Latest Essay: The Pig

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The Pig

Long ago the pig farmer’s job was a simple one: he fattened the pig and he sold it to market. He fed the pig, and he cared for the pig in all the ways he had been taught, and he watched it put on weight. He was left alone to feed the pig as he wished……he had done this same thing for a long time and knew a little something about what was required. He weighed it only when the time was right; he was trusted to get on with his job.

Asked, he would offer up the age-old wisdom: feed the pig, and it will grow.

But the farmer awoke one day to discover that much had changed.

He was told now that the pig should now have a target weight to aim for. This target weight would be based solely on what the pig had weighed as a piglet at its previous farm. In protesting that the weight suggested was far too heavy for the pig and therefore could never be reached, he was informed that the very process of aiming for a weight would be good for the pig in the long term. In suggesting that the pig may have been stressed by its journey to the new farm, or suffered disease as it grew, or escaped from its pen and not been available for its feed on many occasions, the farmer was warned to stop making weak excuses.

When the farmer asked what would happen when the pig inevitably failed to reach its target weight, he was told to work harder and stop avoiding blame for his skinny pig. The pig deserved better than he was giving it. If he was not careful, he could lose his job, or at least get no small pay rise each year like he used to for working so hard for so long at a job that few other people wanted to do.

Late one night, unable to sleep for worrying about all of this, the farmer crept down to the pig shed and did what he never imagined he would ever do: he tinkered with the weighing machine so that the pig would appear heavier in the morning. He was ashamed of his actions of course, but with a wife and small children to feed and bills to pay, the farmer felt he had no choice.

Time went by; life continued. New targets would come in and the farmer would make sure the pig made its weight. However, people started to notice that the pig was beginning to look a little thinner than it used to. The meat didn’t seem to them to be as good as it used to be either….not as tasty, or as lean, or as rich in fat as people preferred.

They were told that they were mistaken. The meat was as good as ever…in fact it was better.

Men came to the farm to inspect the farmer’s work. When the farmer…proud of his farm….tried to show the men all that he had achieved they were not interested; instead they stood watching him feeding the pig for a very small portion of time and then went away again. Before leaving one of the men walked towards him and stamped something on the farmer’s forehead. Alarmed, he rushed to the mirror and found that the stamp read: REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT. The farmer had changed only what these men had wanted him to change, and now they were telling him that his farm…his life’s work…was simply not good enough.

A letter arrived some days later. It read:

TO THE PIG FARMER WHO REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT

IMPROVEMENT REQUIRED:

STOP FEEDING THE PIG SO MUCH…..ALLOW PIG TO FEED ITSELF…..WEIGH PIG FAR MORE OFTEN……MAKE SURE PIG KNOWS HOW TO WEIGH ITSELF….

Later, he discovered that two of the three men who visited his farm not been pig farmers themselves for many, many years, and the third man had never been a pig farmer at all.

This is what the pig farm is like today:

The farmer has not had a pay rise for years. He is told that he may never get another. The small pot of money he was saving for his days after feeding the pig has been raided by men in suits in town who say he was being far too well treated in the first place. They are all in it together. The men’s suits seem to get nicer every time the farmer sees them.

Every few years, the same men in suits tell him to change the feed.

The farm is full of people who do not feed pigs. There is a person who checks that the pig is in its stall, for example; a person to assess the pig’s mental state; a person to reward the pig for putting on weight; a person to tell the farmer off for the pig not putting on weight, and to remind him that there are many other people out there who would like his job.

But the farmer is not so sure about that. He remembers when his job was a good one. He remembers when people used to tip their caps at him when he passed them on the street. Now it seems that he has fallen low in peoples’ eyes. The pig is a scrawny beast indeed, and the people must have somebody to blame.

And the pig?

Why, he was seen in his stall only yesterday. He was eating, as ever…when would he not be?...and rolling around in his own muck as nature has intended, but the more observant may have detected a strange look in his bright piggy eye. It is the look a skinny pig gets when it spies other pigs growing fat on new farms nearby. There is frustration there….at the lies it has been told and all the weighing that has been done to no great purpose because nobody seems to want the meat it has to offer, and there is definitely some envy.

It is an angry pig in fact, and it will escape from its pen very soon.

And we may be sorry.

William Ruby


Latest List:

Significant Persons Who Worked as Teachers

                      John Adams

               Robert Frost

               Lyndon B Johnson

               D H Lawrence

               Mussolini

               Thomas Paine

               Alexander Graham Bell

               Clara Barton

               George Orwell