As a city boy, taking a job at a farm changed my diet forever

I never had any business working at a pig farm.

For starters, I was almost entirely unskilled in any discipline useful to a pig farm. I was sensitive and quiet, prone to both perfectionism and procrastination, and had the soft hands of a person who spent most of their time playing video games, reading paperback philosophy books, and tinkering with old computers.

And yet for one sad, sweaty, smelly week in 2006, I was a pig farmer.

When I was 13, we moved from the suburbs to deep in the country. Every member of my family had the same first impression of our new place: the obvious, aggressively odorous presence of a piggery nearby, though that’s not the one where I ended up working.

After graduating from high school, I was left with about a year to fill before university. I took odd jobs at nearby farms – picking apples, or stooking chaff (which I assure you are both real words) – anything that only required walking, lifting, chatting and occasionally driving. I was sometimes paid in steak breakfasts, but I often did as much daydreaming as working, so that was fair enough.

The pig farm was different. It was a place of real labour. It was owned by my girlfriend’s uncle, and run by his two adult sons. She had suggested I work there, and I was vouched for by a worker who happened to be boarding at my parent’s house.

Honestly, I gave it my all. The smell didn’t bother me. Nor did the pre-sunrise start, the need to shower in and out, and wearing the same gross starchy work clothes every day. The very first thing that bothered me was that I was obviously and irrevocably useless.

The workers were flabbergasted at how long it took me to blast heinous mouldy cheese products off wooden pallets with a power hose, and in disbelief at how much cutting liquid and steel I could waste, simply because I could not measure accurately and was mysteriously afraid of the circular saw. I couldn’t weld. I wasn’t strong. I didn’t have the innate physical abilities of the locals, nor the incomprehensible drive to work of the blow-ins who, I was advised, would disappear after two paychecks.

And, of course, there were the pigs.

A farmer’s relationship to their animals, at least in my admittedly distant experience, is always complicated. There’s a horror implicit in slaughtering animals, or at least in raising them for slaughter, as a mechanical process and a business. It requires at least some detachment from or denial of their autonomy and their life as intelligent creatures, even if the farmer can at the same time deeply care for and love them, or feel that their wellbeing is important.

But for whatever reason, even though I’ve also worked with cows and chickens and sheep and seen them in awful situations, pigs seem so much more keenly aware of the world we perceive. Their intelligence and experience seems so close to being available to us as humans, to the point that you have to admit they know what the bolt gun is, and where the transport trucks go. So my brief dealings with the pigs themselves were the most memorable, if also the saddest, aspects of the week.

The cleanest and quietest shed was full of sows, who all walked to the bars to snork at me as I passed. It’s entirely possible they were just anticipating the special food I was pouring into their chutes. But to me, it seemed they were trying to discreetly communicate what was going on. They were excited, or scared, or lonely. They had new babies, or were about to have new babies. I wasn’t allowed to touch them.

The boars all lived together, and I only saw them once, when I helped move them from one place to another. We pushed them and if they didn’t move, a worker swung a chain with a lobster hook on the end and hit them in the back. He said it didn’t hurt them, but I never found out how he figured that out.

Then there was inoculating the baby pigs, a process which I had naively imagined happened somewhere calm and clean, where the administrator of the needles took the time to settle (or maybe even gently cuddle) the little ones as they gave the jab. In reality, it was an unhinged process of chasing screaming little pink beans around a dank and dusty room, catching them and gripping onto their hot, hysterically thumping little bodies, sticking them and spraying them with colour so we knew they’d been done.

I started on a Monday, and the following Monday the boss pulled me aside to say that he had meant to catch up with me after Friday, and that I should go home. I felt upset, for reasons that weren’t immediately clear to me at the time, but was also quietly relieved.

And for the majority of the time since, perhaps coincidentally but perhaps not, I’ve been a vegetarian.

Tim Biggs is a writer covering consumer technology, gadgets and video games.

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