In his essay 'Death of a Pig', E. B. White tells the story of a pig who stole his heart. White writes that he had become accustomed, over the years, to buying a pig, feeding him, then slaughtering him for meat. He never questioned the practice. That all changed with a particular pig, who, one day, didn’t turn up for his regular feeding. Alarmed, and believing his pig to be sick, White tended to him like a parent would a child. His 'sympathies were now wholly with the pig'. White’s sudden affection for a pig he’d been planning, up until that point, to eat, might seem incongruous. But it reflects the ambivalence many human beings feel toward animals, and sheds light on why we hate to see them in pain. As White writes, the pig 'had suffered in a suffering world', and his experience became 'the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness'. He realized that 'what could be true of my pig could be true also of the rest of my tidy world'. After his 'Death of a Pig' essay, White wrote 'Charlotte’s Web', the cherished children’s book about Wilbur, a lovable young pig, and Charlotte, the spider who saves him from slaughter.
MAYA CHUNG: Over the past week or so, Moo Deng, a baby pygmy hippopotamus whose glistening skin, jaunty trot, and rippling neck rolls has won the internet’s devotion. A Washington Post article last week tried to explain the young calf’s popularity, citing scientific evidence for how the cuteness of animals “hijacks our brains,” similar to the way a baby’s adorable features “strike at people’s ingrained nurturing instinct” — an evolutionary advantage that has helped humans survive. But human attitudes toward other creatures are far more complicated than the latest internet frenzy would suggest. On the one hand, human affection for animals, which often manifests in their anthropomorphization, is well documented… On the other hand, many people still believe that other species are lesser beings — to be kept in zoos or in homes as pets, to be eaten, to test drugs on…
Nearly 30 years earlier, The Atlantic published “Death of a Pig,” an essay by E. B. White in which he tells the story of a pig who stole his heart. White writes that he had become accustomed, over the years, to buying a pig in the spring, feeding it over the summer and fall, then slaughtering it for meat in the winter. He never questioned the practice, believing the killing to be “quick and skillful,” while the “smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.”
That all changed with a particular pig, who, one day, didn’t turn up for his regular feeding. Alarmed, and believing his pig to be sick… White tended to him like a parent would a child — checking his ears for temperature, attempting to entice him with milk. Nothing seemed to work, and White’s mood declined precipitously; his “sympathies were now wholly with the pig.”
White’s sudden affection for a pig he’d been planning, up until that point, to eat, might seem incongruous. But it reflects the ambivalence many human beings feel toward animals, and sheds light on why we hate to see them in pain. As White writes, the pig “had suffered in a suffering world,” and his experience became “the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness.” He realized that “what could be true of my pig could be true also of the rest of my tidy world.”
Ultimately, these questions get to the heart of how humans perceive themselves. Are we, as the Bible suggests, the pinnacle of all God’s creation? What, really, distinguishes us from all of Earth’s other creatures? In a review of two books on the discovery of dinosaurs that we published this summer, Brenda Wineapple reflects on how the finding of the first fossil challenged the privileged place that humans believed they occupied in the grand scheme of life. Though evolution is now largely accepted as fact, it’s undeniable that humans still see themselves as the top of the pyramid: We still eat animals, and we still test our drugs on them.
In 1989, Steven Zak wrote about animal-rights activists who were trying to make people contend with the question of “whether animals, who are known to have feelings and psychological lives, ought to be treated as mere instruments of science.” In his essay, Zak asked the reader to consider a world where humans were prohibited from the use of “any animals to their detriment.” He mentions a 1988 study that found that scientists could, through the use of “current and prospective alternative techniques,” effectively use fewer animals in labs. Though progress has been made in the intervening years, a world free of animal testing has not come to pass. That would require an immense shift in worldview, wherein, as Zak writes, “instead of imagining that we have a divine mandate to dominate and make use of everything else in the universe, we could have a sense of belonging to the world and of kinship with the other creatures in it”…
Four years after his “Death of a Pig” essay, he wrote Charlotte’s Web, the cherished children’s book about Wilbur, a lovable young pig, and Charlotte, the spider who saves him from slaughter. Near the end of the book, as autumn approaches, Charlotte tells Wilbur, “the leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world” — one that White’s pig never got the chance to see. SOURCE…
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