Wed, Jul 14, 1943: baby pigs

"We have some tiny baby pigs one old sow has 12,13, or 14 they are to wiggly to count....

We are building some sheds for two old sows who are going to have pigs very soon."

--Letter from my uncle, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Cape Girardeau, Mo., Wednesday, July 14, 1943.

            Pigs were a crucial source of meat and income on the diversified farm of my grandparents.  These creatures, like all the other plants and animals that fed their family and provided them income, had a millennia-old association with humans.  Domestic pigs descend from the wild boar.  Its wild cousins are still relatively common in Europe, Asia, and North Africa.  Pigs, along with sheep and goats, were likely part of the earliest farming cultures in eastern Europe and western Asia.  Evidence of pig domestication goes back at least to 7000 B.C.E. in Jericho, although pigs may have been domesticated at various different times and places.  Farmers with domesticated pigs eventually spread to most of Europe and Asia, and parts of Africa.  They were especially important source of meat in Asia.  Polynesian migrants brought them to Hawai’i by 1000 C.E.  Europeans brought pigs to the Americas by 1493 and to the British colonies of North America by the early seventeenth century.

Unlike cattle, sheep and goats, which both nomadic pastoralists and settled farmers can use, pigs have primarily been associated with settled farming.  However, people have found two distinct ways to keep them: within farms in sties, or left to fend for themselves in the woods.  Semiferal hogs could be attracted back to farms with food, or hunted like wild animals.  Left to feed themselves, they make use of acorns, beech nuts, “wild apples, berries, chestnuts, slugs, insects, and worms, as well as fungi,” and “mice, voles and other rodents.” Many early English colonists allowed pigs to range through forests for acorns and other food, eliminating food sources used by American Indians.

On my grandparents’ farm, hogs were confined in fences and sties.  They got some table scraps, as well as grains, such as sorghum.  Some local farmers got whey (the byproduct of butter making) from local milk producers, which my grandparents may have done as well.  Pigs were a key part of the diversified farms of that era, which gradually disappeared as more highly industrialized, specialized agriculture developed in the postwar years.  By the time I remember my grandparents’ farm in the 1970s, it had no pigs.  By then, pigs were increasingly raised in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations, or factory farms) that specialized in one animal.

(Sources: Juliet Clutton-Brock, Domesticated Animals From Early Times (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 71-79; Zeuner, History of Domesticated Animals, 256-71; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 97, 112-13; John Long, Introduced Mammals of the World: Their History, Distribution and Influence (Csiro Publishing), 375; Brown, Kansas Farmboy, 114-15).