What is it about?
Since the 2014 outbreak of the African Swine Fever (ASF) in Europe, wild boars have been culled in large numbers for the protection of the pork industry. This chapter investigates biosecurity measures mobilized in Poland to prevent the spread of the deadly virus from wild boars to domesticated pigs. By analyzing breeding and sanitary practices in factory farming and wildlife management, we show how control over animal sex is key for sustaining and maximizing meat production. While wild boar fecundity is being presented as threatening, pig super-fertility is commodified for human consumption.
Featured Image
Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Factory farming and its strategies to separate livestock from wildlife have detrimental effects on the natural environment and both human and animal health. As the bodies of farmed pigs reach beyond-production limits, they become increasingly more fragile and susceptible to diseases. In Poland, hunting wild boars as possible vectors of the lethal disease has been shown to only exacerbate the problem, while controlling their mobility with border fences is often damaging to entire ecosystems. The history of swine domestication and selective breeding sheds new light on the concerns over “super pig” crossbred with wild boar.
Perspectives
We believe that wild and domestic pigs are amazing animals deserving of our appreciation. There is currently a lot of attention being paid to wild and feral hogs, especially in places where they are considered invasive and encroaching into urban and agricultural spaces. Fears over pig-boar cross-breeding should be put into perspective by understanding how humans have experimented with swine reproduction for centuries and introduced these highly adaptive animals to new environments. We hope to shift attention to the scale of meat production that globally is far more threatening to the natural environment than wildlife ecologies.
Dr. Marianna Szczygielska
Akademie ved Ceske republiky
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Naive Boars and Dummy Sows: Porcine Sex and the Politics of Purity, November 2023, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004679375_003.
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Resources
Tracing viral trajectories. Epistemic and bodily reservoirs in interspecies health
Emerging infectious diseases draw critical attention to the human–animal interface for understanding and explaining global health crises. These include zoonoses that directly affect human health, as well as epizootic events in livestock and wildlife rendering economic and societal systems vulnerable. This paper traces the overlaps between three viral trajectories – that of African Swine Fever (ASF), AIDS, and COVID-19 – to show how technoscientific ways of knowing and responding to disease outbreaks frame certain forms of human–animal contact as risky and dangerous. We mobilize the notion of a reservoir, understood both as (surplus) bodies harboring infectious disease, and an epistemic pool of associations and response protocols accompanying health crises. Our point of departure is a short-lived hypothesis from the 1980s on the connection between AIDS and ASF, which marshalled racialized fears over undesirable interspecies contact. From there we inspect the tension between the epistemic and affective modes of causality in current and historical narratives, which seek the blame for disease in transgressions against nature. By focusing on how disease narratives spill over to social categories of race and class, our analysis questions the depictions of these transgressions from the standpoint of universal humanity.
BOAR Veterinarization of Europe? Hunting for Wild Boar Futures in the Time of African Swine Fever
The BOAR project is an anthropological study of veterinary knowledge and practice beyond animal health, examining how veterinary science increasingly mediates human-wildlife interactions and serves to structure and govern society through biosecurity measures. More specifically, the project focuses on how recreational hunting communities, self-appointed stewards of wild boar, are becoming key subjects for veterinary interventions. The BOAR team members pursue a collaborative, ethnographic investigation of the relationship between three understudied subjects in anthropology: veterinary medicine, European hunting and wild boars.
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