Magnificent Beast

They're dangerous, they're evil, and they are very destructive, and I have no use for them, and they just something has to be done to stop them. They're like the devil. (music) -

Tess

The first place most of us encounter a pig is on our dinner plates. Or, in a children's tale. That'll do pig. (violin music) That'll do.

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Tess

But there's far more to pigs than fairy tales and barbecue. We have killed them. And we've been killed by them. Some of us feast on their meat.

Others shun that meat and forbid it. We have revered the pig. And we have despised it. No other animal has had such a paradoxical relationship with us.

This is my buddy, Ziggy. Juliana pig, five and a half years-old, and he's my buddy. They wanna cuddle. He's, like, look at this guy.

He could do this all day long. He's a lover. He's definitely a lover. I have always loved pigs since I was a little girl.

I was one of those where everybody else liked the Disney princesses, I loved Piglet, I loved, you know, "Charlotte's Web". (music) I know the love of a dog, I know the affection of a dog, pigs take it to a whole nother level. They've got a place in my heart that I didn't really even know existed. Ziggy is full-grown, he is almost six years-old, and he is 175-ish, because I have not been able to get him on a scale in a while.

And Zoe will be four in November and she is about 75 pounds and full-grown. My little Zoe was flown in from Michigan, via Delta, because Delta's the only way pigs fly (laughs). You never know how smart or how compassionate they are. You never rationalize that.

I think, just as, if you're a pet owner, then you would appreciate a pig because they're definitely smarter than the dogs, most definitely, and they're way more passionate, and compassionate to you. Pigs have 29 different inflections that they make. Different sounds for different reasons, and you can tell when they're happy, when they're sad, when they're upset. Sometimes they'll come out when they're looking for you, and it actually sounds like they're calling Mom or Dad.

You can teach them anything. They love to cuddle. If you love a cuddle buddy on the couch, he's your man, right here, buddy. So, if you love giving belly rubs, he's it.

(music) Things that we would recognize as pigs I don't know, I'm not a paleontologist, but about a million years ago, in Southeast Asia is the best guess, and they spread across from that direction, heading up towards the north-west. So, within the last million years or something like that. So when they start, kind of, being around and modern humans are interested in them, 20-30,000 years ago, there are pig populations, wild boar populations, I should say, all across the old world. (music) Pigs were domesticated repeatedly.

The genetics of pigs show us that everybody domesticated pigs. For archeologists, a key way that we see domestication is when animals go from being wild to being genetically domesticated, they get smaller. In pigs, what people look at in particular, is the size of the teeth, and most commonly, the third molar, which is pig wisdom teeth. And they measure the length and the breadth of that.

And if you go to Southern Turkey, there's a site called Catalhoyuk in particular, where what you can see through time, if you graph the sizes, the breadth and the width of the third molar, is it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller through time. Hang on (laughs). Right, the provenance of the wild boar is limited. I bought him in a local antique shop here in Durham.

The antique shop owner had no idea of his background. He'd come in a job-lot, house sale, and I watched him in the window for months, and the price was gradually coming down and down, as nobody wanted to buy him, and in the end, I thought, and I wandered in and I said, "How much is it today?" And the owner said, "Oh, I'm gonna sell it to a man "from London who's coming up for it." I said, "I'll outbid him." And I did. And I got him. So I took him home in great pride, and my wife said, "Get him out of the house." (laughs) So he lives here in my office.

Look at these teeth. So these are worn down, but do you see how their teeth look like little mountain ranges? Those are the teeth of an omnivore. Pig teeth look a lot like ours because pigs have diets that are comparatively similar to ours, which is among other reasons why it's very easy to mistake a pig for a human tooth if you just come across one in a forensic context.

They can be spectacular. (music) -

Tess

Everyone, it seems, domesticated pigs. But how did ancient man do it? How do you turn a ferocious wild boar into the pet who sleeps in your bedroom? Pigs may have initiated the relationship on their own when they began to come into human settlements to feed on refuse and so on.

They have huge litters, large litters. They grow quickly. And they produce more meat, more quickly, than any other animal domesticate. In all animal domesticates, the primary selective focus in domestication is for reduction in reactivity to humans, a lowered degree of wariness, and flight reflex.

We see that most dramatically in an overall reduction in brain size. There seems to be, what's called, a domestication syndrome. There are whole series of behaviors that are more juvenile, more playfulness, less reactivity, more socialization that are more characteristic of juveniles. And then there are a really interesting series of other traits that seem a little more removed.

(pig snorting) Things like piebald coats. We see spotted coats coming up in domesticates, (pig snorts) curly tails, (pig squeals) lop ears which are related to changes in cartilage formation. (pig snorting) So there's this whole package. It's not in all domesticates, but it's fairly widely seen in domesticates.

The actual mechanism of domestication is one I've thought about a lot, and I have no good answers for, but I may have some bad answers. A lot of my colleagues would argue that you go from random hunting to intensive hunting to some kind of management of the wild stock, and then you get domestication out of the back of that. I never quite can see how that's supposed to work. So I'm actually going to implicate a sector of the human population in this, that is not usually involved in the domestic process.

I think little girls play a very important role. Hunter gatherers around the world, recently, today, will sporadically kill mother animals with little babies, so I think the little girls going, "Please, Daddy, "don't kill it, let's keep it." Could it be that, if you can get a little pig through weaning, and it's a pet, and then you've only gotta have two or three of those, and you have the basis, potentially, for a domestic population. And I think that's where it comes from. That would be my minds-eye scenario which I cannot remotely prove or disprove.

Want some bacon? No, man, I don't eat pork. Are you Jewish? No, I ain't Jewish, I just don't dig on swine, that's all.

Why not? Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals. The choice to eat pig or not eat pig is one of the earliest identifiable characteristics of the people who we now know as the Israelites, the ancestors of the Jews.

So, the practice of not eating pig would have marked an Israelite community as being different from a non-Israelite community from a very early day. (music) -

Tess

More than 2,000 years ago, the Israelites forbade the eating of pork, a taboo that is written in the "Old Testament". What are the origins of this taboo? Could it date back even further to ancient Egypt? 3,200 years ago, the existence of the Israelites is first mentioned in the Pharaoh Merneptah's Victory Stele.

Here it was written, "Israel is wasted and bare of seed." (crowd chatting) Pig now. No, no. I can't stand the name of the pig, it's disgusting. I hear lots of bad things about it.

I like dogs, cats, but pigs I'm not acquainted with, I've never seen one. Pigs? Ew (laughs). Why?

I don't like it because it eats trash. I don't like it. Okay, have you ever tried to eat it? No.

What do you think about people who eat it? I think it's wrong for our health. The pig was associated with the God Seth, who was a sort of disorderly, but very powerful and very important god in the Egyptian pantheon, but because he's associated with disorder, (music) you don't see the pig featured that frequently in Egyptian tomb art because, of course, you want order in your tomb and your afterlife. Pigs have always been problematic in Egypt and Egyptology and Egypt history.

For a long time, Egyptologists, in fact, even until the '70s and early '80s, said, "Oh, the ancient Egyptians "didn't eat pigs, there was no pig use here. "The pigs were the symbol, or related to Seth, "who was a bad God, and pigs just weren't eaten, "it's just not here." But then when archeologists actually started excavating where people lived, we found pigs in abundance. As far as we know, the ancient Egyptians ate pigs, so perhaps the Jews chose not to eat pigs to try and differentiate themselves from the Egyptians. Pigs become a secondary economy that functions within the overall economy.

There's the state economy, and then there's this, kind of, local subsistence based economy. A small family can raise a pig that can figure entirely outside of the urban economy, and giving those people, that others in the economy might like not to have much independence, a great deal more independence than they might otherwise have. It becomes a really interesting dynamic for these smart, useful animals where they become really subversive elements, they become part of the resistance of the man. (pig snorts) We have evidence of people eating pigs from the richest to the poorest, but in fact, it was more of a poor person's food, or a middle-class person's food, because of course, if you were the king, you can have cow whenever you want.

We don't really know what brought the pig taboo about, or how it, sort of, emerged from the mists of time, but certainly you can see that both the Jews and the Muslims still adhere to the pig taboo. The Torah is the foundational text of the Jewish community. The Torah contains two very similar lists about what the animals are that Israelites may or may not consume. It's organized in its own, kind of, logical categories.

So first, the Torah addresses quadrupeds, four-footed land animals. What are the characteristics of a permitted animal? What are the characteristics of a forbidden animal? After the land animals, it goes onto fish, and then to birds, and then to creepy-crawlies.

This was the way in which Israelites made sense of the animal world around them. And the Torah never says that Israelites can only eat cattle, sheep and goats, but it says that they should only eat animals that are similar to cattle, sheep and goats. Cattle, sheep and goats all have two noticeable characteristics. One, they all have split hoofs, and the other, they chew their cud.

Pigs aren't kosher, they have split hoofs, but they don't chew their cud. Pigs are an example of an animal that seems to straddle the line. -

Tess

Maybe we need to look at a species that doesn't straddle the line. Maybe an entirely different animal plays a part in our story. Chickens arrived at some point, and we're not sure yet. The chicken has a real advantage over the pig.

One, it's the only animal that's a more efficient producer of protein than the pig. Two, it produces a secondary product, the egg. (chicken clucking) Why did pork become taboo? Well, I'd like to give you a firm answer, but like with many things in science, I can't.

I can't see a central authority saying we're gonna give up pigs, but I can see a religious authority saying, we've decided that pig use is bad. Of course, it has to be at the point where people aren't really using pigs. I think the chicken made it possible. You could not have removed the pig from a subsistence system until you replaced it.

It was too important. Where do you think "Leviticus" came from? Why would they write that? I guess it was written about 500 BCE.

Yeah, it's about the time the chicken came in, in large numbers. I just let that go. (pig snorting) (chicken clucking) (pig squealing) (clucking continues) The theory that I find most compelling as to why a pork taboo might have originated, is an ecological theory. That pigs are not well-suited for the environment of the Judean Highlands, that if you start to bring more and more pigs into that environment, they're gonna make it much harder for shepherds and goatherds to graze their own flocks.

(sheep bleating) It's possible that communal norms emerged to keep pigs out to as to maintain the economic and ecological status quo. Who are those people? (pig snorting) Who are those people? Hi May, you wanna come say hello?

I'm not gonna chase you. You can't kiss her on the first date. No? It takes a little warm up.

You wanna come and smell me? You have a pig. I have a pig. And what's your pig's name?

Her name is May, it's short for Maybelline. This is Bash. Can you say hi, Bash? She was bought as a micro-mini pet for my neighbor's daughter, and the mother said no.

He said, "Could you feed what's in my stall?" So I said, "Yes". And it happened to be Maybelline. (gentle music) Bash fell in love with her instantly. The three of them, the dog, the cat and the pig, just became The Three Musketeers, who loved each other.

This is the hole that Bash digs for her. Hole, oh Bash? Bash dug her this hole so she can lay in it when she gets too hot. Oh.

I raised her, have been raising her as a pig, and not a dog or a cat, so she lives in the barn and sleeps in the barn. She has a quilt in here. This goes in here, if she gets too hot, and she'll pull it all in, like, I don't make her bed, she makes her bed. She has her sheepskin, she has a quilt.

If she gets too hot, she pushes this off, pulls the quilt up top, lays on top. If she's cold, she makes a little bed in this. She eats grass in the yard all day. She grazes, she doesn't root.

They're not meant to be laying on someone's couch eating concentrated pig food. To treat them like a dog or a cat is not fair because then they get kicked out and they're too loving and too smart for that. So when she was this big, I treated her like a pig a well-loved pig, but she can still be a pig for the rest of her life. If she's out of line and gets a little pushy, then you say no and she gets it.

Being honest with your animal, it's not trying to do what they're not supposed to do, like, wear little clothes. I make pig clothes for a living (giggles). I wanted to bring joy to people, and you really can't help but smile and laugh when you actually see a pig in a tuxedo, or a pig in a dress. I got my pig, Rosie, and I was, you know, looking on the internet and nobody really made pig clothes, and if they did, it was like their grandma made the clothes.

So I, kind of, took it upon myself to create my own patterns. It just, kind of, went from them because there's tons of people that have pigs, you know, a lot of people don't think about it but there are a lot of people in the United States that actually own mini-pigs as pets. And I just kept getting more and more orders. So which of these are Rosie's?

So, this is one of Rosie's. This is like her, you know, her pretty dressy-dressy-dress. And this was one for my website. I had a photo shoot, some of these she wore, and this was like a skirt she had.

This is beautiful. And then the collar with the, that matched. I would never have thought that my pig would have made my life be so much more with the clothing and making friends through the pig community, or customers through Snort Life. So Rosie has really, you know, added so much more to my life from having her as a pet.

I assumed she would stay tiny, so I just really wanted one because I just was like, it'd be so awesome to have a mini-pig, and you know, it'd only be 50 pounds and such, and now I have a 200-plus pound mini-pig. People treat their pets as their children, and I just kept, it was more people asking me to make the piece, where I just had a few things, and then someone would say, "Hey, I have a wedding, I want my pig in my wedding, "can you make a tuxedo?" Or, you know, "My pig is turning one, can you make "can you make a cupcake dress?" "Can you make me a leprechaun costume?" Or, "Can you make me a newsboy costume?" Or, a police costume. This is one of the jackets for one of my customers, I had to make this little hat, it has pearls like Mary Poppins, and then these are for my bow-tie collars. How many different species have you sewn clothes for?

Cats, bunnies, pigs, dogs, llamas. Sloth. That's predominantly, pretty much, the animals I've made for, so. Oh, a duck too, a duck.

A duck, okay. Do the pigs like getting dressed up? Or what? How do you get them into their clothes?

Even with Rosie I still have to throw down a bazillion Cheerios, I mean, she can get them gobbled up in minutes, so I have a ton and she gets irritated when I have to clip it on her neck and underneath at her girth, but once she has it on, she's good to go. Can you compare the intelligence between Rosie and Lola? (laughs) Poor Lola. Lola, I love you.

She's super-sweet. I mean, dogs are smart, but I'm sorry to all the dog owners out there, but pigs are way smarter. I mean, she just, even when it comes to, like, I'm a bad pig parent, Rosie only knows how to sit, but I have friends who, their pig, you know, can spin, play a piano. The dog is, like, unconditional.

You could beat your dog and the dog will still love you. A pig, uh uh, it remembers. So if you fed the pig from the table, and then the next day you sassed it or yelled at it for begging, the pig will get mad at you 'cause it remembers that you fed it and now you're telling it no, kind of a thing. So they're definitely more intelligent in that sense.

Do you eat pork? No, no. When I, you know, got Rosie, I became more cognizant of sentient beings, and there's a disconnect, I believe, between, you know, I have my dog and people will eat meat, and nothing against those people, like, I don't judge people, like, that eat meat and things like that. But I just can't do it.

(wind rustling) (crow cawing) We are a hog killing crew in Hunt County, and we were established in 2017, November I believe it was, Scott? It's about that, yeah. A lot of the local farmers, just from the talk of the town, going to gas stations and places, they have hay fields, crop fields, wheat fields, bean fields, corn fields, and we're hearing about all the damage they're getting hit with by the pigs, and so we just started, I started putting a few cards out, letting them know that we'd be willing to help. Usually what leads the pack is a mother sow, and over time she gets pretty smart to all different circumstances from traps, people trying to trap them, or shoot them, and about every 50-yards, 100-yards, they'll tend to stop, and she'll stop and freeze up, smell, she'll wind, she'll look and she'll listen, and all the pigs behind her will stop just like military, it's amazing to see it.

And when she proceeds on, they relax and follow. So they're real, they pay attention to the leader of the pack. And the leader of the pack is female? It is, yep.

It tends to be a sow, yep. Wild pigs were first introduced to the Americas by Spanish explorers in the 1500s. Pigs, being wily creatures, sometimes escaped, or they were released on purpose by those explorers who wanted a future food source. Almost everywhere, the hardy, and adaptable pig survived, and multiplied.

They've been pretty much around ever since that time. What are feral swine? They're sus scrofa. I mean European wild boar, domestic pigs, most pigs that are encountered are all the same genus and species, just sub-species that vary.

From my experience, they're probably all very opportunistic, they're all very smart and capable. So if you have a domestic swine that escapes, it can adapt to having similar behaviors as feral swine fairly rapidly. -

Tess

Another trait that persists from domestication is large and frequent litters. This is an evolutionary advantage in the wild, and it contributes to the rapid spread of feral swine. Back in the '50s, up through the '80s, feral swine existed primarily in the south. We believe in the early '80s they were only in 17 states.

Since that time, they have now spread to, at one point, we believe, at least 41 states. The absolute environmental limits to their range, we don't know. They get down with their noses and just start throwing the dirt, just start rutting, rutting the ground, and throwing the dirt up in the air. They can throw it 10 or 15-feet in the air, and they just wad up and make hog wallows.

And it looks like small grenades that went off in the ground. It's just holes everywhere. Here close to the house, there was a farmer that planted some corn. The corn didn't come up and I got out and looked and all the seed was gone.

And what had happened, those pigs have got in there, and went down those rows and picked out every piece of corn down through there over probably 20 or 25 acres. They just went straight down the rows and ate all the corn out so therefore, they had to replant it. How long did it take for those pigs to do that? I'm gonna say, at the longest, two or three days.

All you hear when you get them in pens are fighting and when you try to load them in a trailer they're fighting you and they're trying to eat through especially the boars with the long tusks trying to chew through the trailer. (intense music) (pig snorting) I got into trapping about four years ago I knew we had a pig problem, but I really didn't understand the scope of the problem. I sat down, started looking at all of the game cams that were used to monitor deer, and realized that when I started actually doing head counts, there was a lot more pigs here than I thought there was. I could individually identify over 100.

I worry about them coming too close to the house. And I worry about my granddaughters playing out, and then maybe walking between a boar or a mama pig and her babies, and something happening to them. It's not effective to try to hunt them here and control them. We're in thick woods, you're only gonna get maybe one or two shots, and then that's it.

What I needed was a corral trap and so I started off with a 30-foot diameter pen with a guillotine gate on it. It sits at the back of the property, it's a permanent trap and I monitor that trap with wifi electronics and some remote relays. It's on a wifi extended radio that's on a 30-foot pole which connects to my house. That's the internet relay controller.

This black box over here is a POE injector and a solar charger for the solar panel, and it's what runs the radio on top of the pole. And then there's a small router over here on the side. I've not had a pig get out of this trap yet. Two-by-four, they can't go through it.

It's too tall, they can't climb out. Usually there will be one pig that sits outside of the trap that's kind of a watcher, and they'll sit out there and, kind of, just see what's going on, and then after some period of time, they'll eventually give in. I mean that's the reason why I'm using live camera feeds is so I know what's there, who's in, who's out, and to kind of get a feel for when I can pull the trigger and shut the door. One of the reasons why corral traps are really the only effective method to trap them, is when a sounder comes in, if you don't have an ability to trap the entire group in one shot, the ones you don't trap figure it out and they will never go back in that trap again.

They may have a litter and come back to the trap and they'll sit outside of the trap and tell the other ones not to go in there. Forty years ago, we could go and play out in the woods. Twenty years ago, when I raised my own children out here, I could send them to the woods and say, "You guys go play. "Come back when it's dark." But my grandchildren, I wouldn't be able to do that.

I don't feel that they would be safe. -

Tess

Pigs terrify some people for good reason. They can be dangerous. But on this farm in England, it's a different story. (banging on bucket) (pigs snorting) -

Tess

Yeah. -

Tess

Oh yeah, I don't see any churning up. -

Tess

Yeah. (pigs snorting) (farmer whistling) -

Tess

This is caviar for them, oh there they go. -

Tess

Oh, what does that mean? -

Tess

Uh huh, so you don't know-- -

Tess

This is great that they don't churn up the land. We're gonna walk over? Yeah, you're right, okay. You ever been bitten by a pig?

Nope, never. Never been bitten by a pig? So do you think it's just because of the breed or? Yeah.

They're very smart. Now, do you have dogs too? Who's smarter? The pigs?

Yeah. (pigs snorting) (ears slapping) Commercial pork has almost no flavor. Just a pork chop in itself just has, it's really almost like chicken to me. It's really bland.

A feral pig will have, depending on its age, will have a distinct taste to it, and if you wanna eat a big boar, it's gonna have a very distinct taste. (knife cutting) (knife cutting) Can I let go? Yep. They're eating in corn fields or eating in wheat fields, it has a much milder taste.

If you're catching them in the fall when they're doing nothing but eating acorns, they're gonna have a much more bitter flavor. I shot a pig that had been grazing underneath pecan trees, and it tasted like pecans. I mean, seriously. Sounds pretty delicious.

Yeah, pretty good. -

Tess

He's not the only one who thinks pigs are delicious. Pork is celebrated at culinary events around the country, organized by Cochon 555. It brings together chefs and foodies in a celebration of pork. And I'm ready to join them.

Every single part of this animal is usable, and there's flavor packed in these little hidden nooks and crannies. If you put a whole cow in front of a butcher, it's different than putting a whole pig in front of a chef because a chef can bring in his team really quickly to help break down that animal. If you look at a pig as a canvas, it's really just a place for a chef to start taking a journey. (crowd murmuring) (upbeat music) (birds chirping) My goal was to be able to grow food and grow things that I couldn't find.

My name is Melissa Kelly and I am the chef and owner of Primo Restaurant in Rockland, Maine. (gentle music) We raise about 15 pigs each year. We get them at eight-weeks old when they're little piglets and we raise them behind the restaurant on waste, scraps from the kitchen. The beautiful thing about raising them is they help you recycle everything, and you know exactly what they ate their whole life.

Pig day at Primo is a celebration of the pigs' life here on the farm, and how we're gonna honor it, and respect it, and turn it into delicious things. We come together as a team, the whole staff, bartenders, servers, cooks, dish-washers, past and present. We start with breakfast and a toast to the pigs. To the pigs.

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All

To the pigs. It can be a lot of people. We have teams with captains. They make head cheese or pt, or a couple of different kinds of sausage, or bacon.

There's an ultimate respect for the animal that day. It's fun, but it's also very serious. Not one piece of the animal goes to waste. Pork is just so versatile and so delicious, and I think it's healthy too.

Coming up next, a pig who refuses to eat Jews? Jews tell stories that when they knew they were consuming pork, they developed a stomach ache. But in an egg roll, they could almost pretend that the pork wasn't there. They couldn't recognize it.

It wasn't noticeable, and so, they ate it and felt perfectly comfortable. Felt perfectly happy. In fact, Chinese food has become central to Jewish identity for generations of American Jews. Even when there's pork in it.

(music) Jews settled in large numbers on the lower east side of Manhattan, as did many other immigrant communities in New York. There was a large Italian population, there was also a very small Chinese population. And for a variety of reasons, the Chinese established restaurants, and they needed to cater to non-Chinese clientele in order to keep these restaurants going. Jews flocked to the Chinese restaurants in their community.

They saw these restaurants as a symbol of cosmopolitanism. Here we are, we are American. We're not from our old Eastern European communities, we don't have to just eat the old Eastern European food. We can explore, we can expand our horizons.

And what's more expansive than eating Chinese food? But Chinese food was also seen as being in some ways, safe for Jews to consume, because it didn't have any hint of Christianity to it. Jews fled Europe because they were fleeing Christian persecution. There were plenty of Italian restaurants in the neighborhood as well, but those restaurants felt too Christian.

They felt too obviously alien and threatening for Jews, even the most adventurous Jews. It's a statement to go out and eat in a Chinese restaurant. The statement is, "I am abandoning "certain aspects of my tradition, "but it's not threatening to do so." The pig taboo, which is really something that Jews and Muslims share, perhaps came out of something that is very practical. That if you eat pigs at certain times of year, you will get sick.

And also, of course, a lot of the other animals that are taboo in both these religions are carrion eaters. And it's a bit disgusting, things that eat their own feces, things that eat their own children, things that eat other animals of the same kind, might be considered to be rather awful. So this is why, perhaps, these animals were thought to be unclean, impure, dirty. There's reports out that feral swine carry over 30 pathogens, viruses, that are either zoonotic or detrimental to livestock.

Some of them with humans, brucellosis is a big concern of ours. There's some reports of tuberculosis. Hepatitis is an issue. We know leptospirosis is fairly common in feral swine.

The US government and the industry have spent decades, and millions upon millions of dollars, eradicating the diseases from the domestic herd so they no longer exist. So the threat of feral swine reintroducing those diseases is a major concern of ours. Would I eat feral swine? I have in the past.

My awareness of the diseases they carry, and some of the problems with eating feral swine, sometimes you know too much. -

Tess

One disease wild pigs can carry is trichinosis cause by the trichinella roundworm. It normally lives in rats and other rodents, and it makes the leap to pigs when a pig eats an infected rat. The larvae migrate to the pig's muscles and form cysts which can lurk for years waiting to invade another host. An accidental host.

When a person eats undercooked pork, those cysts break open in the stomach. The larvae grow into adult worms which produce more larvae, and these larvae invade the muscles. They can cause weakness, muscle pain, heart problems, sometimes even death. Could trichinosis be the reason why ancient Israelites banned pork?

Trichinosis? No, I don't think that stands up either. It takes at least 10 days, maybe several weeks before you start displaying any symptoms. So somebody falls ill, how do you know it was the pig that gave you trichinosis?

You have no way of knowing, you know, in 1000 BC or something like that. Other animals can carry equally unpleasant pests, so the idea that Moses or somebody was some kind of enlightened health inspector, I think just doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all. No way. There are plenty of examples of pigs living in very warm climates where actually in cultures and populations where pork is extremely popular.

The trichinosis problem would have been there too, and it didn't discourage these populations from eating pork. A classic example, look at South Asia. Pigs became seen as being taboo because pigs had really become this symbolic marker of are you Jewish? Or are you not Jewish?

Or even are you anti-Jewish? Jews became very skittish about associating themselves with pigs. The Rabbis forbade Jews from raising pigs, from participating in the sale or distribution of pork. Rules that have nothing to do with biblical laws of keeping kosher, but that have everything to do with the symbolic significance that the pig had taken on as a personification of the enemies of the Jewish people.

(music) There was an iconic meal held in Cincinnati in the 1880s to celebrate the first graduating class of American Rabbis. And the menu broke every single rule in the book, but there was no pork. And in Porkopolis, right Cincinnati was the center of pork production. To not have pork marked that meal as Jewish.

and everybody in the community recognized that as Jewish, recognized that as completely appropriate. And it was the New Yorkers who said, "Wait a minute, "you've got shrimp on this menu, what are you thinking?" So pork is the absolute wall. Pork has become this cultural touchstone that persists even after all the rest of the rules don't. Pork was a bridge too far.

That's when you become Christian. Hog Haven Farm is a registered non-profit and we're funded primarily by donations, - Public support. Public support. It's 100% public support.

We currently have 66 pigs at the rescue. 90% of pig surrenders are because of a lack of education and people not doing research. So there are terms like teacup pig, micro-pig, all of these misleading labels-- Dwarf pigs. To sell piglets.

Dwarf pig. And they all, kind of, point to one type of pig, which we call pot-belly pigs. So there are also miniature pigs, but there's no such thing as teacup pigs, or those other silly terms. They grow up, they kind of range at 70-pounds on the low end, to 250 on the high end typically.

Only two to five percent of pet pigs stay in one home in the course of their life. (upbeat music) (speaking in the distance) (pig snorting) (pig squeals) And what's the fate of the piglets? Are they just gonna try and find homes for them? (pig squeals) (pig grunts) (pig grunts) I'm still waiting to see the 600 pound-- Yes, he's coming.

We had one other that got adopted out back in May. You are the friendly one. That's Piggy Smalls, he's very friendly. Hey, hi Piggy Smalls, hi.

(pig grunting) And the mud is really good. I know a lot of folks have that conception that pigs are dirty animals because they associate them with mud, and sure they will go in the mud hole, but that's natural sunscreen for pigs, and it also keeps bugs off. What's going on in there? Is it break time?

Being a camera pig is hard? Why do you think Jews first forbid pork? I think it may be a matter of dietary identity. In about 1000 BC, or a little before, you know sites occupied by Philistines, people like that, have an increase in the frequency of pigs in the New East.

Which rather suggests that the Philistines are not bothered about trichinosis or climate change or desertification or any of those other things, right? So, what's going on? Is it possible that the Jews are reacting to the Philistine diet and saying, "You're different from us, "we don't like you very much, and to prove we're different "from you, we're not going to eat the animal "that you eat quite a lot of." Pigs are not very common at that time, taboos tend not to involve animals that are really, really important, or could be really important. If pigs are not a main resource, one thing you could do to differentiate yourself culturally from Philistines is to cut the pig out of your diet.

I believe that keeping these traditional norms is part of what it means to be Jewish, and being Jewish is central to who I am as a person. I never wanna lose that sense of who I am. And the fact that at every meal I remind myself of who I am, helps me to keep that central to my identity. And so, for me, the pork taboo isn't more important than any of the other foods that I don't eat.

But collectively, you are what you eat, I suppose. I am the person who I am because, among other things, I keep these traditional practices. (crickets chirping) You can already see some hog wallows right here. Oh yeah.

Along the fence. The more the merrier. Oh yeah. A lot of the rooting holes that are around the corner back here, just another big sign.

So they're here. And usually anybody that has, his neighbors have a lot of cattle, and I say pretty much 100% of the time where there's a lot of cattle, the pigs are at also, they'll be at that same place, you know, from the feed, when they feed them every day, they can smell that from miles away, so that's how we locate them. (music) (ATV revving) Okay. (cows lowing) Are you all charged up?

Do you wanna charge a round? (loading a round) Even a few minutes, three minutes, and then you look back and there's hogs right there real close to you, so we always try to have somebody on the glass all the time 'cause it can happen (snaps fingers) that fast. (footsteps) (drone buzzing) (cows lowing) He might be just mildly rooting in the grass. Yeah, I see one over there.

I'm checking our right. Are you switching calls, Myron? Yep. Hey boys, right there, should be right over there.

He's right behind the pond. Right behind the pond? Yeah, I just see him plain as day. Oh, I got him.

Yeah, I see him, Josh. Oh my gosh, that's a giant boar. Get ready. That looks like a giant boar.

Scott, turn that call back on. Yeah, tell him to come this way. Are you off safe? Get ready.

(pig call) Three, two, one. They're pretty big, they're pretty big. (pig snorting) You're pretty. Right, so how big do you think?

So they're useful for pets. (laughs) Yeah. She is so cute. (pigs snorting) He had a really hard time adjusting coming to us.

So he was an owner surrender in a divorce situation, and he really had a hard time learning the ropes and becoming a Hog Haven piggy. They do grieve when they're surrendered to us, and the older they are, the harder it is. So for about the first week that we had him, he actually was crying and wanted nothing to do with us, nothing to do with other pigs. And he's really come out of his shell.

He's a wonderful pig now. He's very, very social. Lucky's about six years-old. He escaped a slaughter-bound truck two years ago, and was found on I-25 north of Denver, middle of the day, on the highway, he was never claimed so he got to come live his life with us.

So now he's Lucky because not only did he escape a slaughter truck, but he also survived it and now he gets to live here. He doesn't open his eyes, and the vet thinks that that's from not having enough sunlight exposure, and being housed in an indoor facility. He's very friendly. He likes being scratched on.

Does that feel good? Does that feel good? Does that feel good? He does not know his size, that's the only challenge.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah. Does that feel good? Does that feel good?

My big boy. And how much did you say he weighs? 700 pounds. 700 pounds.

It goes to say how intelligent they are, I think, because they've got that free will, you know? Like, he said dogs have that servant mentality where they wanna do everything to impress you. With pigs, they could care less what you think. So if they don't wanna do it, they're not going to do it.

Or not easily. So they can be challenging because of that. (gentle music) You look into a pig's eyes, or another animal's eyes, and you can really see the intelligence. You can see their emotions.

I think pigs especially are very emotional creatures. If I look back on my life, and if I have to say which animal species you would have liked really to become an expert of, and I know that my answer would be pigs. Pigs are humble animals. Sometimes mistreated.

Sometimes misrepresented. Sometimes they don't have a good reputation. I very much believe in social equality, and I think by studying pigs, I can give my contribution to appreciate pigs for the fundamental role that they have had in our life and our history.