Reflections on Pigs.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2955, 29 November 1900, Page 3

Reflections on Pigs.

(“ Tohunga ” in Auckland “Herald.”)

A Chinaman can criticise intelligently the stuff with which the European is clothed, but is no more a judge of the relative merits of Eurojiean physique than the average townsman is a judge of pigs, and most of us go to > .:•

some other reason than discrimiiia... j enthusiasm for animals. If horses had horns, they could be palm'ed off as cows to a very considerable minority. Then the townsman wonders what there is to see in a “shew,” and the countryman feels indignant 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. 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. 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; of countryman and townsman, of colonial and American and Britisher; and the skill of the breeders alone has kept it pre-eminent now that men are packed in the millioned cities and strewed 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 ever for the animal itself, and Man must work ceaselessly to force the animal into the unnatural road that suits him and prevent it from going bank. Compare a “ Captain Cooker ” with ‘he show pig! Hunt the wild pig in its forest home, anywhere in the world, "ud 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 Homer of the great boar.s that were killed for the great feasts, and take off your hat to the great Yorkshires and thick-set) Berkshires of today. At ten years old, you will recollect, the Homeric butchers 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 tenmonths’ Berkshire supplies the prime pigmeat of the world. Which means that without our breeding there would be no pork or bacon for the million. 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-cousins, we should be like rice-eating Chinamen, or, economically, no higher than the Maori. That primeval pig ! Every show should tether a specimen out in front of its pig nens and let the multitude see what the breeders have done and .what they have to work against—the 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 razor-back and elevated hind-quarters! Bristled as though in derision of all neatness and multicoloured 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 theft, and then they would only give bone and muscle. ■ and surprisingly little of that except with the years. 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 sal 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 —and every farmer is more or less a breeder —are continuing the process. For to the breeder, animal form is as clay in the hands of the artist. He is a Master indeed, a moulder of life—the benefactor of mankind, the Atlas who upholds the 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-broadening 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 the modern society, productive of incalculable good, giving 'to all who understand them the highest •md purest delight. and only not appreciated by many because, enclosed in caging cities, many' are shut off from direct conflict 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 chin stone into lav figures or to groun sounds Wo juxtaposition, is Art with a. hicr “A.” and that the universe knows no "ther. But if you come to think it outthe moulder of living forms, the colon) is* of living skins, the producer of new and worthy species, is not merely scientist, hut Artist, too. We are too apt to belittle the useful things-, and to extend our emotions ou the luxurious, and we take ueople at their own valuation when we unt expected to pay cash. But who would consciously compare the merits of ll’ 6 ,’]" 11 ' rotic and hysterical blower of a bubb e be it bonk, minting, or svmnhony. or statue. with the scientific, imagination. Die mental vision, the emotional nercention. the artistic execution, of the nuiet countryman who wrought out with flesh and blood onr prize pig?