After five months in the stable, this Norwegian journalist still doesn’t know what to think about pigs ★★★☆☆

You’ll just be a pig. Always despised by man. Where Jesus raised the lamb as a symbol of innocence, he degraded the pig to the animal of the demons. Moses preceded him when he banned pork some five centuries before the Common Era.

Modern man has at least a double-hearted relationship with the pig: the ‘unclean’ creature is one of the most eaten animal species on earth, surpassed only by the chicken. The pale pink pig is still colored on it. In common parlance, the addition ‘pig’ invariably goes hand in hand with terms such as ‘fat’, ‘lazy’ or ‘dumb’. The reality is also not very rosy: in the Netherlands alone more than 11 million pigs live a hidden existence in concrete barns, where they kill the time with thousands of them castrated and with their tails cut off on less than one square meter per animal. it’s their turn at the slaughterhouse – if they don’t perish in the blaze of a barn fire.

Norwegian journalist and historian Kristoffer Hatteland Endresen wanted to get to know and understand the animal behind the pork chop of the kilo blaster, and went for his book The pig looking for life in pig farming. That did not happen automatically: the Norwegian Farmers’ Union did not want to provide him with information about pig farmers ‘because of personal protection’. When he approached one himself, the barn doors closed. He also had to undergo a painful mrsa test, to exclude contamination (of the pigs) with the dangerous hospital bacteria.

Five months in the stable

But it works: for five months he gets access to the stables of farmers Leiv and Eirik, where the heavy smell of acetone and ammonia makes him vomit. Endresen sees how piglets are filed off the razor-sharp teeth. He impregnates sows through artificial insemination – it inspires him to contemplate bestiality.

For example, he constantly switches from historiography on the origin and domestication (started about eleven thousand years ago in the Anatolian mountains of Turkey) to report-like chapters on contemporary pig farming, a sector that is also in Norway most of the violations of the Animal Welfare Act. managed to get his name.

Endresen calls himself ‘neither idealist nor ignorant’. An excellent journalistic attitude, which sometimes leads to sensible considerations and questions. Like how it is that the pig is the only domesticated animal that does not produce a valuable by-product, such as wool or milk. The answer: A sow that has given birth to babies is highly flammable to anyone who approaches her. Too much hassle and hassle is money.

Thanks to a long bibliography, philosophers De Montaigne and Wittgenstein are reviewed, as well as ancient Greek poets. So often that Endresen seems a little too eager to prefer the cozy library room to the dung of the pigsty.

In that barn he follows breeding sow No. 13, an animal that will never see daylight or a bird, except on the way to the slaughterhouse. An intelligent being, he observes, but incomprehensible. Her (apparent) apathy makes him sigh: ‘Does anyone actually live behind her human eyes?’ It all leads to the key question, not until page 207: ‘Are these pigs I can eat with a clear conscience?’ The answer is not forthcoming. Because he can’t seem to get out.

Remarkably laconic

After five months and some compassion, Endresen assesses the living conditions of Norwegian pigs as OK. He sees remarkably laconic how the five-month-old pigs are transported to the slaughterhouse. That screaming? “I know how little it takes the pigs to make that noise.” Yes, the sound of pigs being herded into the truck is “pungent, traumatic and painful,” but thankfully, “It won’t be long.” Still 40 minutes, it turns out.

Endresen is allowed to watch the slaughter process from a distance, but not in the crucial minutes when the animals are stunned and thrown around in a net to make them lose their sense of orientation and consciousness. Moments later, when the slackened bodies roll onto a conveyor belt, Endresen calls the whole process “so streamlined, mechanical and sterile” that he “can’t imagine the animals or staff going through trauma.”

‘Not being able to imagine’ is a meager journalistic observation, especially after only one real-life case in which he is deprived of the crucial minutes. Has Endresen never read about the excesses and horrors – from beatings to boiled pigs alive – that are still being revealed by undercover activists with small cameras in their pocket? Yes, he mentions a 2004 report in which this was also the order of the day in Norwegian slaughterhouses. Fortunately, he calms down: “Since then, the industry has been brushed aside.”

Sleep tight.

Despite all this, Endresen ends The pig yet again in doubt. “What have these miserable (…) lives been good for?” he wonders. Suddenly, the birth of ‘tens of thousands of intelligent beings who lead meaningless lives and possibly suffer in vain’, according to Endresen, is ‘a great tragedy in our country’.

In a concluding reflection on swine fever and corona, he suddenly comes to the conclusion that if the omnivorous man had ‘focused his appetite on plants instead of meat, [dan] we wouldn’t have had so many epidemics. Perhaps that is ultimately the best way to actually honor the pig.’

‘Perhaps.’ As a writer, Endresen is reasonably convincing, as a journalist he doesn’t even seem to convince himself.