PART III

HOG

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 5.2 SOW ID CARD
Sow id cards list the animal’s
reproductive history in terms
of animals born alive, number
of piglets weaned, number of
piglets fostered by the sow,
and causes of piglet death.

5.1 FINISHING BARN (overleaf)

A man inspecting the condi-
tion of hogs at around four
months of age.

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FIVE LUTALYSE

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AS PART OF SOW #6’S TRAINING PROGRAM, I learned most of the assigned tasks on
the farrowing side alongside Raul, a wiry and wisecracking man around fifty
years of age. This was his second job since he had undergone a self-imposed
exile to the Great Plains a year earlier. He was trying to keep the mortgage
on his home afloat after he lost his income during the collapse of Miami’s
construction industry during the recession of 2008. Refugees from Burma,
Ethiopia, and South Sudan were drawn to the region in search of work largely
through church networks, while Cubans such as Raul were mostly recruited
at job fairs in Miami. Grensome Meats, a packing plant located a few hundred
miles north, had flown Raul to the area. The company put him in temporary
housing, gave him a $500 advance to get settled, and required him to work on
the cutting floor for at least one year.
The second he could escape los mataderos, Raul moved south with friends.
“My body’s too old for those slaughterhouses,” he said, flexing his right hand
at the memory of pain in the smallest of muscles from repetitive motion with
a knife on the cutting floor. He did not speak enough English to be employed
in retail or in an office job. “The only work they’d give me was on sow farms,”
he said with a shrug. During my time at Sow #6, four people arrived for one
day of work, never to show up again, as they were overwhelmed by the odor
and heat of thousands of hog bodies. But as I got to know Raul, I realized he
derived an ironic satisfaction from being surrounded by pigs. Like a lot of
my coworkers, he genuinely liked the animals. But he also told me that he
had saved money for one year in rural Cuba to buy a single cow and that it
was his proudest possession. “One cow, one cow,” he chanted, looking around
and cackling about his former sense of value as he dripped milk into a piglet’s
mouth amid hundreds of animals.
Nursing weak piglets is a grating task reserved for new hires. Each morn-
ing, Raul and I grabbed four blue plastic baby bottles from the workshop and
filled them with a scoop of sugary powdered milk and water. (I tasted the
liquid after a shrieking piglet gurgled it back in my face.) The job is perhaps
better described as “force-feeding” than “nursing.” Our coworker Blanca gave
a demonstration. She picked up one of the runts and gripped its neck under
the base of the skull using her thumb and index finger, its screaming mouth
facing the ceiling. The tiny piglet shrieked so loudly that my ears rang, and
I involuntarily caught myself cringing; she then silenced the animal with a
squirt of milk. After a few seconds of gurgling, with half the liquid running

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5.3 OVERHEAD VIEW OF FARROWING ROOM The room contains twenty-four farrowing crates
ordered in a clockwise manner. The crate at the top left is #1 and the one at the bottom
left is #24. The circle at the left is an iodine bucket for disinfecting boots. Sows are fed
by hand at this stage using a wheelbarrow. (Illustration by the author)

out of its mouth, the piglet swallowed. Blanca repeated with a few more drops
until the baby animal started drinking from the nozzle. Francisco, our man-
ager, later walked by. “Pigs are like children. They claim all the teats and won’t
let the little ones have one,” he explained as we watched a dominant baby
animal bite the neck of a tiny one that had jumped for an unoccupied teat.
The crates held fourteen or fifteen piglets while most sows have only twelve
to fourteen working teats, meaning that piglets’ natural social hierarchies can
deteriorate the runt’s fragile condition.
For ten days, until someone else was hired, Raul and I moved through the
farrowing rooms in a circle, taking turns refilling and warming bottles, re-
turning to clammy and milk-stained piglets every fifteen minutes with more
liquid in an often-futile effort to keep them alive. I felt the hours tick away
amid a blur of piglet shrieks, sticky residue of powdered milk, cold bodies,
and back pain from sitting on the narrow plastic edge of farrowing crates.
I was surprised to find that work in these rooms—places of abundant life,
the ostensible opposite of the slaughterhouse—is experienced as a constant
LUTALYSE

confrontation with near-death. But what I did not realize at the time was that
Raul and I were among the first generation of workers to be formally assigned
to act as human nurses. While powdered milk has been kept on confinement
farms for decades to deal with the rare situation in which a single piglet is too

123

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 124

weak to get sustenance, it was only in the late 2000s that “runt feeder” was
turned into a routine task or job title.1 This repetitious job is a product of sys-
CHAPTER FIVE

temic genetic changes—of transformations that made litter sizes swell larger
than can be sustained biophysically by sows. Nursing runts of the litter is one
small example of this part’s basic argument: that human laborers are being
turned into external prosthetics for hogs by taking on physiological functions
that used to be autonomous. The biology of the industrial pig is not contigu-
ous with its body. It requires expanding arrays of labor to survive.
One morning as we were making our rounds through farrowing rooms,
the squeals of piglets were suddenly drowned out by a huge bang! that
sounded like an aluminum baseball bat slamming against concrete. Startled,
Raul dropped his piglet. I thought something had gotten caught in the ex-
haust fans on the wall. As I glanced over, Raul was scanning the temperature
systems and heating ducts that line the center of the ceiling. He located the
source of the noise first. A four hundred-pound pregnant sow at the far end
of the room was repeatedly weaving and knocking her skull against one of

5.4 FARROWING CRATES Rooms are kept dark and warm for the piglets, as one manager put
it, “to imitate nesting.” The humidity and smell in these rooms makes it hard to stay in
one for more than ten minutes. Another manager once claimed, “It bugs me. . . . It gets
under your skin. It’s hard to breathe.”

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the metal bars of her farrowing crate. bang! bang! bang! The sound was so
loud, ricocheting off walls. We both ran over and stared, frozen, at the sow for
at least thirty seconds. “What’s she want?” asked Raul as we walked around
the crate. We tried to keep our distance from the seemingly erratic animal.
bang! bang! bang! We positioned ourselves on the sow’s right side, trying
to follow the leftward direction of her head to see whether she was pointing us
toward something. Thinking she was hungry, I ran to get a scoop of feed, but
the sow did not acknowledge me. Raul checked her water nozzle. It worked
fine. The rhythmic skull smacking was inexplicable. A red welt was starting to
form on her forehead.
Raul and I sprinted down the long hall outside the farrowing room, our
coworkers giving us puzzled looks as we passed. When we found our man-
ager, Francisco, taking inventory in the workshop, Raul shouted, “There’s a
crazy sow!” Without thinking, I blurted out, “Please go check on it! I think
it’s trying to kill itself!” After returning, Francisco solemnly, even sheepishly,

5.5 SUCKLING PIGLETS These suckling newborn piglets still have tails, indicating that they
are between one and four days old.

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 126

explained to us that this is a rare behavior. “This is what happens when we

give the Lutalyse,” he said. “The sows try to nest, but they don’t have that here.
CHAPTER FIVE

They can’t nest.”

That sow weaving her head against confining metal bars can stand as a pro-
found symbol of the factory farm, though it is more than just that. It is a re-
minder of how agribusiness magnifies some evolutionary behavior—such as
reproductive instincts—only to radically deny others. The many factors and
underlying practices that forced this sow to unwittingly injure herself get at
the core of this part’s concerns. Across the pages that follow, I suggest that this
evolutionary-instinctual protest was a sign and symptom of the modern hog’s
changing relationship to human labor. Industrial hogs are becoming over-
worked in two senses. First, each type of hog is being refined to do only one
thing—emit pheromones, ovulate, gestate, or metabolize feed—with increas-
ing intensity. Second, prior historical rounds of engineering and histories of
human-hog working engagement now require new intensities and intimacies
of human labor to be sustained. Let me take this step by step.

DIVISIONS OF LABOR AND ANIMALITY

It was the execution of the photograph that begins this part of the book that
forced me to rethink the human-hog relationships that underlie standardized
life (see figure  5.1). The image is a series of one thousand different frames
that have been digitally stitched together. The image’s execution required the
human subject of the photo—a forty-something-year-old man who spends
his days driving around the countryside, inspecting animals in different
growing barns for illness—to stand in one place for ninety minutes. When
my photographic collaborator, Sean Sprague, needed to adjust the lighting
in the barns, he gave the man a short break while I acted as his body dou-
ble. I was shocked to find that I could not last more than two minutes. The
hogs would circle me, nip at my knees, and knock me over. I did not have
the bodily habitus to interact with these two hundred-pound hogs that were
four-and-a-half months old and collectively penned; I could not hold my
hands in such a way to corral the animals, stop their nipping, make them
circle rather than charge me.
Conversely, one might also say that these pigs could not figure out how
to interact with me. They had not encountered a person who held his body
in this manner. This was jarring because, after working at breeding farms, I

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 5.6 ONE-MONTH-OLD PIGS
IN GROWING BARN
These recently weaned
pigs are in the early
stages of growth.

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 128

thought I knew how to act around hogs pretty well. It dawned on me that I
had knowledge of pregnant sows and baby piglets as they live in individual
CHAPTER FIVE

crates—I could enact forms of labor that allowed us to get on together—but I

knew little about how to behave with open-penned, nearly grown meat hogs.
Meanwhile, there are many workers who have perhaps never encountered a
boar, sow, piglet, slaughtered carcass, or rendered fat. Some have gained rich
expertise and bodily habitus with open-penned four-month-old pigs. But due
to concerns that pig diseases can transfer across workers’ bodies (recall chap-
ter 2), their labor is embedded primarily in this stage of porcine life.
This moment opened up ways to think about the conjoined division of
labor and animality. In his study of the modern honeybee, Jake Kosek (2010,
670) writes: “What it means to be human is a product of the shifting car-
tography of what it is to be animal.” Read from the American factory farm,
the geographer’s cartographic reference is helpful: as new components are
added to this corporate map of economically significant dimensions of in-
dustrial animality, they are gradually converted into forms that are mediated
by human labor. The underlying proposition of the factory farm is that more
profitable pork will be attained only via the ongoing laboring mediation of
animal biologies at deeper and more specialized facets of existence. From
this vantage point, the story of industrial agriculture is not one of “dominat-
ing nature” but, instead, a matter of exerting social energy to make forms
of life require new qualities of human labor to be sustained. The American
factory farm is not a project of detached human mastery over hogs so much
as it is one of reengineering human communities and embedding their labor
in novel ways through the porcine species’ changing life-and-death cycle.
Yet there may be irony in anchoring a book on agribusiness in the politics
of work and the remaking of human being, because most commentators tend
to define factory farms by their lack of human labor. From one side, agri-
business sympathizers claim that industrial pork is an efficient way to make
meat. By this they mean, as we have seen, that agribusiness requires less in
terms of labor (and land) costs than does any other farming system (McBride
and Key 2013). These authors, often those who are fixated on lowering the
market price of meat, are not altogether wrong. Labor costs per unit of pork
chop have dramatically decreased in the national aggregate over the past fifty
years. There are, after all, far fewer people employed in agriculture than ever
before (Leonard 2014; Paarlberg 2010; Paarlberg 2016). But such abstract sta-
tistics in the aggregate tell us relatively little about the increasingly small

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5.7 EATING IN A NURSERY BARN
At this point, pigs should
grow at a fairly uniform pace,
though minor differences in
bodily form and temperament
will accrue as each pen forms
a hierarchy of dominance.
The result is that some pigs
will get less food. Note the
scratches on the ear from a
recent fight on the rightmost
pigs.

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 130
CHAPTER FIVE

handful of communities and workers who must endure elevated concentra-

tions of swine. Those statistics are born of political economic processes that
unequally concentrate the weight of an entire species on the exploited backs
of a hyperproductive few. Moreover, they do not account for the unpaid labor
provided by human workers and hogs, work that has become necessary to
sustain the anthropogenic fragility of the species (see Moore 2015). Maintain-
ing this scale and degree of uniform hogs over time has led to an explosion
of new qualities and quantities of undernoticed work: paid and unpaid, in-
side and outside of formal workplaces, within Dixon and even around the
planet. Indeed, the notion of an industrial pig—or an industrialized nature,
more generally—that I develop in this section is an organism that is riveted
with contradictions in that its biophysical survival has come to require human
work, even as that labor can be seen as hostile to the species as it sustains con-
ditions of life that are deleterious to animals.

LUTALYSE
Of the many drugs that we injected into hogs, the clear vials of Pfizer’s Lutalyse
(dinoprost tromethamine, a prostaglandin) were the only ones that elicited a
strong reaction from my coworkers. Lutalyse is a birth induction drug that en-
sures sows will farrow no later than 114 days from the moment of conception,
timed to take place during the regular working day. Piglet mortality is reduced
when workers are present to pull animals out of the birth canal with their lubri-
cated arms every twenty minutes during farrowing—a task called “sleeving”—
especially at a moment in time when new generations of sows are having an

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 5.8–5.10 FOUR-MONTH-OLD HOGS IN
GROWING PENS At mid-weight, growing
hogs are again moved to “finisher” barns.
At this point, mortality rates decline
significantly. As one manager described
this point in the process, “The barns raise
the hogs now.”

overabundance of offspring, with massive litter sizes and blocked birth canals
(chapter 6).
Lutalyse was a complicated drug on the farms. Pregnant women, such as
Maria, were expressly forbidden from entering the drug storage closet. Senior
workers refused to touch the drug, claiming that mere contact with the vials
made their throats constrict. However, it was also amongst the most “moral”
of porcine drugs. Berkamp Meats—deemed the most community-centered
of the area’s factory farms—might have used Lutalyse at a higher rate than
the others did. Managers were proud that they could ensure their employees
would have a regular 8–5 job, Monday through Friday, while other corpora-
tions’ work regimens were structured around the temporal unpredictability of
their sows’ uterine contractions and extended into evenings.2 Many cowork-
ers left other companies for this one as they were starting families because
they wanted to know in advance that they could pick up their children from
daycare, participating in the kinship rhythms of standardized industrial time.
Whether through bearing similar mammalian bodies or competing tempo-
ral interests, Lutalyse was distinguished for creating types of farmwork at
the same moment that it manifested hormonal states in animals; the induc-
tion drug materialized moments of cross-species proximity and competition.
Seaming livelihood and ways of life across species, Lutalyse at once intensified
labor in the working-day window, while providing an escape from labor on
LUTALYSE

an animal that now seems to require almost constant supervision. A means of

coping with the growing demands of the industrial pig, Lutalyse is a precari-
ous tool to maintain industrial time amid an industrial animal biology that
now exceeds it.

131

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 132

STEREOTYPIES
CHAPTER FIVE

The sow weaving her head against the metal bars of a crate was a rare expres-
sion of stereotypical behavior, defined by ethologists as repetitive actions that
are invariable in form and serve no obvious function in terms of play, work,
or bodily reproduction. Left to their own devices, sows will make a nest out
of foliage before they settle down to give birth. When they are locked in a
metal-and-concrete farrowing crate without straw, their nesting instinct—
exaggerated through injections of prostaglandin—can occasionally transform
into behavior such as head weaving. Working in factory farms means con-
fronting a display of subtler stereotypies, such as rooms full of sows com-
pulsively biting their bars, or others seemingly oblivious to the world as they
repetitively chew the air or root their noses raw in the concrete floor. Stereoty-
pies are potent reminders of the many other ways of life and times suspended
in limbo in the projects of capitalist modernity (see Pandian 2009).
Applied ethologists explain the stereotypy either as occurring because of
an environmental blockade to evolutionarily ingrained behavior or as the
behavioral product of an environment without any stimulation. The animal
welfare scientist David Fraser (2008, 142–44) complicates these definitions
of the stereotypy. He suggests that other scholars overlook the function of a
stereotypy: rather than being useless noise, stereotypies can reduce an ani-
mal’s level of emotional arousal, acting to calm pigs in stressful situations. But
regardless of whether it is grasped as a matter of being frustrated, “bored,” or
a defense mechanism, the stereotypy is, in this context, a potent manifestation
of a being whose evolutionary behavior has been estranged as human labor.
This is a species that is left with very little to do except repetitiously metabo-
lize, gestate, give birth, and nurse.
In recent years, scholars in anthropology and geography have initiated an
important dialogue on the relation between nonhuman nature and capitalist
work (Beldo 2017; Moore 2015; Tsing 2015). Resisting the chauvinism of prior
Marxian theories that posit human work as the prime mover of the world
(see, e.g., Vogel 1988), as the singular source of worldly creation, or poesis,
these authors argue that capitalist value depends on the unpaid work of non-
human beings. That pigs give capital these kinds of “free gifts”—or that capital
appropriates the unrecognized work of nonhuman others—is a compelling
way to think about factory farms (cf. Tsing 2013). Pheromones, gestation, and
digestion are all biophysical porcine processes that are not solely “authored”
by wage labor, even if they are necessary for wage labor to accrue value (see

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5.11 A PORTRAIT OF A HOG
A four-month-old hog “poses”
in the finisher barns.

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 134

also Beldo 2017; Kosek 2010, 669; Labban 2014). But the factory farm is also
constituted—as the source of standardization and of some of its violence—by
CHAPTER FIVE

an attempt to reject some of these “free gifts.” The ideal of factory farms, how-
ever impossible this might be to realize in practice, is one in which every bio-
logical function of the porcine species is tinged and adjusted through human
work. The logic of standardized life, in a nutshell, is of mediating human work
through hogs’ physiological processes to cultivate uniformity. We might say
that agribusiness has its own theory of animal labor: all pigs work, but not the
same way. Standardized porcine life is being embodied, enacted, and buttressed
by human workers as much as it is by industrial pigs.

HORMONE WORKERS
Yet to frame the industrial animal as constituted by, and dependent on, stan-
dardized (and standardizing) labor might be counterintuitive, given that we
rarely hear about the diverse hands that underlie meat. Many instead describe
how the indoor life of the American hog is riskily sustained through the use
of antibiotics mixed into feed, which keep confined hogs uniformly growing
despite cramped conditions (see Blanchette 2019; Kirchhelle 2018). The pig
is routinely fed and injected with a cocktail of lincomycin, zinc bacitracin,
tetracycline, sulfamethazine, and penicillin, matched with dozens of vaccines,
vitamins, and beta-agonists such as ractopamine that promote muscle lean-
ness. Such drugs maintain the industrial species in a dual sense: they sustain
its raw life in barns teeming with illness and regulate its carnal composition
with semi-predictable rates of growth and fat-to-muscle ratios.
But while such drugs for life garner much media reporting due to the risks
of generating antibiotic resistance genes that can move through microbial
communities off of the farm, relatively little attention is paid to another, ubiq-
uitous class of chemicals: the drugs for labor. These scores of injections are
omnipresent on factory farms. Like the plantation horse blood discussed in
chapter 4, they are designed to synchronize hormonal statuses across groups
of animals. Enacting a chemical massification of hogs, hormonal drugs com-
press biological time into industrial time while temporarily manifesting the
ideal porcine state of the factory farm: a herd of identical sows.3 As a farm
worker, I would rarely encounter antibiotics except during a visit to a feed
mill, where fifty-pound bags are stacked on pallets against the walls, ready
to be mixed and pelletized into feed. Occasionally we would inject milky-
white liquid penicillin or clear “linco” into breeding animals with leg lame-

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ness as part of a last-ditch effort to heal their infections. But many mornings
were, instead, consumed by carefully managing animal hormones with plas-
tic syringes, disposable needle tips, and 30 ml vials of liquid drugs in hand.
We would slowly, slowly move behind animals in their gestation crates so as
not to provoke a sudden reaction. We would cover the glint of the needle,
which tends to scare the animals, with our latex gloves. Alarming a given sow
at this crucial moment can result in her forever reacting with rage when a
human worker enters her gestation crate, permanently rendering her untreat-
able. Animal welfare researchers have also found that sows who are scared of
human workers may also gestate smaller and less robust litters (Hemsworth
2003).
Some drugs are used to ensure, for example, that sets of sows—particularly
unbred gilts—enter into estrous on the day that they are slated for insemina-
tion. Others, such as injections of oxytocin, intensify sows’ uterine contrac-
tions so they deliver all of their piglets within the supervised nine-hour work-
ing day. Exaggerating mammalian processes into tight temporal windows,
these labor-saving and labor-intensifying drugs have the effect of coming to
act on the injectors to compel workplace action. They exposed us to animals

5.12 GROWN HOGS IN A FINISHER BARN A “load” of hogs in finisher barns for final fattening.
These animals are almost 285 pounds and will likely be slaughtered within the week.

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 136

that can be worked on within industrial time while ensuring that many por-
cine behaviors—right down, notably, to the stimulation of hormones—were
CHAPTER FIVE

mediated by human action.

The sheer number of injections to which the modern pig is subjected is
stunning; as a result, abscesses and broken needle tips lost in hogs’ flesh have
become a large economic concern within the industry. Some companies have
even taken up old Soviet needleless injection systems that were never put into
use for mass-inoculation on humans, repurposing the technology on factory
farms. Dover Foods injected hogs thirty-two million times in 2009.
But what I want to emphasize is that the very existence of someone in a
workplace who can, on a given day, be called “the hormone worker” is itself
a reflection of how the human division of labor has been cleaved into the
fissures of the porcine species. In a quite tangible sense, the pig as a unified
single organism no longer exists in this system. Much as we read in the pre-
vious chapter on instinct, each worker spends chunks of the day tending to
increasingly delimited and specific porcine components such as hormones,
nursing, perceptions, or bedsores. The idea that there is one person who
serves as the hormone worker is an illustration of how formerly autonomous
porcine qualities, which once “belonged” to and were generated by the por-
cine species, are becoming alienated from pigs’ biology and transformed into
terrains of alienable human labor.4 This relationship of alienation, in turn, is
the ground on which new forms of human-animal intimacy are arising.

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