Fall of the Animal Kingdom

When the invitation arrived, we were intrigued by one of its particulars. The hosts, our dear old friends the Smythmires (names have been changed to guard privacy and amuse the author) would be offering roast pig as the culinary centerpiece of their yard party. “Whoa,” I thought. The pig roast as ritual feast is popular in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Cuba, Indonesia, Hawaii – and takes many forms, none of which meet the approval of living pigs.
Here in the States, roast pig – and the somewhat technical ceremony surrounding the pig’s humiliation – is a big deal. The occasion summons a sense of unharnessed celebration and typically compels the familiar American trappings of communal levity. If music is provided, women dance with their arms raised, their male counterparts shuffling about like lightly anesthetized bears. Everyone whoops and makes the “hang loose” hand gesture, and many a guest can be seen bending at the waist in a fit of helpless laughter with a hand on a fellow celebrant’s shoulder. This “bent at the waist and laughing with hand on friend’s shoulder” signifies both fellowship and the need for physical support on account of the incapacitating joy and hilarity. Roast pig inspires this happy madness. Again, not among pigs.
Roast pig liberates the repressed human spirit by taking us back to a sanitized facsimile of our anthropological youth. For thousands of years – millennia, if that sounds fancier – the pig roast has been the centerpiece of many a gilded celebration by the increasingly bewildered human family. We’re the apex species inhabiting this big blue marble (as PBS insists on calling the place) and we are amazing. Opposable thumbs, 6,000 languages, rocketry, kazoos; we’re the deserving bosses of this warm rock. Yes, we are very occasionally prone to fighting and petty theft. But some things – like a hot boxed pig – reliably join our hearts in transcendent unity. Or as a pig might express it –“…there isn’t any remote corner of this Hog-forsaken planet where these ravenous jackasses don’t want to flay and longitudinally skewer me.”
(The “Human Family” hymn sounds less musical in pig-talk.)
Arrival and Mingling
We arrived at the Smythmires’ Santa Barbara home on a sun-drenched afternoon and proceeded to their capacious back yard, where we mingled with dear pals. My adorable ex-girlfriend (wife) avidly made the rounds with the genuinely radiant affection for which she is known and loved, while I moved machine-like into the happy hubbub like an only half-enchanted mannequin. I dimly recall a time when I was possessed of the social graces, but that was back when actor David Soul of Starsky and Hutch had a soft-rock hit on the radio. Back in those days I would offer hugs to people, tell them I loved them, freely share my innermost feelings and laugh with unrestrained frivolity. Today you wouldn’t mistake me for that hugging thing, with his too-tight corduroy shorts, tucked-in polo shirt and full head of hair. I guess I’ve traded loquacity for opacity. I love my friends more than I can capably express, and that neatly sums it up.
I found a seat on the Smythmires’ sundeck and began ineptly jawboning, occasionally hoisting a Dr. Pepper to my blabbing yap while holding prisoner some unfortunate convo partner with my howlingly empty gibberish. Paaaaartaay!
Wondrous Meat Wagon

When our friend Tammy began showing around a “pre-burial” photo of “the pig,” I jumped out of my seat to have a look at this post-future curiosity; a digital iPhone pic of a flayed pig. What I saw shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did, this garish image of an animal with legs and a head, body cavity handily emptied of its previously life-giving machinery. What surprised me was how much of this thing was made of simple meat once you removed the breathing bags, the digestion bag, the bile-producing organs, the vascular plumbing. All that complicated junk had been cut out and there was still a lot of pig there. It was recognizably a pig, with a medium-sized divot scooped out of its underside.
I realized, and not for the first time, what physical proportion of an animal is plain, edible flesh, and what proportion is a fussily-designed, ultimately dispensable motor for moving the flesh from place to place as it awaits fulfillment of its primary role in the toothy Circle of Life®. It’s as if every living thing is principally designed to be consumed by all the other living things – a utilitarian epiphany of the sort that surely causes the Hallmark Corporation to blanch and stammer as it lays out its Celebration of Life series.
Tammy showed us the iPhone pig photo because the pig itself had long since been sealed away in a Roasting Box – a sort of raised driveway oven on wheels that mimics the prosaic pig burial common to more authentic cultures. From the sundeck I could see the sealed box down there on its little stilts. I imagined Tammy’s pig inside, the heat unimaginably intense.
The pig began to haunt me. I’ve always been claustrophobic and partial to pleasantly cool environs, so this confined pig packed into a hellbox aroused in me empathies that had me shakily gulping Dr. Pepper® like it was moonshine. Soon I found I couldn’t escape the pig. It followed me around an already jittery neighborhood gathering – the way the audible word “knife” might tenaciously follow a guilt-addled Hitchcock character. Hot Pig in a Box! Hot Pig in a Box! HOT PIG IN A BOX!
Porcine Revelation

Finally the time had arrived to free the roasted pig. The guys who had prepped and sealed and roasted the pig now went down the deck stairs like tribal overseers, removed the top of the hotbox and, using some sort of pig-hoisting contraption, lifted the pig out and set in on a tarp-covered picnic table where it lay unadorned. Giddy attendees skittered down the steps, surrounding the pig and cooing – seizing the opportunity for a closeup look at this splayed animal that, while alive, would have been averse to our examinations. As is the case in many instances of human congress there was inexplicable high fiving around the pig, as if the celebrants had themselves defeated the animal in the wild and could now bask in village glory.
I furtively pushed through the melee for a look. The miraculous fact of the thing – its bilateral symmetry and bristly, minutely-detailed carapace – were but fleeting impressions quickly overwritten by the profusion of crackling pork that was now the pig’s irreducible central feature. The complex structural engineering of this once-sentient creature played tuneless second fiddle to the suddenly overwhelming fact of its being an oblong slab of roasted meat. Eyeless and grinning, this William Golding nightmare had come to our happy gathering with its cockeyed hoofs and bristly ears and frank reminder of the momentary animal hierarchies.
“Have a piece of skin!” someone shouted ecstatically, and handed me a charred flap of tissue, which I timidly sampled – a cat exploring cheesecake. The flavor and texture were unearthly.
I squinted earnestly at the huge subservient thing. Where the roasted skin had peeled away there was no magic or life, no evidence of a once-animate creature. Just grey, striated pork, such as you see on a dinner plate, but here swaddling a former animal with a face whose expression conveyed utter surrender.
I am no Peter Singer, no militant animal rights soldier charging into a factory farm to free the doomed, blank-faced chickens there. But for goodness’ sake.
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