Serenity in a Confined Animal Feeding Operation

Pigs and I have not gotten along well for nearly a decade now. It started with my transition to a majority all-natural diet partially due to nitrates in the swine scourge which were causing most unpleasant migraines and other nasty ailments (some of which resurface regularly). Afterward I held a slightly justified, if irrational, prejudice to pork. Hence, a visit to a hog factory farm was walking directly into an unknown, dark land...perhaps the very place that supplied me such suffering long ago. Initially, the hog farm fueled me with distinct scents of manure even before a pig was in sight, fueling my disgust with these filthy animals even before seeing them. Approaching the operation, the odors grew, the air became heavy, and yet there lay the gate in the form of an unassuming tin door. Beyond the entrance were the burrows of the swine, the floor covered in manure, the air caked with dust, the bestial cries of famished hogs, and powdered foodstuffs spilling out of depressed troughs.

In that moment, silence reigned in my mind in spite of the horrendously human-like squeals. From then on, I witnessed the scene without a thought, connected to all the sows, gushing water, and the dust covered pipes. A serene calm enveloped my isolated world. Sounds, sights, and smells entered and departed with no attachment. I merely was. Similar to a ghost, I was present but left alone and floated along as I pleased. Time moved yet was still within the surreal hog farm. As if a leaf in a stream, sensations mundanely passed by while I floated along.

Soon enough, we ended up in one of the piglet barns. Replacing the raving squeals of sows, fearful human gazes penetrated into my eyes, parting the sea of swine. Seeing the panicked pilings of piglets pushed on the further wall, I crouched down and observed, thoughtless of the situation. Tentatively, the youths approached, eventually poking their noses at my extended foot. So the scene was set, eyes locked and serenity returned if only for a moment.

Instantly, yet an eternity later, a piglet was thrust into my arms; the universe in its entirety was in my grasp. Stimuli from the outside diverted around and through while I wielded the nervous, squirmy piglet. The sheer oneness of the event was awe-inspiring and mindless. For there was no need to think...no need to feel...no need for anything but the absolute enveloping silent aura. In that moment, time teetered to a full, unadulterated stop, then slowly crawled at a glacial pace. The squirms quickened in spite of the silence. Day to night, light to dark, birth to death...the cycle of genesis must conclude. Returning to its fold, the piglet and the silence departed.

In a contrasting flash, we had moved to sows where a flirtatious boar was strutting down one of the aisles flanked by hungering sows (as he was “liberating” their excess food). The artificial insemination had begun, unbeknownst. Fickle bags oozing with pink seed were promptly inserted into receptive sows and occasionally squeezed, yet I was unmoved by the whole experience for I had failed to leave the silence. Timelessness reigned with an iron fist, sporadically crawling and grasping amongst the steel bars of the sows' pens. Somewhere along the trek, a dabble of pink semen escaped from its prison and slowly glided through the air. I could have avoided it easily yet I chose not to react. In a blind stare, I regarded its slithering path in the air currents, eventually hitting slightly beyond my hairline, then proceeding to leisurely drip down the side of my face, drying just below my ear on my cheek. While it made its journey, I felt its elasticity but also its pinkness, its wateriness, and the jiggles of the cells themselves. It teetered along its journey, traveling down hidden crevices and gullies of my skin, leaving behind dried, flaky bits. It was in that single event that I let go of my distaste of the swine folk and accepted them as they lived, as they acted, and as they were. Yet another inner demon was released only to find it unified with my complexion.