REFLECTIONS ON PIGS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11538, 24 November 1900, Page 1 (Supplement)

REFLECTIONS ON PIGS.

[by tohtjnga.]

All Chinamen seem more or less alike to us outer barbarians. It may help us to subdue our pride of individuality to know that all outer barbarians seem more or less alike to the Celestials. The features #nd textures which compose for us the symphony of the Beautiful are blurred and roughened to them by the mask of the white skin. To them our most perfect and our most imperfect types have so much in common that they miss the incidents of difference. A Chinaman can criticise intelligently the stuff with which the European is clothed, but is no more a judge of the relative merits of European physique than the average townsman is a judge of pigs. Frankly, most of us go to agricultural shows for some other reason than discriminating enthusiasm for animals. If horses had horns, they could be palmed off as cows to a very considerable minority. The men who doesn't know always looks upon the knowledge of him who does as something remarkable, and even uncanny, forgetting that the surroundings and vocations of our lives always give to our wits the requisite set and edge. The countryman will watch his town-bred cousin chasing the wrong horse, while the right one stands waiting at the slip-rails, with a feeling of superiority delicious to possess. And the townsman will watch bis country cousin searching hopelessly in the wrong street, and. passing sadly by the house he has slept in half a dozen times, with the gratifying consciousness that country air may make you . grow, but doesn't take the hay-seed from your eyes. Then the townsman wonders what there is to see in a " show," and the countryman feels indigmint at the crowds that ignore a pet exhibit, that would agitate the Waikato from the source to the sea. Yet it is all a matter of education and opportunity. You can no more appreciate a pig without years of sympathetic observation than you can one of Beethoven's Sonatas. Men still talk in a Southern horsebreeding district of a big flood-year, when the fences went down, or had to be cut, and the stock of one famous station got irretrievably and hopelessly mixed, so much so that a number of foals were sold unnamed and unrecognised the next year. Seven years later we were skirting that station, bound down the river, and stopped for tea—what else could it be but teaat a hotel that bore its name. Coming out, we found on the verandah one of the station boundary-riders, a young fellow of 25 or so. He "was sizing "up one of our mounts, a splendid six-year-old mare, blind of one eye. " That's one of ours, if she's hasn't our brand," he asserted, suspiciously. "How's that?" inquired its owner, provocatively. , " How's that! Why, she's got our points all over her. I'll bet that she's out of old So-and-so, and that old What's-his-name that died, sired her. But there's something queer in her breeding, too," he added, doubtfully. And when he heard that he had named her mother and her grandsire, who was also her presumptive sire, and that she dated from the historic year— his time— when everything got mixed, the boundaryrider looked happy again. "She puzzled me a bit," he admitted. " And I reckon I know a horse. I suppose that accounts for the eye." You will see, perhaps, that to that boundary-rider there were as many fine distinctions and as infinite a number of variations in horseflesh as there are in the fashions to a society belle. That man and his mates may be ignorant of sonatas, but neither they nor their sweethearts dismiss a well-bred horse with the conventional "how nice."

Which story reminds one of how Darwin tells of wandering among the Scottish hills, and finally, having left his watch at home, inquiring of a barefooted shepherd lad the time o' day. " Canna' ye see, mon V" queried the urchin, staring amazed. " What has that got to do with it '!" retorted the great scientist. " nn:i ' ye see by l ' ie sup that it's nearly four ''." was the crushing explanation, which led the keen philosopher to bethink him that the barbarian life, by its very absence of artificial aids, may encourage and foster a power of observation which civilisation only diverts to other channels, that with all our knowledge the intellectual activity may be no greater.

And returning to our —for cows and horses, as the aristocrats of agriculture, always have many diletante admirers—it is only those who have grown to know them who can pass an hour pleasantly and intellectually in absorbing visually the physical development of a single highly-bred swine. The townsman cannot be expected to do anything of the sort, for, rightly understood, Agriculture, with its dependent handmaids, is among the deepest of the Sciences and the most wonderful of the Arts. The uninitiated can only admire and pass by. You could no more expect a novice to paint a landscape in Impressionist fashion, or to understand a Turner, than you could expect a novice to mould flesh and blood as do the skilled breeders, or to understand the meaning of this sleeping porker. For no man or woman, however capable, can do more than admire anything of which they do not appreciate the work behind. The savage can believe in and tremble before the Superior Power whose manifestations appal him, but only the cultured man can recognise the Absolute and Supreme. So in all things, in small as in great, until you begin to understand what has been done you cannot be really interested because you cannot appreciate. Let us consider our pig and its meaning, not all its meaning, indeed, but a little of what it says to the inarticulate countryman who understands it! There it lies, rounded like a barrel, flat of face, small of ear, short of leg and shorter still of neck, with vast hams merging into belly and flitch, smoothhaired and single-coloured—or, at most, slightly touched with an alien brush—and without a ripple to indicate the backbone whereon the whole living structure has been built. Its age is counted in months, but you may almost count its weight in hundredweights. It is a dull, inert mass, to be sure, but a pig is not a lapdog for fine ladies to play with; it is one of the great foods of the Gentile world, the food of rich and poor, oi countryman and townsman, of colonial and American and Britisher; and the skill of the breeders alone has kept it pie-eminent now that men are packed in the millioned cities and strewn broadcast over the furthest parts of the earth. To understand the pig you must know the original "sus" from which it came, and to which it ever tends to return, for Nature breeds even for the animal itself, and Man must work ceaselessly to force the animal into the unnatural road that suits him and to prevent it from going back. Compare a "Captain Cooker" with the show pig! Hunt the.wild pig in its forest home, anywhere in the world, and then think of what the breeder has done ! Think of the strange herds that Wamba guarded in the oak woods of Saxon England! Read in your Homei of the great boars that were killed for the great feasts, and take off your hat to the great Yorkshires and thick-set Berkshires of to-day! At ten year* old you will recollect, the Homeric butcher? thought a beast fit to figure at table, nor were they far out, as you would realise if you had watched and wondered at the slow and weary growth of unbred pigs. Whereas, now, a ten-months' Yorkshire" can be got to a weight to wonder at, and a common ten-months' Berkshire supplies the prime pig-meat of the world. Which means that without our breeding there would be no pork or bacon for the million. Anarchists would refer to the "diamondwearing, pig-eating classes " with all the venom of envy. That rotund, inert mass is one of the things that makes civilisation possible. Without it, and without the kine and the horse and the sheep, its bred-cou-sins, we should be like rice-eating Chinamen or, economically, no higher than the Maori.

! That primeval pig! Every show should 1 tether a specimen out in front of its pigpens and let the multitude see what the breeders have done and what they have to work against— inherent tendency of these seemingly-indifferent exhibits. Huge head and gigantic snout and elephantine ears! Long of legs and. flat of side and lean of flank, with high razer-back and elevated hindquarters ! Bristled as though in derision of all neatness and multi-coloured even in age as a remnant of the zebra-like stripings of its infancy! Appetite insatiable and feeding resultless; husks or meal make little difference to the unbred pig. It would ruin a Tyson to try to fatten a mob of them, and then they would only give bone and muscle, and surprisingly little of that excepting with the years. From this original monster, whose only virtues were the tastiness of its flesh and the fecundity of its females, mankind gradually selected a milder and promising form—then came in Science, and the modern breeder did the rest. A greater than Frankenstein was he when he wrought out this animal shape, which grows meat for our modern market as a fertilised field grows corn. The richest of foods, the most unsparing attention, is the due of this scientific product, for it has been bred and bred until it responds to feeding as an organ does to the hand of the master. This fat barrel will not eat a quarter the quantity that its skeleton ancestor starved and stunted on. Its possession is among the things that make the civilised man prosperous and rich and secure of living. «- Go back to the wild pig and the wild horse and the wild cow and the wild sheep and these great cities of ours would melt away and our nation would be desolate! Let our agriculturists be slothful for but a generation, ignoring the breeding laws in savage fashion, and the grass would grow in Queen-street and foreign flags cease to flaunt in Waitemata! It has all been done so slowly and so patiently, this marvellous moulding of living things, that we rarely realise that year by year our breeders— every farmer is more or less a breederare adding to it, are paring away useless corners here, are adding folds of flesh there, are flattening, flattening, flattening the face and forcing the vital energy of the beasts to the perfecting of the barrel. The man who knows leans over the rail and watches a sleeping pig, comparing its points with those of other beasts photographed in his mind as fanciful costumes are in yours, fair lady. He goes away with a little theory planted in his brain, there to germinate and grow and fruit in action. Sometimes his little theory was wrong, but not alwaysnext year or the year after or ten years after the other men who know may gather round his exhibit and gaze raptured. For what is a void to the townsman is as plain to them as printed English in a book, and plainer. They see what has been done and understand how it was done, and go home themselves to think and think and think how to better it. For to the breeder, animal form is as stiff clay in the hands of the artist. He is a Master indeed, a moulder of life—the benefactor of mankind, the Atlas who upholds our world. For what is said of pigs, is true of all the domestic beasts by which we live, is true of the grains and fruits which we have brought into subjection, is true of all the ever-broad-ening and ever-increasing processes by which we bend to human use "the mysterious Life of the organic world. These agricultural shows are among the most influential functions of society, productive of incalculable good, giving to all who understand them the highest and purest delight, and only not appreciated by any because, enclosed in caging cities, many are shut off from direct contact with the arts and sciences by which all men live. There is a big amount of nonsense talked of Art, you know. The little clique that does the "talking would persuade us that to daub paints on canvas or to chip stone into lay figures or to group sounds into fascinating juxtaposition is Art with a big "A," and that the universe knows no other. But if you come to think it out the moulder, oil living forms', the colourist of living skins, the producer of new and worthy species is not merely scientist, but Artist, too. We are too apt to belittle the useful things and to expend our emotions on the luxurious, and we take people at their own valuation when we arc not expected to pay cash. But who would consciously compare the merits of the neurotic and hysterical blower of a bubble— be it book or painting, or symphony or —with the scientific imagination, the mental vision, the emotional perception, the artistic execution, of the quiet countryman who wrought out with flesh and blood our prize pig? _____««