Pigs and Piggies A Diatribe of Sorts on Killing Hogs Copyright 1994 by Dave Laird Hello Everyone! It is time once again for another informative piece of journalism in which I go bezerk and attempt to show you the things which you thought you understood but never really knew. Of course, with new knowledge comes new fear, or at least that seems to be the way it works with politicians just before election. Nowhere else can you hope to find more surprising information that is totally useless to anyone except a bra salesman than at a pig slaughterhouse. Most people who have seen one of these technologically-correct butchering plants refuse to ever eat ham, or any other meat for that matter, again. Some of them retreat to the top of a mountain and begin a lifelong study under the greedy fingers of Rubba Doo Dah, the perfectly-enlightened Indian mystic, who takes these traumatized members of society for everything they're worth. Others sit down and write their memoirs and eat wild greens that they grow in the cat box behind the back door. Who could forget the first time they contemplated a slightly-startled look of origastic bliss on a porcine porker as it idly window-shops for corn nuggets as it strolls down the final chute in a packing house? With large limpid eyes, with pretty eyelashes, and the cutest pucker on its lips that could be found this side of the latest Playmate, a piggie in the slaughterhouse looks for all the world as mindlessly sated as the house-spouses shopping the aisles of the mall, looking for bargains. Unlike the house-fraus, however, Porkie or Porkette always find bargains left behind by the landlord, in the form of large succulent apples or ears of corn, thoughtfully left to entice them further down the slaughter chute. No ballarina ever stood so delicately or so sweetly as the patter of little piggie feet as they indelibly cross from the squeeze chute to the escalator and the squeeze chute, that final avenue of deliverance, swings quietly shut behind them, blocking all hopes of escape. By the time that the scarce glimmer of swine logic tells them that their hams have been hocked, Porky or Porkette, are too busy blissfully masticating away on the goodies to bother with logic, swine or otherwise. Thus it is, in a final moment of near-sexual rhapsody, with hog heaven glimmering visibly on the horizon, a pair of electrodes intrude upon this final moment of enchantment, are clamped to Swinette's head and introduce a five gigawatt jolt across the brain of the piggy in paradise. Piggie is no more. While the soul of the piggy transports itself to where grain always grows and there is nothing to do but eat, sleep and copulate, while the svelte hooves of porkette dance a exquisite tap dance in repose, the escalator begins moving the once febrile carcass on down the line where tired men and women await with bloody aprons, sharpened knives and bone saws to do their best. In less time than it would take for a normally adept piggy to click their hooves together and repeat, "I wanna go home. I wanna go home..." three times, they are already halfway to gracing the dinner table. Now you may think that this elegy to porcine clairvoyance has some deeply-hidden meaning and that awards will be granted to the first one who guesses the correct answer. Of course, on the other hand, you could be wrong. However, in 1994, history records that a hideous murderer, a man who by his own admission, tortured and killed several innocent people as easily as the slaughering house tricks the little piggies into dying, was sentenced to death by hanging. However, because he had a very expensive lawyer and weighed more than 400 pounds, he got off. It seems that the court determined after a sufficiently long coffee break that hanging such a heavy man would fall under the guidelines of "cruel and unusual punishment", as defined in the law. Furthermore, because no one in the legal system could devise a method of killing such a huge, flabby wasteland of a man, they set him free. They never asked any of his victims what they thought of the courts' largesse. More important, none of them went out into the streets to see what the general public thought of setting such a gruesome man free. Most important of all, none of them had witnessed how pigs die. The only difference between killing a piggie bound to market and killing a piggie who desperately cried out to be killed by slaughtering other humans is in the final weapons that are used. Substitute caramels, chocolate truffles and large gooey bon bons for the apples and ears of corn and increase the voltage to 10 gigawatts. That's about the only difference. Dave * Origin: The Phoenix Echo/Used Kharma Lot Spokane WA (509)747-6207 * (1:346/11)