Chapter
Space, Time and Pig
5 David J. Nemeth
Space prohibits so much and permits so little
(Stevens, 1974: 3, 222)
Introduction
Wild pigs (Sus scrofa) in the early Holocene were nimble,
fierce combatants for humans who sought them out for sport,
as rites-of-passage and as flesh food in the hinterlands of their
isolated agrarian settlements. In contrast, pigs-as-pork in the
Anthropocene have been reduced to unhealthy indolence while
awaiting slaughter in industrial factory farms.
Of late, improving the welfare of pigs-as-pork in factory
farms has become a major campaign issue among organized
animal welfare activists. They also aim to improve pig–human
relations in general by restoring a prevailing human perception
that narrowly values ‘pigs-as-pork’ to a pre-Modern agrarian
perception that more broadly values pigs ‘as-pigs’. This idealis-
tic goal challenges a dominant ‘pigs-are-pork’ paradigm that is
presently shared by most factory farmers and the general public.
The ‘pigs-as-pork’ paradigm is deeply entrenched and has thus
far proved not readily amenable to change.
Pigs-as-pork?
There are nearly eight billion humans worldwide and – to help
feed them – there are hundreds of millions of pigs-as-pork con-
fined to factory farms around the world, awaiting slaughter.
Statistics reveal that pork is the most-consumed meat world-
wide today (FAO 2014). Forty per cent of pigs worldwide are
in China, where a long history of productive relations between
humans and their domestic pigs has been well-documented
(Simoons 1991; Gade, 2000). Whether Sus scrofa form domes-
tica in China was always valued exclusively or mainly ‘as-pork’ is
the topic I will now address.
The overwhelming opinion of scholars and the general pub-
lic at present is that pigs have been valued essentially ‘as-pork’
throughout recorded history, and less so, or never, valued ‘as-
pigs’, e.g. as robust, intelligent animals with multiple uses to
humankind. Wild pigs across Eurasia, the forbears of today’s
domestic pigs, were certainly robust. Wild pigs, omnivorous
herd animals and mammals (like humans) – but ungulates –
were hunted by humans and their dogs. This was prior to their
increasing management by humans in the wild (their semi-
domestication). Their management in the wild (free environ-
ment) did not restrict their movements and can be contrasted
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to, and preceded, their full domestication and more careful atten-
tion to restrictions on their movements ranging from by mild to
severe confinements. Managed restrictions emerged approxi-
mately 7000 BC, and rather simultaneously in both western and
eastern parts of Eurasia. Were these innovations in domestic pig
rearing motivated by their valuation mainly ‘as-pork’?
Inarguably meat protein is an important component of
the human diet; for example, meat protein provides healthy
cells with essential amino acids. At the same time, it cannot be
ignored by pork consumers (much less denied by pork produc-
ers) that there are abundant alternative sources of meat protein
available for human consumption as food in addition to the
pork readily available worldwide: the most familiar are beef,
chicken, and fish, but there also many other animal protein sub-
stitutes and alternatives, including insects (Huis 2013). In addi-
tion to these are the other sources of many non-meat proteins:
nuts, beans, legumes, seeds, and so on. Pork is therefore not a
necessary component of a healthy human diet, even though this
is widely assumed to be the case. My own personal failure to dis-
cern between pigs-as-pigs and pigs-as pork and its implications
changed dramatically when I joined Peace Corps in 1972 and
was sent to South Korea.
Discovering Pigs-as-pigs: My Cheju
Island Epiphany
Not very long ago, the famous cultural materialist Marvin
Harris summed up with certainty his perception of pig–human
relations throughout history: ‘Clearly, the whole essence of pig is
the production of meat for human nourishment and delectation’
(Harris 1997). Apparently, asserting pigs-as-pork without any
need for qualification was neither a controversial topic nor even
a challenging hypothesis when Harris made this truth claim
near the turn of the millennium. Millions of scholars and their
students around the world simply accepted his ‘pigs-are-pork’
assumption as a statement of fact. I did until I arrived on South
Korea’s Cheju (Jeju) Island in 1973.
My encounter with Cheju Island’s gregarious, hyperactive
domestic privy-pigs was a profound event in my life and perhaps
epiphanic, for it set into motion my journey down a life-long
research path that to this day remains a gift that keeps on giving.
49
 Part I: Evolution, Taxonomy, and Domestication
I discovered that the domestic pigs on the island were perceived,
valued, and utilized by islanders primarily as-pigs (full of vital-
ity) in contrast to as-pork (dead meat). Encountering privy-pigs
for the first time on this island, and then contemplating the
conditions of their captivity there, and on pig–human relations
world wide and throughout history, I suddenly became awak-
ened to the importance of the intrinsic value of life through their
example. I was forced to examine my basic assumptions about
human food-ways in space and time and how it was that I came
to perceive pigs-as-pork in the first place.
Site and Situation
Cheju Island is an isolated and long-inhabited dormant volcano
in the northern reaches of the East China Sea. Soon after my
arrival, I discovered thousands of functioning privy-pig struc-
tures attached to escape-proof corrals each containing one
or two privy-pigs. Most of these structures were crudely con-
structed (as seen in Figure 5.1A). Their archetype, I eventually
learned, had remarkable provenance and antiquity as well as
distant origins.
Cheju Island Privy-pig Trait-complex Origins
Functioning pigsty-privies are no longer extant on Cheju Island.
They suffered a swift extinction by a draconian government
decree which banned them during the 1970s. How long were
these functioning pigsty-privies an integral part of the produc-
tive subsistence Cheju Island peasant landscape before being
outlawed? DNA tests of pig bones excavated from island sites
occupied 2000 years ago reveal the presence of both wild and
domestic pigs. Thus, pig domestication on the island was prac-
tised more than 2000 years ago (Kim et al. 2011). Productive
pig–human proximity and relations on Cheju Island can be char-
acterized as initially predator–prey relations, as was characteris-
tic of early pig–human relations throughout Paleolithic Eurasia.
Chinese T’ang dynasty (618–906 AD) histories relate that as
early as 316–317 CE the tribal chief of Cheju Island (then called
‘T’amna’) paid tribute at the Chinese court. These visitors were
described as follows: ‘The people [of T’amna] follow humble
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customs. They wear boar skins [my italics] and live in leather
houses. In winter they live in caves’ (T’angso, circa 661–663 CE).
We can deduce from these events and descriptions that
T’amna envoys visiting China at that time were recurrent visi-
tors bearing tribute. They had ample opportunity during these
tribute missions (and, therefore, early on in the evolution of their
own productive subsistence agricultural systems) to observe
and experience the Han Chinese pigsty–privy structures already
in place. We can assume here for discussion purposes that they
respected the wisdoms of their hosts and adopted pigsty-privy
practices on Cheju Island. They seem to have imported their
breed of privy-pig from China (Choi et al. 2014).
More Empirical Observations
The straw-covered privy structures I encountered are on the
left in Figures 5.1A and 5.1B. The pig shelter is on the right in
the rear of the pen in Figure 5.1A (although the model has no
apparent pig shelter in its architecture). The pig in Figure 5.1A
stands with its fore-hooves in its crude, stone-hewn food dish
while waiting in expectation of the next food delivery. There was
invariably one bowl per pen.
I observed rural Cheju Islanders tossing all manner of
unused organic wastes toward the food bowls. The alert and
perpetually hungry omnivorous pigs voraciously consumed
everything offered. Islanders had to train piglets to eat human
faeces, and human faeces seemed to be the main diet of these
privy-pigs. A reader of some of my earliest published researches
on the Cheju Island privy-pigs reported:
Nemeth points out the consequences for archaeological interpre-
tations of the American mindset that considers pigs only as food.
He shows that on Cheju Island in Korea, even though pigs may
eventually be eaten, they functioned in the recent past as trans-
formers of human waste into fertilizers as well as meat, with the
pigsty–privy an important part of the ecosystem. Furthermore, in
considering the role of pigsty-privies in the ecosystem of disease,
rather than being an unsanitary practice that promoted illness,
they helped keep some endemic parasites in check. This example
of the need to extend our notions about pigs is especially useful
Figure 5.1  (A) A typical traditional
pigsty–privy architecture on Cheju
Island (photographed by David J.
Nemeth in1973). (B) Photograph of
an Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 CE)
glazed miniature model of a pigsty–
privy, excavated from a Chinese royal
tomb (Shaanxi History Museum in
Xi’an, China, photograph by John Hill).

as a cautionary tale for archaeological explanations involving the
role of pigs in early domestication, as well as their place in urban
economies and the rise of complex societies. (Nelson 1998: 1998).
My conclusion about the valuation of pigs-as-pigs in ancient
and medieval peasant subsistence agro-ecosystems on Cheju
Island in Korea are much in concert with those of Albarella, who
has published on the valuation of pigs-as-pigs in Northwestern
Europe peasant agro-ecosystems. He acknowledges (Albarella
2007) that pigs in medieval European agro-ecosystems were val-
ued in part as pork, but adds this caveat: ‘It would, however, be
grossly unfair to regard them as mere meat producing machines;
pigs were much more than that.’ He goes on to itemize their
additional value to humans: ‘They were living creatures that
contributed substantially to the shaping of the medieval com-
munity, to its organization, settlement, movements, everyday
activities, seasonal cycles, entertainment, and also feelings.’
Albarella also quotes Wiseman (2000): ‘It has been writ-
ten that pigs’ role as a major contributor to the development of
medieval society has rarely been acknowledged’, and proceeds to
conclude: ‘It is a fair point, which should remind us of how much
domestic animals have helped in our history, and how little they
have received in exchange’ (in Albarella 2007).
Subsequent to my observations and experiences among
Cheju Islanders while in the Peace Corps, I increasingly began
to wonder the extent to which initial interpreters of the terra-
cotta models in Chinese tombs (see Figure 5.1B) failed to realize
they were pigsty-privies? For example, in one popular history
book there is a photo of an excavated tomb model of a ‘pigsty’
accompanied with this caption:
Ceramic Model of a Pigsty. Chinese farmers regularly raised pigs,
keeping them in walled-off pens and feeding them scraps. This
Han Dynasty model of such a pigsty was placed in a tomb to repre-
sent the material goods one hoped the deceased would enjoy in the
afterlife’ (McKay et al. 2011).
It seemed possible that even the archaeologists who early
on interpreted these tomb models as ‘pigsties’ for raising pigs-
as-pork were slow to realize or publicize that they were in fact
not pigsties attached to gravity-fed silos, or granaries. I asked
myself if a massive misperception of pigs-as-pork in the present
and applied to interpreting the past might be entrenched to the
degree that it clouded the perception and judgement of archae-
ologists and museum curators and scholars like Harris (1997),
Kim (1994) and Gade (2000) below?
Occam’s Razor Misapplied?
The Korean archaeologist Kim Seong-og (1994) concluded his
own detailed analysis of pigs in the food production systems of
traditional East Asian subsistence agro-ecosystems as ‘mainly
as a source of nutrition’. Thus, his findings further validated the
prevailing, long-held assumption of pigs-as-pork in East Asia
disseminated in the literature by Harris (1997) cited above, i.e.
‘Clearly, the whole essence of pig is the production of meat for
human nourishment and delectation.’ Also, cultural geographer
Daniel Gade writing in 2000 (p. 539) persisted in reproducing
this dominant pigs-as-pork discourse as recently as the turn of
the present millennium by claiming that ‘Unlike sheep, whose
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Chapter 5: Space, time and pig
wool may be more valuable than their flesh, or cattle that are
kept for their milk or for use as draft animals, pigs have had no
primary nonmeat uses [my italics]’ (Gade 2000). Thus, pig-as-
pork remains the dominant paradigm for their valuation in the
present, and is still applied to interpreting the significance of
pig–human relations in the past. This pigs-as-pork paradigm
mentality today prevails to shape and to justify the unhealthy
welfare state in today’s modern factory farms.
Speaking for the Pigs: Five Freedoms
‘Rural dwelling is no longer tied to rural working and the popu-
lation has become several steps detached from food production.
Thus pig keeping is no longer familiar and the vast majority of
the [human] population has little idea how pigs are now reared,
slaughtered and processed’ (Marchant-Forde 2009).
Contemporary animal welfare advocates like Marchant-
Forde have taken it upon themselves to inform and persistently
update the public about what they perceive of as persisting farm-
ing practices that have negative impacts on the welfare state of
those farm animals now confined, reared, and rendered into
human food resources – including pigs raised as pork – awaiting
slaughter on factory farms. Their reminders are often harsh and
are delivered in various communications media – for example,
in graphic art (Figure 5.2).
In factory farms, as Sue Coe represents them below, an
unsympathetic but cruelly efficient machine environment and
the absence of any living space allocated for pigs-as-pork await-
ing slaughter prevails. The abuse and slaughter occurs far from
public awareness, yet apparently with tacit public approval. The
assumption conveyed in the illustration is that few humans
and especially pork-eaters have any overriding motivations to
attempt to achieve healthy and humane balances between pro-
duction efficiency and animal welfare in factory farms.
Just so, animal welfare activists have taken upon themselves the
role of ‘speaking for the pigs’ to educate the ‘careless’ public about
these abuses, one of which is deprivation of living space for pigs
awaiting slaughter. Animal welfare advocates speaking for pigs
proselytize that Sus scrofa domesticus is an intelligent, sentient,
and gregarious herd animal, and prone to play in captivity where
permissive space allocation characterizes the prevailing conditions
of their managed rearing (Horback 2014; Marino & Colvin 2015).
Crary (2013) writes that it is due to the efforts of the Farm
Animal Welfare Council of the United Kingdom that ‘it has
been possible to draw up first principles of good welfare for ani-
mals whether on the farm, in transit, or at the place of slaughter’
Crary (2013). These ‘first principles’ manifest in their manifesto
as ‘Five Freedoms’. These address both the physical fitness and
the mental suffering of pigs and other animals raised destined
for mass slaughter in factory farms and they comprise ‘a com-
prehensive check-list to assess the strengths and weaknesses
of any husbandry system’. For example: freedom from thirst,
hunger and malnutrition, discomfort, pain, injury and disease,
fear and distress. Among these ‘Five Freedoms’ is the freedom
to express normal behaviour by providing sufficient space [italics
mine] (Webster 2001).
Spokespersons for the factory farm industry vaunt the suc-
cess of their mass production of pigs-as-pork in factory farms
51
 Part I: Evolution, Taxonomy, and Domestication
as an achievement of their space-efficient management of the
reproduction of pigs-as-pork in a hard-fought battle against
starvation. Factory farmers claim that mass pigs-as-pork
production is space-efficient and both ‘feeds the world’ and
improves the human nutritional condition: e.g. ‘We can’t let all
these animals roam free – it’s not an economically sustainable
system . . . [although] we have to fulfill our obligations to these
animals, . . . is it fair for us to starve the world?’ (Dr Janeen Salak-
Johnson, Professor of Animal Science, University of Illinois,
quoted in Crary 2013).
This point of view in support of rational-instrumental ‘best
practices’ in factory farming is obviously hyperbolic (in defence
of these profitable operations), but hardly convincing in the
face of many credible arguments to the contrary that have been
advanced by contemporary animal welfare advocates. Most
important, the world’s human population is not starving for lack
of food. Enough food is produced globally to feed the estimated
total of 7.5 billion humans according to current FAO current
statistics (FAO 2015). From the point of view of agricultural
technology, food shortages for existing and growing human
populations – far into the future – can be solved by applied food
science and technology.
However, it is the prevailing perspective across the agricul-
tural sciences that any human food shortage ‘problem’ is not a
technical problem but a problem created by cultural, socioeco-
nomic and political issues (Buringh & Dudal 1987). The ‘food-
shortage’ narrative is in part a prevailing social construction of
the pigs-as-pork story that serves the interests of factory farm-
ing and works against the arguments of those animal welfare
activists who critique pork-producing factory farming for
depriving pigs-as-pork of healthy living space in factory farms
while awaiting their slaughter.
In sum, the factory farm lobby’s misinformation and disin-
formation add up to help explain the present-day general pub-
lic’s abject lack of concern and motivation to aggressively seek
a remedy for those factory farm conditions contributing to the
unhealthy welfare state of pigs-as-pork awaiting slaughter. In
sum, critiques by animal welfare activists of pork-industry fac-
tory farming lack credibility and are thus far proving ineffectual.
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Figure 5.2  ‘Factory Pharm’ featur-
ing pigs-as-pork by Sue Coe (2001).
Reproduced with permission.
How and why have pig–human relations deteriorated over mil-
lennia from the Paleolithic to the present alarming conditions
in the post-modern Holocene, and in spite of these dual ironies:
(1) there are now more pigs throughout the world than at any
previous era, and (2) the close proximity of pig populations and
human populations has never been more concentrated? The next
section of this chapter will briefly recap the story of the transi-
tion of pigs-as-pigs to pigs-as-pork that characterize the chang-
ing relations between pig and human relations in time and space.
Space, Time and Pig
I have described in previous publications what I have observed
and experienced first-hand on Cheju Island, and then came
to believe to be a human–pig symbiotic (or mutualistic) agro-­
ecological trait-complex embodied in the pigsty–privy’s func-
tional and symbolic architecture. I eventually interpreted the
pigsty–privy in the context of the profound achievement of
Korean Neo-Confucian ideology. The pigsty–privy was a sig-
nificant, insightful element of a ‘sincere’ (Kr. song) landscape
‘inhabited by a ‘virtuous’ (Kr. in) people (Nemeth 1987). I
accompanied my narrative description of the pigsty–privy in
that book with the following illustrative model, incorporat-
ing ideas inspired in part by reading the works of Nash (1967),
Stilgoe (1976) and Stevens (1974).
The wisdom of Neo-Confucian ideology applied to healthy
welfare state for humans and pigs inferred in Figure 5.3 is to carve
an axis mundi settlement out of the wilderness (far left) and sys-
tematically grow it from an incipient peasant (subsistence) land-
scape (visible productive agro-ecosystem) into a mature peasant
(subsistence) landscape (visible productive agro-ecosystem)
and then strive to preserve it as such into perpetuity (far right,
middle). Failure to preserve the mature peasant agro-ecosystem
might result in its reverting to wilderness (far right, top). Or,
choosing to modernize through industrialization (far right, bot-
tom) is to choose to fail: industrial modernization, as history
reveals, sets into motion disruptive changes that undermine the
productive achievement and dynamic equilibrium of the mature
peasant landscape. The outcome of the processes of industrial
modernization is the deliberate transformation of achieved
 Chapter 5: Space, time and pig

axis mundi : site of peasant dwelling

natural chaos
artificial chaos
Reverts
to
nature

Is
preserved

Incipient Mature
peasant peasant
landscape landscape Becomes
complicated

TIME

Figure 5.3  Productive complexity or unproductive complicatedness? A heu-

ristic model of alternative outcomes of human agency through historic land-use
choices and policies, for example, on Cheju Island. To choose complexity would
be to choose ‘enlightened underdevelopment’ over unavoidable yet invited
complications resulting from following the path of Modernity and its disruptive
economic growth ideology; e.g. ‘collateral damages’ and ‘creative destructions’
in the names of ‘Progress’ and ‘Development’ (Nemeth 1987, p. 318).

natural complexity (the mature peasant landscape) into the arti-
ficial complicatedness of a self-destructive dystopia.
The Cheju Island pigsty–privy I first observed and experi-
enced in 1973 was an achievement of the mature subsistence
peasant landscape, but doomed to failure by the deliberately
disruptive government-implemented Saemaul Undong ‘New
Village’ movement in an industrializing, modernizing South
Korea. The hard-earned mature peasant landscape shaped over
many centuries by its age-old productive subsistence peasant
agro-ecosystem is now extinct.
Pig–Human Relations: A Cosmological Casualty
of Modernization in East Asia
The feng shui (K. p’ungsu) surveying compass along with the
Neo-Confucian ideology and cosmology that it embodied are –
along with profound pig–human relations –also simultaneous
victims of Modernity in East Asia, in South Korea, and on Cheju
Island. It is instructive and a profound exercise for the purpose
of contemplation on pig–human relations to overlay the face of
the feng-shui compass (Figure 5.4) upon the achievement of the
‘Mature peasant landscape’ depicted in Figure 5.3.
The overlay offers some cross-cultural insights into the pro-
found significance of the compass to Neo-Confucian peoples
in East Asia prior to their Modernization. Space, Time, and the
Myriad Things are united as a single comprehensive, integrative,
cosmology symbolized on the compass face. Sus scrofa is prom-
inently displayed there, not as-pork but as a force to be reck-
oned with in conjunction with space and time toward achieving
success in the human search for ideal habitats to nurture their
‘sincerity’ and ‘virtue’.
Note that the axis mundi in the mature peasant repre-
sented in Figure 5.3 is represented by ‘The Well’ at the centre
of the feng shui compass, and that the symbol of Sus scrofa from
the Chinese zodiac is in close proximity to ‘The Well’, implying its
significance in relation to the search for human perfection. ‘The
Well’ conceptualized from a Neo-Confucian 3D perspective
Figure 5.4  Diagram of the face of an antique medium-size feng shui compass.
The location of the boar zodiac symbol on the compass is encircled. Photo by
David J. Nemeth.
connects Heaven and Earth and thus comprises a conduit for
‘heaven’s breath’ to infuse Earth with potentially propitious sites
whereby, once located by a compass-wielding feng shui expert,
a potentially propitious habitat for humans on Earth is ‘born’.
So, in the context of a traditional agrarian Neo-Confucian
cosmology, how would a ‘virtuous’ peasant inhabiting a ‘sin-
cere’ landscape on Cheju Island treat a pig? The answer is: as-a-
pig; with respect, and with empathy mixed with awe: ‘Even the
prosaic pig is said to bear seven spots on its hind legs resembling
the seven stars’ of the celestial dipper (Rufus 1913).
Modernity in the West, Land-use Change, and Loss
of Living Space for Pigs-as-pork
Modernization during the Anthropocene also complicated and
rendered into extinction mature peasant landscapes that had
once evolved in Europe. Northern Europeans, and the inhab-
itants of England, for example, also deployed pigsty-privies
as integral parts of a productive pre-Modern agro-ecosystem,
although it is hard to find an educated Englander these days
willing to validate this unsavory narrative. In a nutshell, indus-
trializing humans worldwide have failed to deliberately act
successfully against their material self-interest by producing –
rather than rejecting – labour-saving devices and unmanage-
able and ecologically destructive complications (Nemeth 1987).
One outcome of this downward ecological spiral triggered
at the onset of the Industrial Revolution was to presage the
invention of pork-producing factory farming associated with
land-use change and the abandonment of any respect for the
intrinsic value of pig life. The instrumental-rational logic of
the Anthropocene redefined pigs-as-pork ‘essential’ for human
consumption and justifies the worldwide spread of pork-­
producing factory farms that dramatically deprive pigs-as-pork
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 Part I: Evolution, Taxonomy, and Domestication
of their ‘fair share’ of living space in the contemporary calculus
of land-use economics. Thus, land-use practices have changed
dramatically during the transition from agriculture to indus-
trialization that accompanied the ‘second agricultural revolu-
tion’, which accompanied modernization and the advent of the
Anthropocene in Europe.
Land means space in which production processes take place.
Almost all such [productive] processes demand some space . . .
the space requirement for . . . pig rearing is much less than most
other farming enterprises and this has earned them the title ‘fac-
tory farming’. (Hill 2014)
The animal welfare implications of Hill’s observation for
contemporary pork production is that space efficiencies and
economies for profitable pig-rearing in a factory farm require
a rationalization of space for pigs-as-pork production. This
rationalization of space in efficient factory-farm pork produc-
tion allocates minimal if any living space for pigs-as-pork.
The road from complex historic Holocene pig-as-pigs
husbandry to complicated pigs-as-pork factory farming in
the present-day Anthropocene (both in East Asia and in
Northern Europe) narrowed rapidly after the onset of the
Anthropocene (c.1700).
Relational, Absolute, and Relative Spaces, and
Changing Pig–Human Relations
In contemplating ‘the nature of space’, David Harvey (1977)
introduces distinctions between relational, absolute, and
relative space. These can be discussed as consecutive lenses
associated with changing human perceptions of their material
surroundings as resources during their sequent occupancy of
the land for the purposes of agriculture (and animal domestica-
tion), beginning with the Neolithic:
At the beginning of the Neolithic period, pigs were able to root in
oak and beech forests which provided ample shade and wallows
as well as acorns, beechnuts, truffles, and other forest floor prod-
ucts. With an increase in human population density, farm acreage
increased and the oak and beech forests were destroyed to make
room for planted crops, especially for olive trees, thereby eliminat-
ing the pig’s ecological niche’ (Harris 1997).
This sequential ‘elimination’ of the ecological niche of wild
pigs during the early Holocene can be modelled as Figure 5.5.
Figure 5.5 suggests (from left to right) that a historical
sequence of expanding human settlements (‘urbanization’)
on a global scale has taken place during which the once unre-
stricted ‘free environment’ available for pig life in the wild, and
in human confinements, has been significantly compressed in
space and time since the onset of the Anthropocene to make
room for the efficient industrial agricultural production of
pigs-as-pork on factory farms in order to meet the demand of
rapidly increasing pork-consuming human populations. The
transition was achieved in large part by government agency that
legally ‘enclosed’ agricultural space in order to more efficiently
grow and sell agricultural products to finance manufacturing
smokestack industries, marking the onset of the Anthropocene
that coincides with the end of the European Medieval Period
(c.1500 AD).
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Figure 5.5  Spatial decline of wild pig habitat (depicted in black as declining
from left to right) during the Anthropocene. Grey areas from left to right depict
the rapid transition of ‘mature peasant landscape’ in Northwestern Europe.
Metropolitan regions centred on cities during the Anthropocene (represented
by the land-use efficiency of W. Christaller’s urbanizing ‘central place’ hexa-
gons) have all but ‘squeezed out’ at present any fair share of living space for
both pigs-as-pigs and for pigs-as-pork.
Relational Space
According to Harvey (1990), in pre-Modern times, people expe-
rienced relational space/time. I interpret Harvey to mean that
Neolithic farmers were close to Nature and its seasonal rhythms,
including the wild pigs that were increasingly encroaching on
their villages. In contrast, they inhabited complex, productive,
subsistence agro-ecosystems as peasant farmers without need-
ing to contemplate time and space as distinct abstractions. As
productive subsistence farmers during the historic Holocene,
any abstract thinking continued to be impractical to the condi-
tions of their everyday survival, and was anyway irrelevant to
the success of their productive agricultural lifestyles.
To farmers inhabiting ‘mature peasant landscapes’
(Figure 5.3) the time/space experience was cyclical (in contrast
to linear) and mental model of the cosmos was – as, for example,
in the Neo-Confucian cosmological model – a ‘gravity model’
centring on the nourishing axis mundi of ‘The Well’ of their
settlement and surrounded by the myriad things, including
pigs-as-pigs all ‘relating’ in space/time.
Absolute Space
‘History of time began with modernity’, according to Zygmut
Bauman (2000a), a claim seemingly in tacit agreement with
David Harvey and other social scientists who have theorized
about the forces of Modernity and the Anthropocene that have
separated the concept of time from the concept of space, thus
replacing relational time–space with an absolute-space-and-
time paradigm, one that engenders and promotes scientific and
technological progress in the service of the Industrial Age.
Bauman observed that Enlightenment thinkers and scien-
tists in the West at the onset of the Anthropocene made pains-
taking efforts to express velocities, distances, accelerations of
observable objects in detail and numerically in order to system-
atically advance knowledge about these objects in the name of
Progress and Development. All this was made possible by cast-
ing space and time ‘as two transcendentally separate and mutu-
ally independent categories of human cognition’. Stevens’ (1974)
truth claim (see epigraph) ‘space prohibits so much and permits
so little’ in an absolute-space-and-time context made sense and
presented a challenge to Enlightenment thinkers, who tasked
 Chapter 5: Space, time and pig

themselves with advancing knowledge and technology that

could make industrial productivity – including the machine-
Quo Vadis Sus scrofa?
Will improved welfare conditions for pigs-as-pork emerge dur-
aided production of pork – more efficient (and profitable).
ing this present age of liquid modernity and relative space–time?
The separation enables industrial production because it ena-
While their welfare state in factory farms at present remains
bles Modern humans to rationalize land use even in agriculture,
dire, there are reasons for optimism.
and to productively fill space with objects more densely, mean-
Although shock artist Sue Coe exaggerates for effect in sup-
while expanding the space that could be so filled in a given time
port of animal welfare activisms how humans allocate no living
(Bauman 2000b). Increased efficiencies of this magnitude are
space for pigs born and raised in factory farms and bound for
characteristic of human agro-ecosystems in the machine age
the slaughterhouse, she is not all that far off the truth. The pigs-
that have enabled the advent of factory farming coinciding with
as-pork business-like approach to pig production during the
unbridled consumerism that coincides with a increases in pur-
Anthropocene ‘has resulted in increased confinement of pigs
chasing power and increasing pork consumption worldwide.
in highly capitalized, specialist houses [factory farms] where
Factory farms have successfully increased mass pork pro-
emphasis was placed firmly on production efficiency. Some
duction. Success in mass, mechanized pork production has also
of the methods adopted to maximize production efficiency
increased human alienation (of pork consumers and producers)
included minimizing space allowance per animal’ (Spoolder &
from Nature. The alienation has both accompanied and allowed
Waiblinger 2009, p. 229).
changing human perception of pigs-as-pigs (characteristic of in
No space for pig-life means that pigs-as-pork ‘living’ in fac-
relational time–space) to pigs-as-pork in absolute-time-and-
tory farms are essentially ‘dead on their hooves’ in anticipation
space. Sue Coe (in Figure 5.2) depicts the outcome of this change
of a ‘shelf life’ for human consumption in the local supermarket.
of human perception on the welfare state of pigs-as-pork ena-
The impossibilities of all their possibilities is a realistic defini-
bled during the Anthropocene era of absolute space conceived
tion for the living death of Sus scrofa form domesticus. Those alive
in the service of industrial food production.
today will never experience normal pigs-as-pigs lives as that
possibility remains foreclosed – at least into the near future –
Relative Space under present ‘best practices’ governing pigs-as-pork welfare in
Bauman envisioned ‘liquid modernity’ literally as a ‘watershed factory farms; for example,
change’ that rendered Modernity’s space and time separation
Ultimately, calm and consistent handling saves time . . . The qual-
more and more irrelevant as the Anthropocene progressed.
ity of human–animal interactions depends to a large extent on the
During the transition from absolute space and time to relative
ability and the willingness of handlers to reduce stress in their ani-
space/time, it became fashionable among many ‘post-modern’
mals (Spoolder & Waiblinger 2009; Figure 5.6)
thinkers like Harvey and Bauman that absolute space ‘annihi-
An important role of research is to determine how best to
lates’ absolute time, and vice versa.
achieve appropriate balances between production efficiency and
Paraphrasing Bauman (2000a, 2000b, 2007): absolute space
animal welfare within intensive pig production .  .  . promoting
decreasingly set limits to human actions and agency because of
welfare through allowing pigs to perform natural, species-specific
the instantaneity of communications: the instantaneity of time
behaviors invariably means increasing environmental space and
in the era of post-modernity devalued space. Because all parts of
complexity, and thus increasing capital cost of housing (O’Connell
space could be reached in an instant, no space had special value.
2009, italics added).
There was no longer a need much less a reason for humans in
post-modernity to bear the cost of perpetually supervising rela-
tive spaces, the sort which could be abandoned and then revis-
ited in an instant.
In sum, key thinkers about time and space have increasingly
conceptualized Modernity (and the Anthropocene) in philo-
sophical and political terms as the age of the emancipation of
absolute space from absolute time. This cognitive ‘trick’ enabled
pigs-as-pigs during the agricultural era of relational space–time
to become pigs-as-pork in the instrumental-rational Industrial
Age (Anthropocene).
Pig–human relations in the present age of relative space–
time (which Harvey terms post-modern and Bauman terms
‘liquid modernity’) are ripe for change, and any change would
seem to foster an improvement in the welfare state of pigs-as-
pork. In this present post-modern era of corporate forming,
mass communications and consumerism run amok, pigs-as-
pork remains as much a cause for celebration as it was early
in the Anthropocene when Charles Lamb in 1823 wrote his
Figure 5.6  ‘Schweinelebensraum’ (Living Space for Pigs-as-Pigs). An original
‘Dissertation on Roast Pig’ (which presumed pigs-were-pork in futuristic drawing by Timothy Sanderson inspired by the counterfactual con-
ancient China). jecture ‘If pigs could fly . . .’.
55

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316941232.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Part I: Evolution, Taxonomy, and Domestication

Thus, while factory farmers are aware of ways to improve
pigs-as-pork welfare in factory farms, animal welfare activist
case studies ‘speaking for the pigs’ argue with conviction that cost
considerations and the profit motive nearly everywhere have nul-
lified any widespread implementation of these ‘best practices’.
And so, in response to question: (1) ‘How much space and
time do pigs need to be pigs?’, the ethical answer would be ‘Much
more than they are allocated by the cruel and frugal forces of
economic growth ideology at this time in history’; and to ques-
tion (2) ‘How much space and time do pigs need to be pork?’, the
same forces would argue ‘As little as it takes for our factory farms
to maximize efficiency and profitability.’
Such instrumental-rational responses having become
entrenched as the ‘absolutist space and time logic of the
Anthropocene’ are, however, rendered nonsensical in the con-
text of post-modernity’s fast-evolving relativist space–time
relations. Animal welfare activism in the Internet Age reaches
an unprecedented (in size and diversity) audience of dysra-
tional/relativist thinkers. Pork-producing factory farms as we
know them are already verging on the provocative absurdity
depicted in Sue Coe’s dystopian artistic renditions.
Summary
This article has argued – drawing on personal observations in
the field, and deploying models of East Asian Neo-Confucian
cosmology and the Western experience of changing pig–human
relations in agro-ecosystems ranging from the Neolithic to
the present Anthropocene – that pigs were perceived and
respected as-pigs prior to the Anthropocene, in contrast with
their being perceived exclusively as-pork with the onset of the
Anthropocene. Pigs perceived as-pigs in the relational space–
time of pre-Anthropocene agro-ecosystems became pigs per-
ceived as-pork in absolute space–time that coincided with
the onset of Anthropocene agro-ecosystems culminating in
Industrial-Age mass pork-producing factory farms.
Assuming Zygmunt Bauman is on to something with his
concept of ‘liquid modernity’, the emergence of relative space–
time convergence at this stage of the Anthropocene allows that
the chances of pigs flying and/or human’s changing their atti-
tudes about Sus scrofa from pigs-as-pork back to pigs-as-pigs
are about equally absurd – as well as equally possible.
Conclusion: If Pigs Could Fly . . . What Then?
I have argued in this chapter that pigs ‘as-pigs’ no less than
humans ‘as-humans’ require living space to achieve healthy
productive lives. Pigs without living space in factory farms
at this stage of the Anthropocene continue to live in an
unhealthy welfare state. If pigs could fly, would their lives be
worth living?
What could be more provocatively absurd and thus post-
modern than flying pigs? Humans have conjured up this flying
pig scenario for ages. The proposition ‘If pigs could fly . . .’ is usu-
ally considered an adynaton (the exaggeration of an impossible
event). However, at present, pigs do fly when they accompany
humans into airspace.
The phrase can also be construed to be a counterfactual
conjecture (an unprecedented event, but nevertheless within
the realm of possibility). As a counterfactual, the possibility of
pigs-as-pork taking flight from the severe conditions of their
restricted confinement in a factory farm is not utterly foreclosed –
although escape into airspace by a pig of its own accord as
envisioned in Figure 5.6 remains far-fetched at the present time.
This chapter has interpreted the long history of pig–human
relations documented by Albarella (2007) as beginning well in
relational space–time, but evolving badly for pigs during abso-
lute space and time. That relationship viewed in retrospect has
been both remarkable and paradoxical. At present, in post-
modern relativist space anything is possible – but few pigs are
as yet escaping the hellacious conditions of their living deaths in
pork-producing factory farms.

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