Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The family pig was everybody's pride and everybody's business … its health and
condition were regularly reported in letters to children away from home, together with
news of their brothers and sisters. Men callers on Sunday afternoons came, not to see
the family, but the pig, and would lounge with its owner against the pigsty door for
an hour scratching the piggy's back … The children on their way home from school
would fill their arms with sow thistle, dandelion and choice long grasses, or roam
along the hedgerows on wet evenings collecting snails for the pig's supper.
In one of his
Just So Stories
, 'The Cat Who Walked by Himself', Rudyard Kipling com-
pares the contracts made by the dog, the cow, the horse and the cat as they submit to do-
mestication by primitive humans. Kipling neglected to include the pig - but 8,000 years
ago when herds of wild swine were attracted to the settlements of early agriculturalists, an
interspecies bargain was negotiated. 'You give us your waste food and a bit of that extra
juicy grass seed you have, and we'll keep your camp clean and let you eat our surplus off-
spring (of which we have many).' We have broken that contract by forcing our pigs into
concentration camps, and feeding them on concentrates, and we are materially and spiritu-
ally the worse for it.
1
Since writing this I have been directed to an article on wikipedia claiming that piggy banks evolved their porcine
form because they were made out of a certain kind of clay, called 'pygg'. However this theory doesn't explain a 14th
century piggy bank from Java pictured on the same web-page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggy_bank
2
Thompson, Flora (1948),
Larkrise to Candleford,
Reprint Society, p 22.
3
Engels, F (1845),
The Condition of the Working Class in England
, Panther Books, 1972.
4
Feed figures from
Feed Facts Quarterly
1992, cited in Brooks, P (c1993),
Rediscovering the Environmentally
Friendly Pig
, Seale Hayne Agricultural College, unpublished.
5
Personal communication.
6
Energy Power Resource (EPR) website;
http://www.eprl.co.uk/profile/index.html
7
Lawrence A (2000), Letter from Alan Lawrence, secretary UKRA to Barbara Richards, Food Standards Agency, 15
Sept 2000.
www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/lawrence.pdf
8
Elferink, E V and Nonhebel, S (2007), 'Does the Amazon Suffer from BSE Prevention', Agriculture, Ecosystems
and Environment, 120, pp 467-9 .
9
WHO
et al
(2007)
Joint WHO/FAO/OIE Technical Consultation on BSE: Public Health, Animal Health and Trade,
Conclusions and Key Recommendations
; OIE Headquarters, Paris, 11-14 June 2001
http://www.fao.org/ag/aga/AGAP/
10
European Commission (2005),
The TSE Roadmap
, Brussels 2005,
http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/biosafety/bse/
11
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (2007),
The Introduction of the Ban on Swill Feeding
, Dec 2007,
12
Miklósi, Gabor (2004), 'In Search of Lost Fat Content',
The Hungarian Quarterly
, No 173, Spring, 2004;
