Studies have shown, for example, that piglets appear to become stressed by seeing and hearing other piglets that have been placed in restraints.
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Farm owner Sylvia Hook said the activists attempted to cuddle the pigs and piglets, which stressed the animals out, and caused the death of two of her piglets.
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The model shared videos on her Instagram story of herself lounging in the sand with pigs and piglets, stroking their heads and allowing the piglets to lick her hands.
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Her three (also massive) piglets roamed on the sidewalk nearby.
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PRRS often kills piglets and in some cases, also sows.
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They had little goats and piglets you could easily pet.
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There, piglets and tiger cubs are put together in cages.
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Next shot: farmers push and coral their piglets toward slaughter.
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"Piglets are very attached to people, they will constantly squeak to make you play with it or feed it," Chen said, adding that many overwhelmed owners abandon their pet piglets in just a few months.
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Not with actual piglets still roaming Hollywood -- and she names names.
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There will be "barnyard animal cheerleaders," with ducklings, chicks, and piglets.
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It's a considerable shift from cooing over cute corgis or piglets.
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At 2.5 million it's the nation's largest, and is growing exponentially as the sows birth litters of five to six piglets twice a year and those piglets can start reproducing before they are even a year old.
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Then unfortunately, they were putting the piglets back in the wrong pens.
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One of the most horrifying, and surprisingly common, practices is "thumping" piglets.
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The killing method is used on runts and injured or ill piglets.
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A sow was in the throes of delivering a litter of piglets.
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I see all of this—the crates, the dead piglets, the bloodstain.
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Since allowing them to nurse, Treasure and her piglets have been inseparable.
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" He exclaimed, "Did you know that 31 piglets were born here last night?
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Some of these piglets are still growing, says Yang, and they're still healthy.
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Record pigs per litter speaks to farmer efficiency in raising piglets, he said.
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They will don swim shorts and tussle like baby piglets in mud-pulp.
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The album artwork—the group cradling three cute piglets—renders that in visual form.
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Do they open up pregnant sows and pluck little unborn piglets from the womb?
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Right, but Swine Tech would be a customer of yours, not the piglets, correct?
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That shot of the piglets feeding on a swollen, bloated momma pig is very gross.
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The potbellied pig had persevered through abuse to ensure her piglets would have a future.
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Those embryos were then implanted in sows, growing to fully formed piglets, free of PERV.
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A record number of baby piglets that survived during the quarter further fueled herd expansion.
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These prized piglets are nestled inside terra-cotta casseroles and roasted over a fire pit.
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Tiny piglets covered in birth fluid and blood stumble around on the metal grate floors.
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By the edge of the trees, a pen held a nursing pig and her piglets.
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I turned my head and looked around: happy sows and adorable piglets in every direction.
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And no, it doesn't matter that the piglets were scheduled to be slaughtered six months later.
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PRRS, also known as 'blue-ear disease', often kills piglets and in some cases, also sows.
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These piglets could be protected from an infection that costs the swine industry billions each year.
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Though not yet let loose on people, it has successfully stitched up the intestines of piglets.
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The researchers then replicated their results in piglets, whose metabolism more closely resembles that of humans.
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The mystery epidemic had spread to four farms and was killing the piglets, almost 25,000 of them.
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In the meantime, the designer piglets should continue to be studied to make sure they stay healthy.
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To thank the firefighters, the farmer returned the piglets to them — in the form of piglet sausage.
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Once the piglets are weaned, the mother is inseminated anew and the process repeats all over again.
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Each female is capable of birthing at least two litters a year of six or more piglets.
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In Western England this week, a group of firefighters saved 18 adorable baby piglets from a barn fire.
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The farms include mostly sow herds, which produce piglets, and finishing barns that raise pigs to slaughter weight.
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But there's hope on the horizon, thanks to a new study out in Science today involving CRISPR'd piglets.
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Piper is in good company, sharing her sty with adult pigs, Kookie and Kipper, and two other piglets.
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There were 37 PERV-inactivated piglets born; 15 are still alive and the oldest are four months old.
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In addition, piglets and breeding sows are becoming more expensive in China, a result of the mass culling.
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We're not here to boar you with regular old hog shots -- these piglets are raised among the stars.
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Ted Cruz (Texas) are poised to win the Iowa caucuses, according to the predictions of some racing piglets.
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Twice a year, she sells piglets, fetching 15,000 Rwandan francs (about $17), an enormous sum in rural Rwanda.
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But Dr. Church and his colleagues ended up with 15 living piglets, the oldest now 4 months old.
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They remember when he brought squealing piglets to the state house to make a point about "pork" spending.
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This, finally, is the heartbreak that in her writing Ginzburg staved off with the oranges and the piglets.
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In 2011, an undercover investigation at an Iowa Select Farms found employees smashing piglets onto the concrete floor.
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On a farm stay, guests might have the option to stargaze, enjoy outdoor sports, or see piglets birthed.
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Chip posted a photo of six piglets resting alongside a larger pig, presumably their mother, on Instagram early Tuesday.
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Sows, or adult females bred to produce piglets for slaughter, account for roughly one in 232 pigs in China.
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"They were picking piglets up, cuddling them—there was a lot of screaming going on," Hook told the BBC.
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One will alert farmers when piglets are being crushed by their mothers by listening out for young pigs' squeals.
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U.S. sows on average gave birth to a record 10.53 piglets in a litter in the September-November quarter.
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The stamp, issued this week to mark the upcoming Year of the Pig, shows two parents with three piglets.
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Even the luckiest of gamblers sometimes loses—and even the greasiest of piglets sometimes ends up in the abattoir. ■
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"It makes me so sad," said Huang Tiancen, the farm manager, who raised the sows when they were piglets.
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In a major breakthrough, researchers have created gene-edited piglets free of viruses that might cause disease in humans.
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This policy is particularly critical to the well-being of our piglets—the animals they claim to be rescuing.
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Sows, or adult females bred to produce piglets for slaughter, account for roughly one in 10 pigs in China.
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In 2014 America imported 153m eight-to-12-week-old piglets which had been born and weaned on Canadian farms.
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Early tests were positive for PEDV, but by January 2017, they began coming back negative—and piglets were still dying.
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"We're considering using piglets, which is a common pediatric surgery model, as our pre-clinical, large animal trial," she added.
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The Adamses live on a two acre "micro farm," with 70 chickens, two piglets, three guineas, a turkey, and greenhouses.
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Yangxiang will house 30,000 sows on its 13-hectare site by year-end, producing as many as 840,000 piglets annually.
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Authorities would make the transport of piglets easier, while still controlling the risk of spreading African swine fever, he said.
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Yangxiang will house 5003,000 sows on its 11-hectare site by year-end, producing as many as 840,000 piglets annually.
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Outside, farm animals — six piglets, 50 chickens, several dozen brown-and-white cows — crunch through the carpet of winter leaves.
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For example, animal studies have found similar changes in the gut bacteria of piglets when exposed to disinfectants, she said.
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Video footage of the heroic act shows the firefighters hustling out of the smoldering barn with armfuls of grateful little piglets.
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Emma and her piglets are a few of the animals living on the farm that is the center of this film.
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High-calorie diets, like human rubbish, or corn and cereal crops, are causing them to have more piglets, and more often.
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A record number of baby piglets that survived during the quarter helped farmers to be more efficient and boosted herd sizes.
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Tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, may well be the most indestructible animals ever to roam the Earth.
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Cloning often fails; most of the embryos and fetuses died before birth, and some piglets died soon after they were born.
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They return to one pen where, the night before, they freed a group of injured piglets caught under a cage door.
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When piglets began dying on farms in southern China in late October 2016, their owners thought they knew what was going on.
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When Lisa was once asked to participate in thumping piglets, for example, she was able to use sexist stereotypes to her advantage.
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SQUEALING, the ten tiny piglets ran around in panic as policemen booted them with such force that they flew into the air.
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So it was that a contest unfolded: three teams of engineers pitted against one another to adapt facial recognition programs to piglets.
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The embryos were implanted in sows and grew into piglets that were genetically identical to the pig that supplied the initial cell.
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By the numbers: Prices for swine carcasses have soared 31% and piglets 56% in the past year in Europe, according to Bloomberg.
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A litter of rescue piglets is motherless no more, thanks to a boxer named Treasure who's taken the group under her care.
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"Not only sheep, but my heritage hens are laying eggs and I just had five or six litters of piglets," she said.
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The embryos did not grow into part-human piglets and the technique was far from perfect, the researchers reported in the journal Cell.
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Understanding water bears Tardigrades, sometimes called "water bears" or "moss piglets," are tiny micro-animals that have fascinated scientists with their uncanny tenacity.
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Since posing for pregnancy celebration, Sophie has welcomed her little ones into the world: The pig recently gave birth to seven healthy piglets.
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On Tuesday, the Fixer Upper star shared a photo of a sow and six newborn piglets resting peacefully on the family's farm property.
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When the cheese is ready, it can take on many different shakes, like braids, knots, and even a pig-like shape called piglets.
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Soon, I'm spooning with La Mamma, a huge mother pig who has given birth to 170 piglets over the course of her life.
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Over the course of 2016 and 2017, she and her colleagues filmed the pigs using tools to prepare nests for piglets multiple times.
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For days everyone eats sausages, and the streets are filled with the cries of newborn piglets, the makings of Christmas sausages to come.
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The grave also contained the bones of a half-dozen piglets, which may have been consumed during the man's funeral feast, the archaeologists speculate.
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At a basic level, this system will be able to count pigs and piglets, but Alibaba hopes it will also offer more sophisticated analysis.
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But as swine unit manager Doug Jones explains, standing in a temperature-controlled room full of piglets, raising hogs inside allows for speedier growth.
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In February 2017, firefighters from the Pewsey Fire Station in southwest England saved two sows and 18 piglets from a blaze at a nearby farm.
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It reckons that its system can increase to 32 the number of piglets per sow per year, a measure of efficiency in the pig business.
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They even recently got their own pigs, Thelma and Louise, who gave them 16 piglets and are natural soil turners, preparing the land for planting.
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I feel the constant need to stay on top of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter — even though that's like trying to pin down grease-covered piglets.
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Inside an electric fence, a litter of pup-size piglets scampered around a fat black sow, miniature hooves flinging muck over their darkly mottled coats.
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After tending to piglets on a drizzly recent morning, Mr. Jenkins said he did not expect much profit from this year's corn and soybean crops.
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Tardigrades, sometimes referred to as moss piglets or water bears, are eight-legged microscopic animals that like to live in moss, lichen, decaying leaves, and soil.
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Their new project "iAnimal" literally plants viewers amidst a bunch of cramped pigs as they either await slaughter or give birth to piglets within tiny cages.
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Thousands of tardigrades -- also known as "water bears" or "moss piglets" -- were on board the Beresheet spacecraft when it crash landed on the moon in April.
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They were right: The cause of the piglets' illness, identified by the US-based EcoHealth Alliance and published in Nature last week, was a totally new virus.
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Litters of healthy piglets with that genetic tweak have since been born, and some have even gone on to have their own litters with the inherited edit.
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Half of those piglets are still alive, four and a half months after their birth—which would be the ideal age to harvest their organs for transplantation.
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Instead, Hsiung and his team allege that sows remained in gestation crates so long that they wound up giving birth there, with fatal consequences for their piglets.
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The expansive display of nearly identical fiberglass piglets are led by two humans riding a larger, fat-bellied pig, together questioning the rise of materialism within Chinese culture.
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Some are also looking to add space for the heavier pigs currently favored by customers and to cater for extra piglets as sows become more fertile, experts said.
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After both piglets got off to a speedy start, the two began to run in circles, before Team Cruz ultimately snorted his (or her) way to a win.
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The smallest cubs and piglets nurse together from a sow or sometimes from a tiger — an echo of the Tiger Temple's marketing mantra of peaceful coexistence among species.
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The tiny animals, colloquially known as water bears or moss piglets, can survive extreme temperatures and pressures, years without food, and direct exposure to the vacuum of space.
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Visitors at a petting farm in the northern city of Taoyuan get a kick out feeding milk to piglets in a pen, and many want to take one home.
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Last year they dropped piglets in Kampala and Jinja (in the latter a police chief accused the Brotherhood of "holding an unlawful assembly and violating the rights of pigs").
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Eager to promote that accomplishment, the piglets are place with different farmers across the globe, building toward a contest to see who has raised the best bacon-to-be.
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I'm hopeful that our research in piglets could eventually lead to treatments for both people and animals designed to mitigate the adverse effects of stress on the GI health.
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Hsiung claims that he has seen, at Smithfield facilities, piglets get stuck in these slats after their mothers had given birth, after which they likely fell to their deaths.
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And only a few days later, the glacier, also referred to as PIG, "spawned piglets," ESA said -- in a process known as calving -- and "many large" icebergs were formed.
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In a striking advance that helps open the door to organ transplants from animals, researchers have created gene-edited piglets cleansed of viruses that might cause disease in humans.
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For a few days people ate nothing but sfrizzoli , incredible sausages that made you drink the whole time; and then the squeal of new piglets would fill the street.
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Bleeding animal carcasses, piglets torn from their mothers, and the harrowing squeals of pigs being led to slaughter could be coming to a university campus or high street near you.
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Many farmers in central and western Canada specialize in "feeder pigs" — piglets that are born in Canada and shipped to American farms when they are just a few months old.
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We started in the breeding area, a series of long metal warehouses filled with tiny newborn piglets and pregnant sows big enough to knock a small car off the road.
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While Prissy is the flagship pig of the account, she's often joined by life partner Pops and various other little piglets with — and I cannot stress this enough — seasonal outfits!!!
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The edits were made early in the embryonic stage, removing the bit of gene in a laboratory while the piglets were still merely zygotes then implanting the embryos into mother pigs.
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The 18 piglets and two sows were rescued after an electrical fault set hay on fire at a farm in Milton Lilbourne, 70 miles (110 km) west of London, in February.
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In other health news, geneticists have created piglets cleansed of viruses, above, that might cause disease in humans, an important step toward creating a new supply of organs for transplant patients.
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Priscilla was particularly adept at using the sticks to prepare for her offspring, according to CNN, and she may have taught her mate and piglets how to copy her unique skills.
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If it is one of the 35,000 piglets raised each year on Soren Sondergaard's sprawling farm, odds are the animal will get just a single course before it goes to slaughter.
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It argued that some of the dead piglets shown in the film were stillborn and accused DxE of hand-placing piglet carcasses in the same gestation crate as live newborn ones.
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The group says it has maintained a purposeful ignorance of where the two piglets ended up, but that to DxE's knowledge they haven't been confiscated by the FBI or Circle Four.
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Before filming began, Sidney and his colleague Diana found a gruesome circle of dead piglets outside the house, and, believing Agnes was the culprit, slapped the unstable actress with a restraining order.
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Some people have pointed out that the piglets were being raised to become sausages or bacon anyway, while others have called the Fire Station "insensitive and unprofessional" for grilling these particular pigs.
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Now, thanks to CRISPR engineering scientists have successfully created piglets free of certain viruses, and humans are now one step closer to receiving not just pig valves, but entire porcine organ transplants.
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The DBV German Farmers' Federation called for a 70-percent cut of the country's wild boar population, saying hunters should also be allowed to kill sows and newborn piglets, the newspaper said.
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Some even saw the issuing of a Year of the Pig stamp for 2019, featuring two adult pigs with three happy piglets, as a sign the Communist Party was preparing to move.
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This spring, he and a codefendant, Paul Darwin Picklesimer, will face trial in Utah for breaking into Circle Four Farms, one of the world's largest pig farms, and taking out two piglets.
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The virtual tour showed many of the same sights as DxE's VR experience—minus the blood, feces, and dead piglets in crates and a garbage bin—with daytime lighting and uplifting music.
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Baby pigs on farms are especially vulnerable to illness, and one particular disease, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, causes exactly the symptoms the piglets were having—vomiting, severe diarrhea, death from dehydration, and stress.
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Then, by transplanting these purged nuclei into egg cells extracted from sows' ovaries, and implanting the results into other sows' uteruses, they created eight litters of PERV-free piglets—30 animals in all.
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But a non-profit called Action on Armed Violence offered half the men a package of agricultural training, counselling and farming kit (such as seeds, piglets and tools) worth $125, in two instalments.
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By focusing on animal welfare and implementing new management practices to eliminate individual stressors or intervene therapeutically with mast cell blockers, we can lower the overall threshold of stress that the piglets experience.
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His idea quickly spreads throughout the animal kingdom, attracting a wide range of contestants, from a mother of 25 piglets, played by Reese Witherspoon, to a porcine punk rocker, played by Scarlett Johansson.
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By the end of the year, 10,226 sows will live inside two huge barns on this 280-hectare (22017-acre) site, producing up to 25,2000 piglets annually, or about 235,2003 tonnes of pork.
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In a portion of the film Mr. Hsiung narrates, dead piglets are piled up behind a sow who is wedged into a crate so tightly that she cannot move away from the mess.
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"If you have 10 million pigs to raise, you can barely count how many piglets were born on a daily basis when the due date comes," said Tequ Group's chief information officer, Zhang Haifeng.
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Through my lab's research of piglets and early-life stress, we have been able to significantly lower the stress and GI disease that they experience through their life by eliminating individual early-life stressors.
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In this exclusive sneak peek at the new documentary The Biggest Little Farm — out May 10 — we see Emma the pig teaching her tiny piglets how to cover their bodies in mud — nature's sunscreen.
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Beginning with 35 gilts and five boars, she gave pregnant pigs to Delta families who agreed to care for them, return the mother pig to the bank and keep the remaining piglets as dividends.
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His animals also got to keep their tails, unlike American and most Danish piglets, whose tails are cut off without anesthesia to avoid the tail-biting injuries that can occur in closely packed barns.
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The film shows sows with bloody and mangled teats; pregnant sows gnawing on the bars of the narrow stalls they live in until they give birth; and piglets clambering over and nibbling dead siblings.
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The researchers, including famous Harvard geneticist George Church, used the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 and the same technology used to clone Dolly the sheep to create healthy piglets that can't transmit harmful viruses.
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A UK farmer is claiming that a large group of vegans stormed her pig farm and, in their attempt to bring attention to the plight of the animals, accidentally caused the death of two piglets.
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Micro pigs are these tiny little oinklets, the size of small dogs (though they eventually grow to be the size of large dogs) and there were, at the time of visiting, one-day-old piglets.
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The neighbors were leaving, too, Their sow and piglets squealing As they ran after the moving truck, And even that scarecrow I once tied to a tree So it would have to listen to me.
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The first stop was the insemination shed, followed by a visit to the nursery, where sows suckle their new piglets — which are born walking and with a full set of teeth — in well-heated pens.
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They organized scores of them — including a skull, a small cannon, an oil drum, a life preserver and a pink sow suckling piglets — on a platform of fake wood planks and called it "The Raft" (1982).
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It's hard to know who deserves the top prize: the stay-at-home-mom pig with 25 piglets (Reese Witherspoon), the young gangsta gorilla with daddy issues (Taron Egerton) or one of the other gifted animals.
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She says there is no available anesthetic for the procedures, that castrating boars is necessary to prevent the meat from becoming too musky, and that cutting off piglets' tails prevents them from biting each other's tails.
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Hurricane Florence bore down on the densest area of hog farming in the U.S. — which also has some of the laxest regulations surrounding the storage of hog waste, including urine, feces, blood, and even dead piglets.
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Breeding pigs supplied by U.K.-based Genus and others from Canada, France and the United States produce a higher number of piglets per litter, more lean meat and grow faster than China's once-common native breeds.
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Like "The Leftovers," it's fuelled by cockeyed, hyper-saturated imagery, including dreamlike visions—piglets racing across a courtroom; cracked eggs that resolve into a smiley face—that don't need to be fully understood to be effective.
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Along the way, they frolicked in the fake snow, communed with puppies, piglets and baby goats, and had their photos snapped on a 2,500-square-foot sound stage, painstakingly decked out to resemble a South Korean mountaintop.
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Hsiung responded by sending two other angles of that same scene, saying that the layers of dried and wet feces below and above dead piglets in the stall would have required hours of careful work to assemble.
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Animal rights group Mercy for Animals released a video publicly on Tuesday that showed large number of pigs and piglets constrained in small spaces, being treated cruelly and left to suffer from injuries and illnesses without veterinary care.
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Once dubbed the "mystery swine disease," it emerged in the late 1980's on farms in Europe and the US and spread rapidly, causing piglets to die and adult pigs to be afflicted with fever, lethargy, and respiratory distress.
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Speculation that China may further ease its two-child policy was sparked early this month when China Post unveiled the design of a stamp for release next year that features a family of two pigs and three cheerful piglets.
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I know that they are really piglets of a larger variety, the potbellied pig, which are unintentionally underfed by owners who have been led by dishonest sellers to believe that the pigs need to eat less than they really do.
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In the early morning hours of February 21, firefighters from the Pewsey Fire Station in southwest England were called to a barn fire, where they rescued two sows and 18 piglets from a blaze started by 60 tons of hay.
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The company has stated publicly that sows on its farms will remain in crates while being inseminated, then moved to group housing with other mother pigs, and then moved to bigger "farrowing crates" with their piglets once they've given birth.
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Lusk and Norwood also find good results for the "confinement plus" system, in which sows have limited access to the outdoors but plenty of space for themselves and their piglets and plenty of space to roam freely outside their lying area.
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The final shot of the film, which began with a dumpster full of piglet carcasses, shows VR close-ups of the two rescued piglets at a sanctuary as they happily root around in a sawdust bed under a clear blue sky.
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That included immediately abolishing local rules preventing pig-farming that were not in line with the law, as well as allowing for piglets and chilled pork to be added to a list of fresh products that are exempt from highway toll fees.
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In 2013, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus entered the country — no one is yet sure how, though the cause may have been contamination of the bags that hold bulk feed — and killed at least seven million piglets, spiking pork prices by almost 10 percent.
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Hunters are usually able to kill only adult pigs, and because pigs can reproduce as early as 6 months old and have litters of six piglets or more several times a year, they're typically able to withstand heavy spates of recreational hunting.
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To reduce the stress on piglets that sometimes leads to infectious diarrhea, Mr. Nielsen and most Danish farmers have allowed them to wean for a month or so before separating them from their mothers, a week longer than the average American pig.
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A literature review from the American Veterinary Medical Association in 2013 documents extensive evidence that piglets experience pain during castration, from their high levels of stress hormones like cortisol, their squealing, and their trembling and lying alone for days following the procedure.
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A report published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details the lengths a group of Chinese scientists, led by Jianguo Zhao of Beijing's Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, went to in order to engineer these piglets.
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The teensy little creepy-crawlies, which average less than a millimetre in length and are also known as water bears or moss piglets, are able to go into a dehydrated state and survive some of the harshest environments, including the vacuum of space. Yup.
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Pig farmers are often burdened financially by this genetic shortcoming in their pigs: Farmers have to install heat lamps to keep their pigs warm, which translates to more money on their end, and in infancy, many piglets can't even survive such conditions—they simply end up dying.
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Then he escapes into the woods and there are these extended beautiful sections when he's just figuring out how to navigate, roping piglets, making fires, listening to the trees, eating honey and finding herbs and different flowers and just sort of sleeping and listening to the birds.
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A little more than a month after its Operation Deathstar release, Hsiung received a phone call from a rattled volunteer at an Erie, Colorado, animal sanctuary, telling him that FBI agents had just visited and demanded to search the property for the two stolen Circle Four piglets.
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"My in-laws gave us two piglets, which brought us manure to farm a plot of leased land, crops we could sell at the market, and ultimately enough money to buy our own piece of land," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, keeping an eye on her constantly buzzing phone.
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On their last night in the facility, Paul Picklesimer carried the VR rig behind Hsiung as he chose two piglets from a birthing barn, both of whom he believed looked sick and weak enough that they wouldn't last much longer on the farm, yet seemed healthy enough to survive their rescue.
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The seven-minute tour takes you through the life of a factory-farmed pig, including piglets being tail-docked and castrated without pain relief, sows suckling their young in pens so small they can't stand, and males being fattened in such confinement that they turn on each other or succumb to disease.
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We passed by old pens where the island foxes had been bred when they were on the brink of extinction — an event caused by a complicated cocktail of invaders: golden eagles had been drawn to the island by piglets, which were easy prey, and welcomed as a check on the pig population.
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The British mustered a strike force of paratroopers and London bobbies and invaded the island in a pre-dawn landing that the world press playfully derided as the Bay of Piglets, a sly reference to the failed Bay of Pigs assault on Cuba in 250 by counterrevolutionaries backed by the United States.
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There, Subicz sets to work as a novelist, but with Reichsmarks worthless and Deutschmarks scarce—and a wife, and a son, and mistresses, and a prostitute habit—he takes on sideline gigs scribbling scripts for the "piglets" of the German film industry, eager to revive the glory, if not the aesthetics, of Weimar's Ufa.
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If you think the conditions in factory pig farms — like Smithfield in North Carolina, where an investigation shows mother pigs forced into tiny cages where they can't move around and frequently crush their piglets to death accidentally — are morally acceptable, it's hard to see why gunning down or euthanizing feral hogs would be any worse.
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Stirring the oats, I smile to think of the automated breakfast machine constructed by the eccentric inventor Caractacus Potts in the film "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" from my childhood, or the one Rosita Pig makes in the recent movie "Sing" to allow her to slip away from the morning routine for her dozen-plus piglets.
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A few seconds later, Hsiung—now a virtual Hsiung, standing in front of me in the dark of a Utah desert night, not the physical one I'd just been talking to—is showing me a dumpster whose floor is lined with dead piglets, the bloody carcass of a full-grown pig thrown face down on top of them.
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Breast versus bottle is but one of the many debates wending through Kurlansky's often fascinating ("Thomas Jefferson liked to serve ice cream on sponge cake with a lightly baked meringue on top"), sometimes mundane ("In addition to milk, cheese and porridge, the Dutch ate huge quantities of butter") and occasionally weird ("There are also records of women in the highlands of New Guinea breast-feeding piglets, pre-European Hawaiians breast-feeding puppies, and Guyanese women breast-feeding deer") new book, which can be seen as nothing less than an attempt to tell the history of the world via what is, let's face it, a bodily fluid.
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