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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
---------------, December 23, 2004
This review is from: The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs (Hardcover)
These days the majority of us are city-bred and virtually clueless when it comes to farm animals. Rarely do we get much closer to these domestic denizens than the kindergarten song about Old MacDonald's boisterous barnyard. Except, of course, when we lift our forks, at which point such creatures hardly resemble their living selves. Perhaps this mollifies our consciences, i.e. that pork and beef, lamb and fowl seem nearer those edibles springing from the earth (corn and cabbage) and less like our not-so-distant, four-legged cousins.
With his 24th and latest book, Lyall Watson may inadvertently launch a new wave of vegetarianism, so charming is the porcine portrait he paints. (To counterbalance any economic shock to the meat industry, it should be mentioned that earlier in his three-decade writing career, Watson also penned a couple of essays on the topic of whether or not plants feel pain.) At any rate, once you have delved into "Whole Hog", you cannot help but come away with an altered perspective and just a bit of guilt about this `star' of so many meals.
Watson describes not only the hog versions with which we are familiar, but contrasts them with their wild varieties, as well as, their close relatives, the peccaries. He intersperses scientific fact with fanciful information such as the origin of piggy banks and the distance covered by a single year's worldwide sausage production.
This ode to pigs will likely bring criticism for something that has long been the bane of naturalists: anthropomorphism. Anything smacking of benevolence towards, or support of, animal consciousness elicits supercilious smirks from humans. (Are we inherently so unsure of our place in nature and our tenure as its `rulers'?) Loren Eiseley, who during his years as Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, won more awards and accolades than any predecessor except Franklin, addressed this. "There is a sense in which when we cease to anthropomorphize, we cease to be men, for when we cease to have human contact with animals and deny them all relation to ourselves, we tend . . . to deny our own humanity."
Watson, too, weighs in on the issue with, "It is indeed difficult to demonstrate true awareness or consciousness in other species, but it is becoming more difficult to deny the possibility of animals having minds and using mental experience in the practice of their behavior."
This book is filled with sober and comical photos, statue renderings, and drawings of pigs in various situations. Several are downright endearing, reminding me of someone I knew who, in raising an occasional hog to feed his large family, maintained detachment from the animals by giving them names such as `Food' and `Dinner'. If you have read any of Lyall Watson's books, you already know the smooth, effortless quality of his writing. If you haven't, let "The Whole Hog" be your introduction to it. You may well want to go back and read others ("Dark Nature," "Supernature," "Gifts of Unknown Things") representing this author's broad range of interests.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All things porcine, October 10, 2010
This review is from: The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs (Hardcover)
This is a surprisingly endearing and educational book, and an altogether splendid one. THE WHOLE HOG is written by a very literate naturalist/biologist, Lyall Watson. I have enjoyed several other books of his, including the equally endearing and educational and splendid "Elephantoms" (which I highly recommend to anyone with a special interest in elephants). Here, the subject is pigs - and their close cousins, peccaries.
The book covers, seemingly, all things porcine: brief profiles of the 16 different species of pigs and peccaries; relevant evolutionary biology; wild pigs and domestic pigs; pigs in human history, including the history of pig husbandry; and pigs in literature, movies, and culture in general. If so listing the subjects of the book makes it sound rather academic, that does the book an injustice. While the reader inevitably learns a lot, it is learning by osmosis rather than study, as the book is hardly academic in tone and presentation. It is eclectic and generously strewn with fascinating anecdotes and miscellany.
Among the anecdotes are the author's extended experiences with three different wild pigs/peccaries. As a boy in Africa, for three years he had as a pet a warthog named Hoover (so named because he ate everything given him; "it was like watching a vacuum cleaner at work, a suction bag with a leg at each corner".) Through Hoover, Watson learned first hand about the wide range of pig vocalizations - a topic that Watson returns to again and again in the book, making a convincing case for the proposition that such vocalizations often are intended communications, either to other pigs or to human companions, as the case may be. Another of Watson's porcine friends was a Sulawesi warty pig that lived under the hut in which he lived for nine months on an island east of Bali. The pig was named Babi ("pig" in Indonesian) and she quickly became an almost inseparable companion of Watson's, in part because most of the natives on the island were Moslem and hence shunned Babi. Each morning they would go on a jaunt along the beach or into the forest, Babi leading and occasionally calling back to Watson to make sure he was still in range. His third such experience was with Salsa, an orphaned javelina (or collared peccary) he raised while in the Sonoran desert in Mexico. Salsa soon became an inveterate player of chase, "initiating games with everyone, bounding like a puppy with his head on one side, panting in open-mouthed invitation, looking around for an object, any object we could pretend was worth a chase."
I will mention three of the countless fascinating points of "pig miscellany". One has to do with the fact that pigs, like humans, are omnivores, and the hypothesis that that has led to enhanced intelligence. "Being omnivorous goes hand in hand, hoof in hoof, with being curious, dexterous, and willing to explore new ways of finding, preparing, and keeping food. Omnivores never stop investigating and are always on the lookout for anything in the environment that can be bent to their advantage. * * * They are also far quicker to learn new tricks and, almost as important, quicker to abandon new moves that turn out to be counter-productive." Another has to do with the biological co-adaptation or symbiosis between the black truffles of Périgord and wild pig sows that, attracted by a chemical copy of boar testosterone, burrow into the soil, thereby releasing the cloud of spore for the next generation of black truffles. A third such tidbit of pig lore has to do with the taboo in Mosaic and Islamic law against eating pig flesh. Watson argues that its genesis lies not in medical reasons (the transmission of trichinosis) but rather because in semi-desert areas pig flesh was such a luxury that, if available to any in a community, it became a destabilizing flashpoint for the entire community.
I close with two quotes from illustrious contemporaries. From Winston Churchill: "Cats look down on you; dogs look up to you; but pigs look you in the eye as equals." And from Harry Truman: "No man should be allowed to be President who does not understand pigs, or hasn't been around a manure pile."
THE WHOLE HOG is marvelously written and generously illustrated. It also is intelligently assembled and laid out. I can't imagine anyone with even a passing interest in the natural world not enjoying the book thoroughly.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Informative, funny, fascinating, weirdly educational, March 17, 2010
This review is from: The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs (Hardcover)
This is just a darn good book. The author clearly knows more than practically anyone else alive about pigs, and has carefully explained everything about this remarkable animal in clear, readable prose. If you want a definitive and thorough overview of pigs, read this book. It is surprisingly interesting.
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