Egypt's "cowardly" mass killing of pigs

In Egypt, mass slaughter of the country's 300,000 pigs is slowly beginning. The action was first announced as a security measure "to reduce the risk of a major swine flu outbreak in Egypt". On May 29th, faced with criticism from health experts and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, who pointed out that pigs actually do not carry the swine flu virus, Egyptian officials changed track and said that the cull was more a general health measure than a specific reaction to swine flu. They promised that "cleaner, larger pig farms would be established outside population centres".

The decision has caused an uproar in Egypt.

Egypt's pigs are raised by members of the Coptic Christian minority, garbage collectors in the Cairo slums, who feed them food scraps they collect on their rounds. Culling the pigs would severely threaten their livelihoods. According to the NY Times, "It remains unclear if the government will compensate the farmers for their losses. The Health Ministry originally said the farmers would be paid, but after many in Parliament disagreed, the ministry appeared to back down."

Journalist Per Björklund has written about the situation in his blog.
"Actually, no one I spoke to brought up this issue or portrayed the decision to slaughter the pigs as an attack on christians as a religious group. Instead, one of them offered another theory concerning the motives: 'This is nothing new. Some people have been propagating against the pig farms for a long time. The reason is that there is influential people who want our land, to build expensive apartments. They take this opportunity to get rid of us once and for all.'"

DSC_0007_s, originally uploaded by Per Bjorklund. He has some more photos from the Cairo neighbourhood he visited.

Animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has written a letter to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak protesting the decision: “Taking advantage of the global hysteria over the propagation of ’Mexican’ flu, which has nothing to do with animals, in order to launch a campaign to exterminate pigs raised by a destitute section of the population is extremely cowardly."

She also urged the authorities not to proceed with their stated intention to set up what one agriculture ministry official called “new farms in special areas, like in Europe."

Ms Bardot called such facilities “horrific and shameful". “To want to kill all these animals and then later establish intensive piggeries where they will be packed tightly together and badly treated is unacceptable,” she wrote, urging Mr Mubarak to prevent the swine slaugher.

(Source: Times Online)


Let us all take action! Write emails to the Egyptian government protesting this ridiculous decision. Here is the government's website: http://www.egypt.gov.eg/english/guide/directory.aspx - the link goes to Prime Minister Nazif's contact details, and you can also choose different ministries in the drop-down menu to get more email addresses. I haven't been able to find president Mubarak's email address yet, though ...

Here is a simple example of a letter, which you may use as is or modify:

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I am writing to you concerning the Egyptian government's decison to go through with mass killings of pigs. I agree with Ms. Brigitte Bardot, who wrote to President Mubarak recently: The way the Egyptian government is taking advantage of the global hysteria over the propagation of ’Mexican’ flu, which has nothing to do with animals, in order to launch a campaign to exterminate pigs raised by a destitute section of the population, is extremely cowardly.

As for the stated intention to set up “new pig farms in special areas, like in Europe", as a European who knows in what terrible conditions pigs are raised in our factory farms, I must say that such facilities are horrific and shameful. To want to kill all these animals and then later establish intensive piggeries where they will be packed tightly together and badly treated is unacceptable.

Please reconsider and prevent the mass slaugher of the pigs.

Yours sincerely,
[your name and location]

Chrum.com - Pigs we are!

Chrum is a design firm from Warsaw that specializes not least in all kinds of swinish motifs - often sarcastic and humourous, playing with the nasty stereotypes about pigs ... and sometimes unexpectedly heartwarming.

They have some very nice T-shirts.

Pugna Porcorum

Pugna Porcorum ("The Battle of the Pigs") was written around 1530 by the domenican monk Johannes Leo Placentius from Liège, under the pseudonym "Publius Porcius, Poet". It is a great masterpiece of Latin-language alliteration. In its 253 hexameters, every word begins with 'p'.

The poem is composed in a style called ‘grotesque’ or ‘Macaronic’ verse, a burlesque form in which two or more languages are mixed. In Pugna Porcorum, Placentius adds Latin endings to words of his local language, and uses them in Latin constructions.

Apparently, it often appears in a compilation of "risqué and bawdy tales, macaronic verse, student drama, and nonsense writings on the subjects of sex, food, wine, women, history, religion, science and the medical and legal professions".

When I studied Latin in secondary school, I waited in vain for a chance to research it, and now I've forgotten too much of my Latin to understand very much of it without tedious dictionary wrestling.

It seems hardly any other people on teh Internets have read and understood it, either, because I can't find any reviews of it that would say anything about the plot. Well, it's probably something nasty, anyway ...

Read the whole poem on Mori's Humor Page.

Porcopolis has some illustrations to the work.

The People vs. the Pig

One of the great wonders of the Internet is that you can find archived material from many parts of the world dating many years back. Something interesting I came across today is a transcript of the TV program "The Animal Attraction", aired on ABC TV in Australia on February 24, 2001.

Its fourth program - Animals on trial: The People vs. the Pig "takes us over to the dark side. Our relationships with other animals are not all sweetness and light. And over the centuries, we've come up with some truly bizarre attempts to justify our actions." This episode explores "the ethical complexity of our dependence on animals. We find out why animals were put on trial in the middle ages, what witchcraft had to do with pet ownership, and how pet keeping transformed our society."

The program gives an overview of the problematic relation between humans and animals in history, and how humans have dealed with the moral problem in relying on domesticated animals for their survival.

Jonica Newby: Our empathy problem magnified a thousand fold when we were joined by domestic animals and our entire economy became based on exploiting them.

James Serpell: We have to maintain a degree of separation, emotional separation, if you like, from these animals. We have to avoid getting too close, literally, too intimate, too involved, too knowledgable about the nature of that animal and its psychology and its feelings.

[...]

Jonica Newby: Humans face a dilemma that's not been faced by any other animal in the history of our world. Many animals are carnivores. But we're the only ones with the brainpower to sympathise with our victims. And to cope with being a sentient carnivore, we’ve resorted to all sorts of strategies. Where possible, we avoid responsibility for killing. Even abattoir workers subconsciously shift the blame.

[...]

James Serpell: We have this association in our minds of pigs being filthy creatures but, of course, how could they not really be filthy in the kinds of conditions we keep them in. So, there’s a great deal of misrepresentation going on there which, I think, just makes people feel better about the notion that pigs can be killed, you know, because pigs aren’t really worthy of moral concern.

Read the full transcript.