Pigs

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Pigs

To be a Farm Hand Trainee is a bit like being an inmate of the Death Corridor, except that this corridor had two openings, one towards the manure tip and one through the glass ceiling towards the paradise of the ballpoint men.

We would wake quite late, sometimes as late as 6 hours, but many positions required that we should get out of bed before 5 o'clock.

We had really two political schools; One was of the opinion that if you had had a good late evening with a girl, it was really useless to try and get into another bed a 3 o'clock just to wake up again at 5 o'clock, feeling as if some of your friends, animated by a great spirit of fun and jokes, had filled your mouth with all the pig manure of the year.

Up we were, again we had two philosophical schools that would carry their opinion until their death. One school was of the opinion that the dirtier your working cloths were, the better they would stand up by their own strength and the better they would fit your forms.; as to those that pretended that your working clothes had a pungency which would guaranty that only a self suicide minded mite would attack it you pointed out all the benefits you had in the stables and in the pig house as the animals would welcome you as the long lost cousin who had travelled to America.

The other school was very posh, they would change cloths every week even if they were not dirty, they would even use black patches on the black rubber boot, whilst us the lower ranks, we considered that anything that would fill the hole in the boot was welcome.

Getting up I was to discover later on in life that we had much in common with cats and dogs, our back brain clearly ordered us to fill as much food as we could into our belly.

Knowing that these texts may be seen by people younger than 50 and older than 55, I will refrain from detailing the content of a breakfasts; let us agree that the fast did not have much of a chance against us. We would be twenty workers sitting in the dining room surrounded by ten fair maiden who were there to satisfy our needs, and you dirty minded reader should not immediately jump to conclusion, try working a full day (12 hours) with a spade and tons of shit to shovel and try to do the gentlemanly thing thereafter!

I did three farms as a midshipman before entering the Agricultural College.

The first farm considered us midshipmen as cannon fodder. Any job that was boring, meaningles, that was ours.

I preferred the job at the pig houses. You would have at least two houses, one for the sows going to give birth or just having given birth and one house for the young gentlemen who were putting on weight under our watchful eye, little did they know what would happen when they reached the fatidic mark of 90 kg

You may think that you have not worked with pigs and that you will never work with pigs. You are wrong! Pigs are the successful branch of the Dog family. Any pig would put a dog to shame in an intelligence test. Any pig would put a dog to shame in a courage test.

Let me open a parenthesis. Having seen the courage, maturity, courage of pigs and see what in the end happens to pigs, (should I close the parenthesis? Anyway, I leave one here which you can use as you see fit ) ], I feel that their could be some truth in the theory that we humans are being brought up to become the food of some being that thinks that He is superior to us.

So I was learning to tend the pigs. Tending pigs is mostly a matter or carrying barrows after barrow of pig manure, pushing up a slippery plank and having reached the top, tilting it sideways. The reader may realize that during winter time, pushing a wheel barrow full of pig manure up a slippery frozen plank would be a rather demanding performance, but it did not matter very much if the experience ended in wheel barrow, pig manure and trainee finding themselves mixed up at the bottom of the manure heap. For those of you interested in advanced physics, may I recommended a study as to why the wheel barrow always ended up on top of the trainee, the manure around the trainee, making us look as some kind of newly invented sandwich? The boss was very kind, so long as the wheel barrow was not damaged; he just demanded that we work overtime half an hour to compensate for the lost time.

Most bosses also have a religious respect for planks. If the planks had been long enough for a 10 meter pig hill, they would still be long enough for a 20 meter pig hill, meaning that we had to slosh our way the last ten meters against's a tidewall of pig shit.

Pigs are animals that have one interest in life <<food!>>.

Sows have one interest in life, creating a Home, they will deeply resent your climbing over the fence to scrap the floor, they would loudly express their dissent and occasionally they would have a grab at you, if you have seen the length of the teeth of a sow, you tend to try to keep at a respectable distance.

There were two tricks; you could fill the manger of the sow with attractive freshly grounded flour and torn between the desire to dissemble you and the desire toad a few calories to her, she would usually prefer the food.

As a precaution, you would always keep the shit scraper between yourself and the sow.

Later we were to learn that sows were no different from other females, if you bothered to learn their sensitive spot and would be willing to spend half an hour scratching them around their sensitivity spot, they would become your best friend. When you arrived in the morning they would welcome you and demand a bit of scratching.

Sows were not there just to be one of the Jet Set, they were more like the Harem of the Sultan. When the time was right the Boars who were lodged in a five star hotel 100 hundred meters away from the sows, would know and so far to the best of my knowledge no human as invented an obstacle that will prevent a boar to present to a sow his most respectful homage.

So in the morning we would find that the door of the barn hade been dismantled as if the Special Intervention Teams has been breaking in into a narcotics factory. To get to the sows paradise the boars would have had to overcome rolls and rolls of barbed wire, lines and lines of stocks buried and joined, they just laughed at it.

Then they would jump into the sow pen (does a boar really jump over a 2 yard barrier?) and would then produce some suggestions to the sow as to some new entertaining games he had thought about.

Sows are rather peculiar animals; they did not really reject the advances of the boars, at least so long as it would not interfere with their morning meal.

Nature has not really produced one of its major pieces of anatomy when it created the genital organs of the board. Its penis, for reasons nobody has really bothered to explore has the form of a corkscrew, and as all of you know, while most of the time a corkscrew is most adaptable to getting a cork out of a bottle of claret, it does happen that the corkscrew gets stuck and you can neither get in or out. At that stage we were supposed to intervene. Let me, allow me please, to shed a cloak of ignorance as to what went on thereafter.

At least as a trainee, it was felt that I could be entrusted with leading the boar back to his enclosure; It sounds rather easy, but I have you ever tried to convince Yves Montant to leave the room or Norma Jean Baker? As a result the boar would suddenly decide that a morning canter was really the stuff that would set his blood running and we would have a morning jogging session, all trainees running behind the boar and when the Pig Master <whistled>> we all had to stop in our tracks as it is well known that a pig or a boar has only two sweat glands and that if he runs more than 5 minutes he dies of cardiac arrest. Regretfully the boar had not read that section of the physiology of pigs and boars.

Incidentally, I must mention to readers who are not familiar with country side and the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury that getting near the boar and kicking it as hard as you can in the back, it considered as an offence against the rules. Further I can ad my own experience, if you tried to kick the boar in the back on a slippery ground with slippery boots you are likely to hurt your toes, and fall back most likely on pig shit. Definitively not advisable.

At this stage we were half way in the story. The sow, with a bit of luck would be pregnant. They would be pregnant for 3 months, three weeks, three days; Which we were supposed to remember.

On the day the sow was due, she did not appear to any different from the other days, complaining that her food ration was really miserable;

So you kept and eye on her and by 6 p.m you closed the door, when to the common room to have a shower, changed into civilian clothes, had a loving look at the different bottles of aquavit you hade managed to keep from last Saturday, reclined in you bed with an very instructive copy of Play-Boy and knock-knock on your door, you were informed by your grinning mates that she had started to deliver.

Again two schools of thoughts; you went back into the pig sty clothes (try to do that without vomiting) or you went with a pair of clean tops and bottom.

You would sit next to the sow from 11p.m; to 3 a.m. Sure, I joke about it, but which decent man cannot joke when he is the witness of a miracle. You would sit by the sow, the pigs would come out every half hour, they would try to stray on their legs which was of course an impossible feat as the back legs are twice as long as the front leg. Something was urging them towards the nipples; how they knew, how they could do it, this is the miracle. They were less than accurate in their aim, some would end in the nose of the sow, some would wander to obscure corners of the box, but with a little bit of patience you managed to line all the piglets to a nipple. So you were very proud of yourself until suddenly number 14 at the end of the line decided that the milk at nipple number one smelled much better and off he would go, walking all over the the piglets who would loose their grip, and he would dislodge the piglet at niple one and get it for himself. So you had to rearrange the whole array, hoping that you would not have another piglet with a creative spirit. Still you were thanking fate when the number of piglets was inferior to the number of tits; what do you do when you have 16 piglets and twelve tits, which is these days what happened most. And what about the piglet who had totally lost the information lecture about what a piglet should do when emerging from mother?

And there you were sitting, knowing that suddenly the sow would get fed up of this exercise, would rise, crushing two or three piglets during this exercise, walk over to her feeding place, get herself a meal and lie down contented, crushing another two or three piglets.

Pigs would grow in size, continue to get crushed every time the sow would lie down. This is how you ended up in the sixties with farmers and technicians inventing iron cages so constructed that the sows could not move, it was like the medieval torture instruments you can visit in infamous Castles, which does not apparently deter you from eating pork.

We would remain with 8 to 10 piglets per sow, then it was time to regroup them. Putting together two groups of piglets is not very difficult the first time, they are so interested by these companions that they do not fight. The difficulties increase as the pigs grow in size and begin to have in their heads ideas about their own importance; putting together two groups meant that the two ring leaders would be facing one another and fight. Carried by the sporting spirit the other pigs would also start fighting. For some reason, biting off the adversary's tail appears to get you a lot of points.

To prevent these fights we would cover the new pig pen with layers and layers of straw, the pigs would be so occupied rearranging the straw that they had little time for one another. We would also normally hang a long chain from the roof into the box, the pigs were mystified by this Extraordinary apparition from Space and would devote a lot of energy to biting it. Then without noticing it they got used to one another, they established in some kind of peaceful agreement the ranking order at the feeding trough and peace would continue until next regrouping; Possibly one word of warning, when the pigs are lined up at the trough in order of importance, do not have much hopes for the last one in the line, he is usually so dominated that he will not even dare eat and he usually dies.

A pig house is warm, moist, full of grain and flour here and there, it seems to have been constructed by an architect who had been given as commission to construct a paradise for rats.

May I at that point respectfully request my younger readers (less than 50) and my emotional readers (more than 50) to refrain from continuing? Should you see a woman trying to sneak a look into following paragraphs, I do not have to tell you what you should do.

As pig boys, rats were not much of a nuisance. We had a kind of gentlemanly agreement, they would keep out of our view during working hours, they would take over paradise after the extinction of the lights. We mostly noticed them when we were on duty during the time the sow was laying down her piglets. They were also annoying not that they ate much, but they had that disastrous habit of spoiling so much. The boss was not happy.

So one evening, when we felt that this world was really not fit for human consumption, we would, two or three of us, install us in the pig house, we would bring sacks and make fake wall holes with the sacks, we would sit on the edge of the boxes, refreshing our spirits with beverages sold by the Swedish Spirit Monopoly, and when we had something like two hundred rats crawling all over the floor, we would jump into the fray and break as many rat skulls as possible. Is it due to the decreasing quality of the spirit sold by the Swedish Government, is it due to the skills of the rats, it certainly could not be attributed to a lack of precision in our ambitious swings with the bats or our difficulty or deciding which of the left or right rat we were going to hit, usually the results were meagre. But we had ascertained that we were the Kings of the Pig Universe. During all that commotion the pigs usually felt that they were not concerned and went on sleeping.

I can see a kind of doubt in the eyes of some readers, how could be acquire Spirit from the Generous Swedish Government when we were obviously under age?

In our group there was one trainee who even if he had shaved three times a day would have looked unshaven. He would take our orders, take his motorcycle and run to the Spirit Store, next town which happened to be 500 meters from our farm but on the other side of the lake, which meant 10 kilometres. When he came back, the poor motorcycle was so overloaded with liquors that it could barely make the last climb to the farm.

As from Friday evening, after the meal, after having cleaned up, after having lit some candles, we would sit in our rooms and compensate for the moisture that had evaporated during the day. Being of a very social mind, we would wonder what the group in next room was doing, and so as to be welcome, we would take our bottles and go into next room and sample their choices while they samples our choices. There were twenty rooms in the lodgings.

Most of us would be working Saturday morning, but by that time we could still make out the shape of buildings and animals. Regularly the foreman at call up on Saturday morning felt obliged to remind us of some silly in-house rules that stated that we should not drink on the premises; this warning would possibly have had more effect if he had not been seen a couple of months ago stark naked holding a bottle and entertaining anybody willing to listen with old traditional Swedish songs which had all something in common, they all ended with the sentence” hop let us have another one!

Monday mornings were more difficult, any body whispering louder than a falling pin would gather murderous glare from his fellows. I cannot vouch on the bible that the rations fed to the cows, bulls, pigs on Monday mornings were exactly according to the ration books. It was already a major feat if the job assignment was to work at the bull house 5 kilometres away, to reach that building, the road following all kind of treacherous bends which we felt would be easier to negotiate by driving straight on.

But, having started with pigs, let us end with pigs. On day the lorry would come and the pigs leaded on board the lorry. I knew that pig breeding was nothing for me.

I also became interested how pigs (porc in french, gris in swedish) had influenced great artists.

This is what I found :

This one was greatly appreciated by my teenagers when I asked that they prepare a rat-port/rapport

This one had less success but the message is quite clear.

This one was executed in the 16th Century as a special order from King Louis XIV. You can still see it in the Versailles Palace.

There is a tradition in France of representing the President in all Official buildings. This is one of the projects considered;

The German Expressionist painters tried to research the deep mysteries of nature.

This one is so famous that even the most illiterate of my readers will be familiar with it.

When the Frank Porc Airport was inaugurated they had intended that a large mural would welcome the public. Due to the backwardness of the selection Committee, this masterpiece was not retained.

The French Committee for the fight against Air Pollution created by the road traffic had suggested this as the Center Piece of a marketing campaign. Regretfully the pig was run over by a lorry before the marketing started.

This and following art work was intended for a Swedish Effort to curb the abuse of alcoholic beverages.