Earl Butz, a hog.  Earl is housed in an abandoned building, Old Meats, and is looked after by a sophomore work-study student, Bob Carlson.  Earl is the subject of an unusual experiment designed by Dr. Bo Jones.  Dr. Bo wants to know how big a hog can get.

"Never been a hog that lived a natural lifespan," soliloquizes Dr. Bo.  "Never been an old hog.  Hog too useful.  Hog too useful to be known on his own terms, you know.  What can I do with this hog, when can I eat it, what can I make of this hog, how does this hog profiteth me, always intervenes between man and hog.  When I die, they're going to say that Dr. Bo Jones found out something about hog."

Under Bob's care, Earl Butz grows about as large as a Volkswagen beetle but, in Smiley's novel, Bo takes off to study wild hogs, and the experiment is brought to a screeching halt.

In the real world, writer Sy Montgomery personally found out something about domestic hog, and about the possibilities of pigs.  Practicality was not the point.  In her 2006 book, The Good Good Pig, Montgomery tells about how she took in a runt pig no bigger than a cat, named him Christopher Hogwood, and gave him a home for his lifetime.  When people asked Montgomery how long pigs live, she answered "six months," because that's a pig's average lifespan before it is converted into bacon.

After he was wormed, Chris Hogwood grew to something over 700 pounds.  He was intelligent, emotional, sensitive, funny, affectionate, and adventuresome.  He made many friend, and he posed every year for Sy's Christmas cards.  When he died at fourteen of old age, he was buried on the Montgomery property.  

"Christopher's success was fourteen years of comfort and joy, given and received," writes Montgomery.  "Christopher was a gift who kept on giving.  For me, his greatest gift was simply his presence, the pure delight of his company.  But he had given me so much more..."

Montgomery quoes Henry Beston, writing in The Outermost House:  "We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals...For the animal shall not be measured by man..."

Montgomery's charming and thought-provoking book includes photos of Christopher and lots of facts about pigs.  The weight record, she writes, is held by Big Bill, a Poland China raised in Jackson, Tennessee.  When Bill was measured in 1933, he was five feet tall at the withers and weighed 2,552 pounds.  Poland Chinas were raised for lard.