Pigs is Pigs

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 474, 23 July 1948, Page 5

Pigs is Pigs

ITH his gift for arresting phrases Sir Patrick Duff told a group of farmers the other day that they were "the shock troops in Operation Vitamin." If we may be as up-to-date as Sir Patrick, the remark must have "rocked" them. They happened to be pig farmers, and if they are not already carting the swill to the troughs with a jauntier air it is because pig-farmers don't do as much with swill to-day as they did once, and in any case probably have the swill business mechanised. Sir Patrick could, of course, have borrowed from the American classics and reminded his audience that "pigs is pigs," as they still is; but the trouble is that they don’t pig it any longer. If they are going to win prizes on the hooks, their journey to the hooks must be clean and orderly, and planned before they are born. It must be a journey that keeps their hind-end before their foreend, stuffs their hams and starves their heads, and only occasionally, when the weather is very warm, permits a little compassionate wallowing in reasonably clean mire. It is vitamins, vitamins all the way and never a pause for mere padding. For it is the simple truth, as Sir Patrick pointed out, that a peremptory call has come. What he described (in another arresting phrase) as "the continuous epic of the soil" includes the producers of pigs as well as the growers of wheat, all who "serve the business of the earth," and responsibility lies heavy on each one of them. On one hand a hungry worldhungrier for quality than for quantity. On the other hand, sunshine, milk, and mangels, and half-a-mil-lion Tamworths in New Zealand waiting to do their stuff; or Berkshires or Saddle-backs or Large Whites. When pigs was just pigs they sometimes paid the rent. Now they have to insure the family against hunger, wes and disease.