The Feral Hogification of America

There are two options: be pro-society, or anti-society.

A pig is a pig because it is well-fed and well-kept on a farm and given care (and accepts that care for itself). It exists as a pig because it is a pro-society creature; a creature whose very being is enabled by culture—in this case agriculture, which is not the same as the kind of culture we think of when we think of culture (Broadway, museums, etc.), but still a culture nonetheless.

When a pig escapes a farm, or is let out, or somehow gets into the woods, it only takes a matter of months for it to turn into a different creature entirely—it will “get hairy, grow tusks and get aggressive,” almost immediately. Its pro-social coding is switched off, and its pro-survival-in-the-wild coding is switched on. A feral swine’s DNA doesn’t change simply by being released, but its epigenetics do—hormones and other bodily processes changing the expression of the pig’s genes and the pig’s behavior. And then, once that epigenetically-changed pig breeds with a feral boar or one of the other species of feral swine roaming about America’s forests, the offspring will have different DNA.

There is nothing inherently worse, in a moral sense, about a feral swine. But it is, inherently, an anti-society creature; one that can only exist in opposition to (agri)culture and its rules and rewards.

The pig we think of today as a pig (pink, round, friendly), only exists because humans found domesticating wild swine helpful in creating our own culture 10,000 years ago. And that decision—to live via agriculture—domesticated us too. It allowed us to develop rhythms of what we now consider normal days and nights; it allowed us to create human settlements, which became towns, which became cities, which is where things like Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! take place. Agriculture begat culture.

Once a pig becomes feral, you cannot turn it back into a pro-society pig simply by reintroducing it to the farm. It would take generations of re-domestication. Once you destroy a creature’s culture, there is no simple way of rebuilding it.

I would not like to make a pro-eugenics argument here (that would be a very stupid thing for me as a Jew and a trans person to do). But I would like to make a pro-culture argument. And that argument is: the domestication of the pig is the same thing as the domestication of the self, in a very literal sense—we became pro-culture and pro-civilization beings through agricultural domestication. And we now face a stark choice: to be in favor of that domestication, or to allow ourselves to become feral.