Re: Pig – ways of reimagining (industrially farmed) pigs

Ekaterina Gladkova & Naho Matsuda

The “Sad Animal Modern” – this is the condition of the animals today as identified by Amir (2020). In late capitalism, animals are dominated, exploited and objectified. Real animals have vanished from human relationships and instead have been replaced by a world of empty symbols that we encounter in popular culture, advertising, entertainment. Think about pigs – how often do you see or think about them beyond the cheerful Peppa Pig or idyllic farm vistas promoted by the farming industry? Do you see the meat that you encounter on supermarket shelves not as “pork” but as an animal? 

Despite our lack of relationships with them, pigs are much more ubiquitous than we realise. Their bodies have been engineered and exploited to meet a variety of human “needs”. Every year, 1.2 billion land animals are killed for meat in the UK, around 10 million of them being pigs. With meat being the main product, pig by-products have penetrated a surprising variety of different industries, with a non-exhaustive list being pet food, pharmaceutical, medical, cosmetic, chemical manufacturing, sports, fashion.

Pigs themselves are fascinating creatures – inquisitive, intelligent, highly adaptable and able to learn quickly. With animals being “brought back in” to geography (Wolch and Emel, 1995), we focus on pigs to playfully explore their power as a subject in their own right. The blog draws on our interdisciplinary research project Re: Pig that started in early 2022. Inspired by environmental sociology, more-than-human geography, critical animal studies, visual art and speculative design, the project investigates the impact of industrial pig farming on the wider ecosystem and human and more-than-human communities. We have worked on mapping and visualising various issues and topics around industrial pig farming. We edited our visualisations into an illustrated zine that proposes speculative scenarios that re-think the compromised lives of farmed pigs and other affected species and challenge the conceptions of farmed animals’ agency. In this blog we would like to share some of these ideas and encourage the reader to think about their own relationship with pigs and other industrially farmed animals. 

How Far is the Pig ?

This is a prototype for a game, inviting participants to guess if there are any pig by-products in items they use on a day-to-day basis. How many degrees of separation are between the pig and your toothpaste? Are there any signs of pig in that strawberry ice cream? 

While the topic of rearing animals on industrial farms for human consumption is widely discussed and extensively criticised, less attention is paid to how animal bodies pro­vide much more than meat. Contemporary agri-capitalism maximises the utility of every body part of an industrially farmed animal, turning it into a valuable commodity. Some objects and foods we use and eat daily contain the by-products of industrial pig farming, even though we may not be aware of it.

Christien Meindertsma’s Pig research and design project tracked 185 products that have some pig by-products in them – including pharmaceutical tablets, X-ray film, insu­lin, bullets, heart valves, paper, cigarettes, glue, shampoo, beer, candles, bread, cork, ice cream, photographic film, paint, toothpaste, brushes, wine. Next time you buy something, it may be worth deciphering if there are signs of pig in it… 

Pig Emotion Detector

Pig Emotion Detector captures a more realistic picture of pigs’ emotions on industrial farms. 

Pigs are very intelligent, highly sociable, and emotionally complex animals. Researchers started training forms of arti­ficial intelligence to recognise individual animals by their faces alone and discern their emotional state by reading their ex­pressions (Wang et al, 2022). The idea is to help farmworkers more readily identify sickness and injury.

Yet, some campaigners are sceptical about so-called “humane-washing” – where animal welfare is portrayed as being better than it actually is (Thibault et al, 2022). The research intersecting animal welfare and artificial intelligence is partly supported by the meat industry and there are concerns that advertising ‘happy’ animals is a marketing tool to boost sales. The larger question of whether pig “happiness” is even possible on industrial farms still remains untouched. 

Pig Translator

Pig Translator is a listening device that uses machine learning to collect a library of pig sounds and compare them to a sta­tistical human language model. Based on frequency and meta-data the device then roughly translates pig sounds into human English.

Pigs make a wide range of sounds with a variety of meanings. They grunt, they bark, they squeal, they pant and even make a cough-like noise. Pigs don’t actually say “oink” but make a noise more like “groink”. 

So, what would ‘grrr’ and ‘oof’ mean in English? Human researchers tried decoding pig language and created an algorithm that captures the emotional undertones of pig noises. Unfortunately, the research was conducted in a commercial context and was designed to monitor on-farm animal welfare. Pigs high-frequency calls (screams or squeals) tend to happen in negative situations, while low-frequency calls (barks and grunts) occur when pigs experience both positive and negative emotions.

Pig Radio

This is a prototype for a radio station for pigs featuring pig DJs. 

An industrial farm is a very stressful environ­ment for pigs. While the meat industry rec­ognises this, its response is not to cut down production or rear animals on small-scale, organic farms only. Instead, the status quo of industrial pro­duction remains intact but some minor welfare tweaks are introduced. 

Music becomes a tool for increasing the feeling of relaxation in animals, to improve their health and conse­quently boost “production performance”. This is known as “environmental enrichment with music” . There is no consensus on what type of mu­sic pigs prefer and whether it has signifi­cant positive results. One study concluded that pigs favour classical music – primarily compositions by Mozart and Vivaldi, i.e., sounds of piano and violin accompa­nied by a symphony orchestra (Ciborowska et al, 2021). They also suggested that pigs did not appreciate rock’n’roll music and it caused them to grow slower. In another study a group of piglets re­sponded positively to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite no 1 – their behaviour im­proved and they reached the same weight gain with less feed (Harue Ito et al, 2020). 

What would pig DJs play to the pigs who did not care about performance and growth and just wanted to enjoy music for the sake of it?

Conclusion

One element of challenging the “Sad Animal Modern” is addressing our current crisis of imagination and venturing to think of the futures beyond capitalism. What different futures can be conjured up for pigs? How can pigs themselves participate in creating those futures? Public animal geographies offer a possibility of reconsidering the animal agency and dismantling the established anthropocentric orders, while simultaneously considering alternative ways of relating to more-than-human. 

All images are copyright of the authors.

Ekaterina Gladkova (ekaterina.gladkova@northumbria.ac.uk)

I am an assistant professor in sociology. I am interested in critical understandings of interrelations/interconnections between human and more-than-human in the context of food production.

Naho Matsuda (naho.matsuda@northumbria.ac.uk)

I am a senior research fellow in design and part of the Interaction Research Studio. I am interested in more-than-human approaches in practice-based design research.