Wow. I was just listening to Conversations with Tyler with Jill Lepore[1] this morning. She mentioned this article at the end:
COWEN: Final question. The world of social media, we all know it’s not going away. Maybe it has some problems, but if you were to give a student or a person some piece of advice or intellectual ammunition to carry with them through this world — some book, some essay, some thought — so as to make it marginally better rather than marginally worse, what would that be?
LEPORE: Read this E. B. White essay called “Death of a Pig.”
COWEN: And what does he tell us in “Death of a Pig”?
LEPORE: A pig dies on his . . . He was in Maine. He’s trying to understand what it means when something dies when you didn’t expect it to die and you couldn’t save it, and I just find it a very beautiful essay. But I think something is dying, and we can’t save it, and that’s a good place to start, to figure out how to feel about that.
This reminds me of how recently an activist was charged with criminal mischief for giving water to thirsty pigs on the way to a slaughterhouse.[1] (She was found not guilty.[2])
For those that may not click on title alone, this essay is by E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and coauthor of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style.
I asked my friends about this (not telling them about the article). They said that they will not grief or go through regret related to saving the pig or any animal in that case.
The explanation was "If I was already aware of the fact that pig will die eventually in butcher house; I wouldn't have worried too much about it's natural death beside just the fact that I lost an animal who could have become my dinner sometime."
While I can totally relate to the farmer in the article. I might have also cried of my pig's death regardless of knowing that the pig is going to be butchered sooner or later.
I have to say I really don't understand this story. For those of you who don't want to read, it's a 1948 story about a farmer (presumably E.B. White?) who tries to save his pig before slaughter that has fallen sick and dies (from erysipelas presumably?).
The narrator seems to have a lot of investment in the pig's health:
The pig's lot and mine were inextricably bound now,
as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From
then until the time of his death I held the pig
steadily in the bowl of my mind; the task of trying
to deliver him from his misery became a strong obsession.
His suffering soon became the embodiment of all earthly
wretchedness.
The ending few sentences concludes with
I have written this account in penitence and in grief,
as a man who failed to raise his pig, and to explain
my deviation from the classic course of so many raised
pigs. The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can
direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense
good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it,
singly and together, in seasons of reflection and
despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing.
On a superficial reading, there might be a confusion as to the empathy of the narrator, but the narrator clearly understands what the conclusion of a healthy pig is:
I had assumed that there could be nothing much wrong
with a pig during the months it was being groomed for
murder; my confidence in the essential health and
endurance of pigs had been strong and deep, particularly
in the health of pigs that belonged to me and that were
part of my proud scheme.
So it's understood that in the best of cases, the pig is being cared for so that it can be murdered for food.
Is the sense of loss one of not conforming to a rigid script that society sets out? Is it because the narrator has a genuine sense of empathy but just ignores the fact that they'll slaughter and eat the thing they have empathy for? Or is it a statement that we are all eventually bound for a soulless premeditated murder and the only thing we can hope for is a comfortable prison before the time comes?
Or am I just expecting too much introspection from someone who hasn't examined their own motives and actions?
I have friends who own cattle that will later be butchered. They truly love those animals, even though they know their fate in the end. They give even them names. They would be heartbroken if one of them died like this pig did. I suppose this is the mindset of many who raise these animals. There is definitely a sense a humaneness towards their animals, and at the same time enjoy the meat they produce.
I have seen cows butchered -- one second they are alive -- one blow to the head they are gone. Sharp transition from death to life. Better than many humans who endure being eaten by cancer while lying in a hospital bed.
We are so insulated from death in our society, we almost pretend it doesn't happen. Many who butcher there own animals or hunt for their own meat have a better grip on this reality I think.
One of Terry Pratchett's characters, an old shepherdess, summed it up well. From memory: "We are as gods to the beasts of the field: we order the hour of their birth and their death. In between times, we has a duty."
Yes, and there is not this perverse attempt to replace human company with controllable companions (aka pets), that leads to so much animal antromorphism and hidden missery.
I can like a cow, and still know its a cow. A horse can not know what a hand is that holds the sugar cube. For a horse, you are another smaller horse.
I live near a horse-stable, where strong-empowered single ladies have up to five horses. The sadness and missery of a live that has replaced what could be a family or just human company with animals - is on par in my eyes with some computer addicted males. You should hear the arguments they have with the vet.
> I live near a horse-stable, where strong-empowered single ladies have up to five horses. The sadness and missery of a live that has replaced what could be a family or just human company with animals - is on par in my eyes with some computer addicted males.
Not any more than is absolutely required by law. I would render aid should I come upon someone of the Horse Peoples tribe who had collapsed, but that's about as far as it goes. Their ways...they are strange, their speech garbled.
I can't speak for horses because I have little desire to be around them, but it would take some solid evidence to convince me that a dog doesn't know the difference between humans and dogs. Perhaps a dog doesn't bucket me into "human" or "dog" (though I'm confident that they have some concept of categorization), but they sure heck don't think I'm a bipedal dog.
As for "horse people", well, I make no apologies for that lot. I think there's something in horse dander that makes the owners neurotic.
Are you sure, you are not just a very very strange alpha dog, whos moods are easily readable by looking at the face muscles and the tone of voice?
Dogs have no concept of society beyond the pack that is family. Dogs prefer to communicate by action and smell.
Maybee antromorphizing makes alien company more bearable.
I somehow miss that trait, i guess.
Are you sure, you are not just a very very strange alpha dog, whos moods are easily readable by looking at the face muscles and the tone of voice?
Pretty sure, yeah. It's an extrapolation: my dogs don't try to eat another dog that's about the same size and furriness of a rabbit, but they'll about take my arm off to chase a rabbit. So there's some kind of categorization going on. "These things are for eating, these other things are for fun." I'm quite confident that dogs have not created a system that breaks things down along lines of genus and species, but I'm pretty sure they know I'm not one of them. To a large degree it's moot, I suppose, because they can't tell us what's on their mind, so we just have to play with inputs and observed behavior, and go from there.
As a sidenote, research has on multiple occasions demonstrated that pack mentality and other such things as "alpha dog" don't apply to domesticated dogs (IOW, you can pretty much ignore anything Caeser Millan has to say). Extrapolating from those assumptions can be rife with error.
So it's understood that in the best of cases, the pig is being cared for so that it can be murdered for food.
I grew up with livestock that would later be converted to food on our table. Those animals had one bad day their entire lives. Though we intended to eat them, we had no intention of adding to that count of bad days if we didn’t have to. So, though never called upon to do so, I’d stay up all night with a pig if she were sick even if I were going to eat her later.
> Or am I just expecting too much introspection from someone who hasn't examined their own motives and actions?
You're expecting logical consistency from the author, but the author is partly pointing out that our emotions and feelings do not always obey such a rigid framework.
The author is examining how they feel about the pig's death; that sometimes comes before, or is not in congruence with, their other motivations.
If you reflect on this a bit more, the normal course of a farmer (and to a greater degree, industrial meat production) is to view their animals as a product and to not regard them as feeling individuals, as that might rather get in the way of their work. But the farmer is slowly drawn into a situation where the pig is more than future meat, but a suffering fellow creature.
Just to add to this point, with something that Yuval Noah Harari said in an interview with Sam Harris:
"If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the
spice of every culture, a human... must hold contradictory
beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. Cognitive
dissonance is often considered a failure of the human
psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable
to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably
have been impossible to establish and maintain any human
culture."
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves that at least in math, there's a tradeoff between power and completeness / consistency, in that formal systems than can encode arithmetic can prove more things, but they are necessarily either inconsistent or incomplete.
Would make a lot of sense if this tradeoff were also present in other contexts.
The author is fully aware of the irony that he cares and thinks so much about this pig that he was planning to butcher.
It reminds me about when I was a kid and didn't care much about animals until one of my rabbits died because I'd placed it in a cage without shelter and not brought it back in before a heavy cold rain.
I had to kill it, as I realized it was suffering and I guess that was the day I started caring about animals.
"Making the reader think" seems reasonable to me, especially after doing a bit more research on E.B. White.
While it's nice to think that this is the goal of the story, I also wonder if it's not actually giving people a way to rationalize inhuman behavior. By his own account, White is saying "murder" and it seems this wording is intentional. Looking at other comments, it's clear there's a compartmentalization that happens when people try to reconcile having empathy for living things then murdering and eating them.
It's almost as if it's giving permission to people by saying they're more human because they have empathy for a creature that they'll later murder and eat.
Are you actually having trouble understanding the story and the emotions involved, or are you just looking for as many opportunities as possible to call the slaughter of an animal raised for meat "murder", in a non-poetic sense?
I'm actually having trouble. I do admit that I have a hard time reconciling the empathy expressed with the brutality of murder but I've tried to get at the core of what's trying to be expressed.
You're trying to bait me and I think that's unfair. The story itself about the juxtaposition of caring for an animal that can be clearly empathized with while planning a per-meditated murder (White's words). White literally calls it murder. This is what the story is about. You think it's unfair of me to try and discuss it?
Before you judge me to harshly, notice some of the other comments to my original question aren't saying that they have a hard time reconciling the murder of animals with their emotional attachment, they're saying they love their animals while not caring that they kill them. It's almost as if they're saying that their empathy towards their animals gives them moral latitude in killing them. Is this what White was trying to express? I don't think so but that's what half of the comments to my question seem to be saying.
Was this what White was trying to say? That people should feel better about killing animals because they empathize with them? Or is he saying they should feel worse and work towards a world that doesn't kill animals? Or is he not examining this at all and just expressing an emotion without any introspection? I really don't know and I wanted to see what other people had to say about it.
> You're trying to bait me and I think that's unfair.
I offered a response in the spirit of your original comment. If you think that's unfair, then I don't know what to tell you. I think that you're being disingenuous with your posts as a rhetorical device to make a point about your perception of the ethics of using animals as food.
> White literally calls it murder.
In a non-literal, poetic sense. He uses the word murder two times, true.
> Is this what White was trying to express?
I don't think he's saying that people should feel better about killing animals. I think that he's acknowledging the reality that killing an animal for food is killing a feeling being. That it's better to go into an action with full knowledge of the result. I don't think it's a matter of making people feel better or worse about the situation.
He wasn't empathizing with the animal's death anyhow, at least not primarily; everything dies, after all. It was the unnecessary pain that was never a part of the plan.
It's almost as if they're saying that their empathy towards their animals gives them moral latitude in killing them. Is this what White was trying to express?
No. I don't think that is what White is trying to express.
I think it is the wonder that we actually care so much about these animals even when they are clearly (in the opinion of most humans) lesser than us.
As for why we are allowed to kill and eat animals this needs no extra justification as is governed by the same rules that allow eagles, hyeanas, lions and wolves to kill and eat.
Yes, people kill animals for food. Yes, people care about the well-being of those animals during the time they are alive and in their care.
If you see a contradiction there, that's just you.
I assume you are a "supermarket kid", like most of us here, and grew up away from the land, getting your meat from the invisible machinery of modern industrialized food production. Now you seem to have gone off eating meat, and apparently feel quite morally superior. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
From this position of inexperience and moral superiority, of course you are unable to process the nuanced emotions conveyed so skillfully by White. Unable to reconcile the essay with your black-and-white moralistic view of the world, you blame the author for lacking introspection. This is why you are sensing some disdain in the responses you are getting.
I think the author is trying to get across a mindset that is common among people who raise livestock, which others might find foreign like you seem to.
He seems fully aware of the contradictions within it, and isn't making any attempts to rationalize it. He's likely hoping that the reader will try to understand the mindset that makes this contradiction possible.
If this is true, then I would say it's laziness on the author's part to not try to reconcile this contradiction or to at least to address it in a deeper way.
Or maybe it's laziness on your part not making enough effort to understand what he is trying to tell you ... This is not a maths essay, this is literature. Contradiction is part of it (as it is part of life), or even: contradiction is the whole point of it. On the other hand, there is no contradiction at all.
Interestingly, your comment is so much removed from what I read in this essay that the only thing I can recommend you is not worry about it, just set this story aside and try reading it again 25 years from now. It will most probably make a difference.
I'm not sure why this essay was posted to HN, but I'm glad to have read it. Thanks for posting it!
That we may live, other life must inevitably die -- in fact, this is generally the rule for most life at this point. Even if you consider plants unworthy of the same regard we give animals (how zoochauvinist of you), animal life is lost in the tilling and harvesting from fields, even if pesticides are not used and no new habitat turned to our use. Further, the harvest would be most meager without any pest control, and manual removal of insects, etc. is fairly prohibitive; organic farmers usually make use of more natural options for pest control, like diatomaceous earth, rather than discarding treatment entirely.
The real lack of introspection is our handwaving away of this truth from notice, such that we find an unavoidable truth abhorrent.
Farmers respect the animals even though their fate is pre-ordained.
There are all sorts of questions that are tough to answer. My thought always was that it's better to live than to not live at all, and if we didn't eat pigs, we wouldn't have any.
Compare and contrast with Mona, by James Taylor. Superficially similar subject, but very different effect. E. B. White certainly could make every word tell.
Even if it wasn't erysipelas, they didn't know what it was. Eating the pig could've been fine if they at least were able to tell what is it that it had and whether it was infectious or not.
Eating animals whose cause of death is unknown is usually not a sound decision.
The pig had died at some unknown time before. It was summertime. The residual heat of the internal organs would have quickly spoiled the meat; this is why hunters, even in the winter deer season, try to get the guts out and the skin off as soon as possible, in order to let the heat out before it ruins the meat. Also, the pig died for a reason. Could have been a twisted intestine, or it could have been some sort of disease, but in any case the vet couldn't figure out what was making the pig sick which means they don't know if it's communicable.
I grew up on a farm. One winter day, years back, my sister's sheep just started dying. 3 or 4 of them died over the course of an afternoon, for no reason we could discover, and then the rest of the sheep were fine. We didn't eat the sheep, even the ones we had literally watched expire; it's just not safe.
COWEN: Final question. The world of social media, we all know it’s not going away. Maybe it has some problems, but if you were to give a student or a person some piece of advice or intellectual ammunition to carry with them through this world — some book, some essay, some thought — so as to make it marginally better rather than marginally worse, what would that be?
LEPORE: Read this E. B. White essay called “Death of a Pig.”
COWEN: And what does he tell us in “Death of a Pig”?
LEPORE: A pig dies on his . . . He was in Maine. He’s trying to understand what it means when something dies when you didn’t expect it to die and you couldn’t save it, and I just find it a very beautiful essay. But I think something is dying, and we can’t save it, and that’s a good place to start, to figure out how to feel about that.
[1]: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-jill...