A ll religions have a tendency to feature some dietary injunction or prohibition, whether it is the

now lapsed Catholic injunction to eat fish on Fridays, or the adoration by Hindus of the cow as a

consecrated and invulnerable animal (the government of India even offered to import and

protect all the cattle facing slaughter as a result of the bovine encephalitic, or “mad cow,”

plague that swept Europe in the 1990s), or the refusal by some other Eastern cults to consume

any animal flesh, or to injure any other creature be it rat or flea. But the oldest and most

tenacious of all fetishes is the hatred and even fear of the pig. It emerged in primitive Judaea,

and was for centuries one of the ways—the other being circumcision—by which Jews could be

distinguished.

Even though sura 5.60 of the Koran condemns particularly Jews but also other unbelievers

as having been turned into pigs and monkeys—a very intense theme in recent Salafist Muslim

preaching—and the Koran describes the flesh of swine as unclean or even “abominable,”

Muslims appear to see nothing ironic in the adoption of this uniquely Jewish taboo. Real horror

of the porcine is manifest all over the Islamic world. One good instance would be the continued

prohibition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, one of the most charming and useful fables of

modern times, of the reading of which Muslim schoolchildren are deprived. I have perused some

of the solemn prohibition orders written by Arab education ministries, which are so stupid that

they fail to notice the evil and dictatorial role played by the pigs in the story itself.

Orwell actually did dislike pigs, as a consequence of his failure as a small farmer, and this

revulsion is shared by many adults who have had to work with these difficult animals in

agricultural conditions. Crammed together in sties, pigs tend to act swinishly, as it were, and to

have noisy and nasty fights. It is not unknown for them to eat their own young and even their

own excrement, while their tendency to random and loose gallantry is often painful to the more

fastidious eye. But it has often been noticed that pigs left to their own devices, and granted

sufficient space, will keep themselves very clean, arrange little bowers, bring up families, and

engage in social interaction with other pigs. The creatures also display many signs of

intelligence, and it has been calculated that the crucial ratio—between brain weight and body

weight—is almost as high with them as it is in dolphins. There is great adaptability between the

pig and its environment, as witness wild boars and “feral pigs” as opposed to the placid porkers

and frisky piglets of our more immediate experience. But the cloven hoof, or trotter, became a

sign of diabolism to the fearful, and I daresay that it is easy to surmise which came first—the

devil or the pig. It would be merely boring and idiotic to wonder how the designer of all things

conceived such a versatile creature and then commanded his higher-mammal creation to avoid

it altogether or risk his eternal displeasure. But many otherwise intelligent mammals affect the

belief that heaven hates ham.

I hope that you have guessed by now what we know in any case—that this fine beast is oneof our fairly close cousins. It shares a great deal of our DNA, and there have lately been

welcome transplants of skin, heart valves, and kidneys from pigs to humans. If—which I heartily

trust does not happen—a new Dr. Moreau could corrupt recent advances in cloning and create a

hybrid, a “pig-man” is widely feared as the most probable outcome. Meanwhile, almost

everything about the pig is useful, from its nutritious and delicious meat to its tanned hide for

leather and its bristles for brushes. In Upton Sinclair’s graphic novel of the Chicago

slaughterhouse, The Jungle, it is agonizing to read about the way that pigs are borne aloft on

hooks, screaming as their throats are cut. Even the strongest nerves of the most hardened

workers are shaken by the experience. There is something about that shriek...

To press this a little further, one may note that children if left unmolested by rabbis and

imams are very drawn to pigs, especially to baby ones, and that firefighters in general do not

like to eat roast pork or crackling. The barbaric vernacular word for roasted human in New

Guinea and elsewhere was “long pig”: I have never had the relevant degustatative experience

myself, but it seems that we do, if eaten, taste very much like pigs.

This helps to make nonsense of the usual “secular” explanations of the original Jewish

prohibition. It is argued that the ban was initially rational, since pig meat in hot climates can

become rank and develop the worms of trichinosis. This objection—which perhaps does apply in

the case of non-kosher shellfish—is absurd when applied to the actual conditions. First,

trichinosis is found in all climates, and in fact occurs more in cold than in hot ones. Second,

ancient Jewish settlements in the land of Canaan can easily be distinguished by archaeologists

by the absence of pig bones in their rubbish tips, as opposed to the presence of such bones in

the middens of other communities. The non-Jews did not sicken and die from eating pork, in

other words. (Quite apart from anything else, if they had died for this reason there would have

been no need for the god of Moses to urge their slaughter by non-pig-eaters.)

There must therefore be another answer to the conundrum. I claim my own solution as

original, though without the help of Sir James Frazer and the great Ibn Warraq I might not have

hit upon it. According to many ancient authorities, the attitude of early Semites to swine was

one of reverence as much as disgust. The eating of pig flesh was considered as something

special, even privileged and ritualistic. (This mad confusion between the sacred and the profane

is found in all faiths at all times.) The simultaneous attraction and repulsion derived from an

anthropomorphic root: the look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the

pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human.

Porcophobia—and porcophilia—thus probably originate in a nighttime of human sacrifice and

even cannibalism at which the “holy” texts often do more than hint. Nothing optional—from

homosexuality to adultery—is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and

exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in

King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense

for which he plies the lash.

Porcophilia can also be used for oppressive and repressive purposes. In medieval Spain,

where Jews and Muslims were compelled on pain of death and torture to convert to Christianity,

the religious authorities quite rightly suspected that many of the conversions were not sincere.

Indeed, the Inquisition arose partly from the holy dread that secret infidels were attending Mas

—where of course, and even more disgustingly, they were pretending to eat human flesh and

drink human blood, in the person of Christ himself. Among the customs that arose in

consequence was the offering, at most events formal and informal, of a plate of charcuterie.

Those who have been fortunate enough to visit Spain, or any good Spanish restaurant, will be

familiar with the gesture of hospitality: literally dozens of pieces of differently cured, differently

sliced pig. But the grim origin of this lies in a constant effort to sniff out heresy, and to be

unsmilingly watchful for giveaway expressions of distaste. In the hands of eager Christianfanatics, even the toothsome jamón Ibérico could be pressed into service as a form of torture.

Today, ancient stupidity is upon us again. Muslim zealots in Europe are demanding that the

Three Little Pigs, and Miss Piggy, Winnie-the-Pooh’s Piglet, and other traditional pets and

characters be removed from the innocent gaze of their children. The mirthless cretins of jihad

have probably not read enough to know of the Empress of Blandings, and of the Earl of

Emsworth’s infinitely renewable delight in the splendid pages of the incomparable author Mr.

Whiffle, The Care of the Pig, but there will be trouble when they get that far. An old statue of a

wild boar, in an arboretum in Middle England, has already been threatened with mindless Islamic

vandalism.

In microcosm, this apparently trivial fetish shows how religion and faith and superstition

distort our whole picture of the world. The pig is so close to us, and has been so handy to us in

so many respects, that a strong case is now made by humanists that it should not be factory

farmed, confined, separated from its young, and forced to live in its own ordure. All other

considerations to one side, the resulting pink and spongy meat is somewhat rebarbative. But

this is a decision that we can make in the plain light of reason and compassion, as extended to

fellow creatures and relatives, and not as a result of incantations from Iron Age campfires

where much worse offenses were celebrated in the name of god. “Pig’s head on a stick,” says

the nervous but stouthearted Simon in the face of the buzzing, suppurating idol (first killed and

then worshipped) that has been set up by cruel, frightened schoolboys in Lord of the Flies. “Pig’s

head on a stick.” And he was more right than he could have known, and much wiser than his

elders as well as his delinquent juniors.