The Whole Hog.

The Whole Hog 

Lyall Watson

Smithsonian Press

ISBN 1588342166 $24.95 261 pages

For those too young to remember, NBC's Tonight Show was not always MC'd by Jay Leno. Once there was Johnny Carson. During his thirty-year stint as host, Carson and sidekick Ed McMahon sustained a casual joking disagreement on the subject of animal intelligence. At the time, McMahon was the paid spokesman for Anheuser-Busch (think beer wagon drawn by a team of magnificent Clydesdales) so his insistence that horses are smarter was understandable. Carson, who maintained that pigs possessed more brainpower, once brought an exchange to a quick close with, "Yeah, did you ever see a pig run back into a burning barn?"

Now we have it on good authority that Carson was correct. We might like to believe the graceful, noble steed is cleverer than a creature we have come to associate with gluttony, mud and all manner of "lesser" barnyard functions, (none of which seem to bother us when we are ordering breakfast) but naturalist Lyall Watson tells us otherwise. We also learn that there are a good many varieties of pig other than the one we've become accustomed to seeing on our plates.

Hogs may look like an improbable subject unless one is familiar with the broad spectrum of topics covered in this author's previous writings. Watson has given us an in-depth look at the wind ("Heaven's Breath" 1984), a discourse on Japanese wrestling ("Sumo" 1988), and has dealt with the interplay between morality and biology ("Dark Nature" 1996.) This, like all his other books, has its own unique structure, one designed specifically to support the subject matter.

It would appear that people/ pig history is solidly intertwined. Our evolutions may have even paralleled one another during the last several million years. Pigs were finally domesticated sometime around 9000 BC and Watson lists a number of reasons why this was an advantageous arrangement. Pigs are omnivorous, capable of foraging on their own but they also happily recycle kitchen and field-waste. "Pig behavior is far more like ours ... (they) enjoy company, even that of other species ... (and) are easily trained to come and go ..." The benefits of this relationship are tilted decidedly in favor of humanity, there being are no recorded instances of pigs indulging in a person roast.

Not only have they provided food--possibly as far back as the late Stone Age--but there have been fiscal advantages as well. During the emergence of Amerrica as a country, pig reproductive proficiency and the ease with which they could be raised saved many a settler from financial ruin, thus nudging the nation towards prosperity. The growth of Mid-America in general and the city of Chicago in particular--you may recall Carl Sandburg's phrase "hog-butcher to the world"--was fostered by the corn-fed pig industry.

And if all that were not enough, there is the matter of medical technology. Due to the similarities between their circulatory systems, human organ transplants have been facilitated by knowledge garnered through pig experiments. Because they develop many of the same illnesses we do, treatments can be tested on them for a look at how people might respond. "There is hardly any medical discipline that is not already benefiting from studies on specially bred pigs that can cram a generation into a single year, providing answers to the use of new drugs and procedures that would take 20 years to assess in human subjects," writes Dr. Watson.

There is much here to make the reader smile. For all the seriousness of his arguments, one gets the impression Watson has a great deal of fun writing. If there is a middle ground between the author's assurance that "this is not a textbook" and general informative entertainment, then Lyall Watson has staked it out. He makes a convincing case in favor of reassessing something we have grown so used to, we have ceased to see or even value it. That pigs are long-used, unappreciated, intelligent organisms should cause us to speculate on the depths of human callousness. Our large brains aren't the only things that conveyed us to this point in our development; we had help from an array of sources beyond ourselves.

In a society noted for cherishing the under'dog', the pig is long overdue for its turn in the limelight.