FUTURE OF THE PIG.

Waikato Times, Volume 112, Issue 18803, 26 November 1932, Page 8

FUTURE OF THE PIG.

IMPROVED TREATMENT. BETTER HOUSING AND FEEDING. All lovers of animals, including most of those who have also a taste for their flesh, will be cheered by the news of the brighter future foretold for the sadly-maligned creature, the harmless, necessary and occasionally learned pig. From time immemorial man has been notoriously unfair to the four-footed friend who supplies his daily breakfast table with bacon and his sideboard with hams, to say nothing of providing him and his wife with bristles for their hair-brushes and the ohastisement of their children. Human beings have been so busy turning up their noses at his unwashed appearance—solely due to the squalid conditions in which, through man’s ingratitude and no fault of his own, he has been condemned to live—that they have omitted to pluok the stye out of their own eyes. Now this is all to be changed. They will no longer he able in moments of exasperation to oall their offspring dirty little pigs to their faces. Scientific research has demonstrated beyond a doubt, what has long been suspected by a few choice minds in advanoe of their age, that in his natural environment, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile, the pig, Though a Boast, Is a Clean Beast. He does not thrive as he should If kept up to his middle in muck. It may be true that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and it is proverbially unwise to buy a pig in a poke. But why try, and why he so foolish, when £y treating the pig population properly you oau make more money to put into your purse, poke, or pocket than you can possibly earn by keeping them in unsavoury and unwholesome pens that have made the name of pigsties a byword among the nations? There, for all who have eyes to see and noses to smell, lies the broad modern arterial, road to pig progress and profit. It is therefore a weloome sign of the tLmes to learn that in future “care is to be devoted to making pigs really warm and comfortable," on sound business lines. The ventilation, the heating (with wood or coal fires) and, best of all, the sanitary arrangements of their man-made quarters are to be improved and perfected, and they are to have dry and olean beds to sleep in. Owing to the popular belief that pigs rash enough to take to the water are apt to out their own throats, swimming pools will presumably, be ruled out But, short of this, with the abovementioned conveniences at their disposal, with a regular supply of the essential vitamins, and the prospect, till the time comes for big and little pigs to go to market, of a happy and comfortable family life, they will have the placid enjoyment of most of the best things that the heart of pig or man can desire Like many of the great reforms of history, the real object of the coming change is commercial rather than altruistic. Provision merchants have found that the British housewife shares the dislike for fat, at all events in her morning rasher, attributed by the poet to Jack Spratt, and will not buy it. Pigs, say the experts, should therefore be lean as well as clean, to a point well short of embonpoint. There is to be a Time Limit to their Meals. i To the pigs themselves this will no doubt seem a definite hardship. But they will not be so badly off after all. Little pigs . will be allowed five ten-minute meals a day and big pigs three of twenty minutes each. In neither case will they spend as much time over their food as human beings, so that the accusation of greediness like that of unoleanness, falls to the ground. By one of the wonderful provisions of Nature which makes the whole world kin they will actually gain by the restriction. If, it is stated, they have a trough of food always before them, they will first over-cat and then, after a short interval, wake up with indigestion and proceed to eat more food as the only available method of alleviating the pain—another striking parallel, as any human dyspeptic knows from bitter experience, between the pig kingdom and our own. It seems therefore certain that' the new order of pigsties will prove an all-round blessing. The public will get the kind of bacon that they like and will eat more of it; the farmers and merchants who make a living out of pig produots and their consumers will reap the benefit; and the pigs themselves, until they pass from this libellous world to browse on asphodel in the Elysian Fields, will find themselves in clover.—London Times.