It’s what we do, darlin’.
The sounds of fiddle and banjo picking went late into last night, following a dinner with friends of homegrown salad, chicken and sausage gumbo, and an amazing dessert of strawberry and mint cream soup. We were gathered out back around the table, a bottle of elderberry mead making the rounds, as some of us listened and others serenaded. Somewhere between “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Wagon Wheel,” I threw in my own entertainment by sharing the story of how I accidentally moved our 250-pound hogs.
On the farm we currently have two groups of pigs. One group of three is closing in on market weight and has six weeks to complete a life of indolence. At 100 pounds each, the other three will not be slaughtered until late in the fall. Through a combination of chance and timing, the two groups ended up together in the same paddock and pasture. The larger hogs are food bullies, and consequently, the younger ones have not grown out as fast as we would like.
Separating out hogs was long overdue and had, alas, been at the top of our to-do list for the past few weeks. Which brings us to Friday, when I stepped out onto the porch and found all six pigs in the first throes of liberty, cavorting in the side yard.
Hogs are by nature curious and cautious. They test limits, yet they are fearful of consequences. On Friday, the unlatched gate was discovered early, but, clustered and nosing around the magic line, they still took hours before gathering the courage to step across to freedom.
In the early years on the farm, I would have responded in dignified panic, running amongst them screaming and pleading and flailing my arms. Yesterday, as a seasoned warden of many such feeble escapes, I responded with calm. For pigs, like teenage boys, are both perennially rebellious and hungry. They can easily be controlled, if only just, with a full bucket of feed.
I waded through the scrum to the barn and grabbed the bucket. “Piggeee,” I called, and they came running back through the gate. All except one. The outlier barked loudly and ran the opposite direction. The rest stopped in mid-run to the food, turned, and followed suit. I tried again.
The next go ‘round I managed to get the smaller pigs through the gate, but the larger ones gamboled about among the muscadines. Figuring three pigs in a paddock beat six in the vines, I slammed the gate shut and, having doublechecked that it was indeed latched, headed off to deal with the others.
Now snuffling around the pawpaw trees, they came docilely to my calls and trotted into the large wooded paddock … their new home, where we had intended to move them all along and where they spent the remainder of the day celebrating their victory by eating last year’s acorns among the oaks.
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Reading this weekend: just received in the mail, the new American Library edition of Wendell Berry’s collected Port Williams stories and novels.
To appreciate separating and moving of hogs
One might compare it to the capture of frogs
They’ve both minds of their own
And they’re intentions not shown
Could one turn to assistance by dogs?
When you started the analogy to teenage boys I thought you were going in another direction. Glad to see I was wrong on that one.
Hope the vines and the pawpaws are no worse for wear. The image of a bull in a china shop comes to mind. Hog in the muscadines limerick will have to wait.
There once was a hog in Tennessee
He escaped, saying, “I’m off to see the sea!”
He left by the side gate,
A little too late,
Only to be caught when he stopped to pee
Hmmm, someone sure has the hang of this… Must up my game.
A sow called the Empress of Blandings
Might have fallen in her local standings
For she stopped all her eating
When her keeper was tweeting
Social networks caused misunderstandings
Back to you sir.
Yes, but how do the day’s proceedings relate to ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism’?
I am just a simple farmer, your strange queries and limericks, gentlemen, confuse me. I’m off to cut a second field for hay. 🙂
To relate to ‘Brave New World’ we might imagine the Empress of Blandings being artificially inseminated. Or perhaps even more closely – a flush of her eggs inseminated in vitro in a lab.
To relate to ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism’ we might go out on a limb and imbue our poor piggy with sufficient mental process to participate in the logical puzzle put to the three prisoners. Taking a second and third sow from the surroundings at Blandings’ Castle one could mark the three and provide them the instructions. Pigs being pretty intelligent beasts, I’d proffer they might be able to do it.
Of course – if these three sows were to march through the gate together, it could become a puzzle of its own trying to decipher their oinks and grunts as explanations to some satisfaction.
In any event – I’m just hoping it doesn’t rain on Brian’s hay.
You see, there’s a cruel meta-irony to this version of the sophism in that all the prisoners, having darted over the chasm that is the subject as event, in this case have willingly agreed to the segmentation (to quote Deleuze) that the small Other (that is, Brian) had (unknowingly, yet still expertly) divided them into avant la lettre.
Them being pigs, they of course felt they’d nothing to fear from both Huxley and Lacan, yet had failed to take into consideration that the small other’s (that is, Brian’s) learnedness would compel him to exercise caution regarding which books to add to the barn library. They may have had access to the source texts, yet were as helpless as any modern pig without that ne plus ultra of post-studiousness, secondary sources.
May your hay be straight and true (secondary source an J. Salatin).
Michael, we ended up with a good supply of quality hay. We could ask for nothing more.