Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

My affections for things porcine pale compared to my bovine proclivities but they are real, nonetheless.

I just got done standin’ at the stove, fixin’ a pound of sausage for the first time in a long time, then eatin’ some with some eggs over easy and oven-broiled, buttered toast, and so I’m thinkin’ about pigs.

We did not, as far as I can recollect, have pigs when I was growing up. My dad did raise them, but it was either before my time or when I was so little I can’t recall it.

I do seem to recall a particular garden plot – not part of the main vegetable patch – that was where a pigpen used to be. A bunch of tomato plants were there anyway, because of the natural fertilizer the pigs left behind. If I have dreamt this, someone will let me know.

Mama tells of a big hog that ate one, or some, kittens that managed to get in the wrong place. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the notion that a, or some, hogs had eaten a baby that crawled into a pen -- not on pur place but nearby. That might’ve been a rural legend, but big hogs certainly are capable of such.

One of my buddies in school was in FFA and had a horse, a heifer and a pig, the latter two for showing purposes. We were messing with his pig one day and I stuck my foot through the hog wire fence.

The critter clamped his jaws around my toes – COLLAPSING THE STEEL TOE OF MY BOOT AROUND THEM. Them hogs got some powerful jaws.

This made for an amusing moment many years later in Texas, at the newspaper where I worked. A young woman working there was from Long Island, I believe, and felt like she had been banished to the frontier by having to take the job.

She had worked for New York Newsday and was only in this town in Texas because her husband, a jet pilot, was stationed at the nearby Air Force base.

She was going on one day about the odd brief items that would appear in the paper from time to time, usually at my behest as farm-and-ranch editor. Things like:

BUGTUSSLE – Bugtussle County 4-H’ers and FFA members are reminded to bring their show rabbits in for tattooing Saturday between 2 and 4 p.m. at the Bugtussle School Ag Barn.

Or:

BULLWAGON WASHOUT – Ranchers around Bullwagon Washout who want their herds tested for worms should bring pasture samples and $15 to the Bull County Ag Extension Office no later than 5 p.m. Friday. Samples will be sent to the testing center at College Station.

Or:

RANGEVILLE – A seminar for ag youth raising pigs for the local, county and state fairs, “It Takes More than an Egg a Day with Their Feed,” will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the Rangeville 4-H Barn. Bring a side dish. A main course of ham will be served promptly at 7.

So, this Long Island lady, so out of her element, was wondering out loud what things like the above meant, because she had no idea. I was always teasin’ her about her findin’ herself in such a place considerin’ where she was from, and one day when she was musing about her predicament I randomly said to her the following :

“Hey’ve you ivver hed a hahgbatcha?”

I’m sure that’s what she heard. My dialect is Ozarkian. She replied with the New York equivalent of “Do what?” which is “pardon me?”

“A hahgbatcha? What the heck is a hahgbatcha?”

So I said it even slower: “No, hev … you … ivver … hed … a … hahg … bat … chew?”

It took forever for her to figger out what I was sayin’. I might’ve even had to write it down for her: “Have you ever had a hog bite you?”

Anyway, I told her the story about a 4-H pig bitin’ down on my steel-toed boot hard enough to peench my toes. She was amazed, of course, havin’ never heard of such.

Me and pigs kept up with one another in college, too. Not hard at a land-grant university like Oklahoma State.

We used to eat regularly at a restaurant on the main east-west highway through Stillwater. More than a few times, I’d be plowin’ into a plate of bacon and eggs or sausage and eggs, glance out the window and no more than 20 or 30 feet away would be a bunch of pigs. The OSU Swine Barn was right next door.

On a trip to North Carolina to commit an act of journalism back in ’96, I learned the difference in the Durocs, Hampshires, Chester Whites, Spots and other breeds kids still raise and the genetic mutants raised in corporate hog farms. Modern pigs have breed names like “PIC 34758,” the initials standing for Pig Improvement Company.

At this “farm” in North Carolina, a photographer and I were in a barn with 600-something pigs, which were packed in like slices of bacon. They were all, I don’t know, maybe 60 or 80 pounds or so and were manically sucking on feed tubes.

There was a sick pen, of course, because there are always sick pens when large numbers of livestock are involved. I will spare you the details. But amid all the noise and craziness of that madhouse, one thing sent me a chill and made me realize that these were not my daddy’s pigs, nor the more-or-less natural variety that ag kids raise.

The photographer was loaded down with equipment. We were walking down the center of the barn, talking to the “farmer.” Suddenly, my photo man stopped dead in his tracks and almost tumped over backwards.

While walking, he had accidentally let the feet of his closed tripod, on his back, slip into one of the pens, and a pig as wild as the Tasmanian Devil cartoon had clamped down on one of them and was trying his damnedest to eat the thing.

The critter was makin’ dents in it. The farmer hauled off and jackslapped the thing to get it to let go. Made me think of my bent steel-toed boot back in high school. Made me realize that corporate “farming” ain’t “farming” as I know it.

Not that I’m against corporate agriculture. We all do have to eat. Just realize that pig barns like the one in North Carolina – and the ones in the Oklahoma Panhandle – really are factories, not farms.

Not that any of the above has a thing to do with the taste of the sausage me and Dr. ER just had for breakfast. It beats Soylent Green – but the fact that Soylent Green (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/) even came to mind says something, doesn’t it?

END