Pig Hunting Quotes

In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.

A pig painted gold is still a pig.

Most of us believe that eating meat is natural because humans have hunted and consumed animals for millennia. And it is true that we have been eating meat as part of an omnivorous diet for at least two million years (though for the majority of this time our diet was still primarily vegetarian). But to be fair, we must acknowledge that infanticide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are at least as old as meat eating, and are therefore arguably as 'natural'--and yet we don't invoke the history of these acts as justification for them. As with other acts of violence, when it comes to eating meat, we must differentiate between natural and justifiable.

He poked his finger into my chest again. “Well, I have something to tell you: don’t let the sun set on you in this county, because…” I grabbed his wrist and yanked him forward, tripping him with my foot. He went down back first and I caught him by his throat, three feet above the ground, lifted him up a bit and bent down to his face. My eyes glowed with murderous red. My voice turned rough with an animal growl. “Listen well, because I won’t be repeating myself, you racist prick. If you make any trouble for me or my people, I’ll hunt you down like the pig you are and carve a second mouth across your gut. They’ll find you hanging by your own intestines. The next time you hear something laugh and howl in the night, hug your family, because you won’t see the sunrise.” I opened my fingers. He crashed on the ground, his face white as a sheet. He scrambled backward, rolled to his feet, and took off. The three shapeshifters stared at me, openmouthed. “That’s how you intimidate people. No witnesses and not a mark on him. Get your asses to the car.

What had I believed at ten? Anything I wanted. Any tale to make the day more fun, the night more alarming. In giant pigs rooting beneath the streets. In the corpse-eaters who pulled black carts by night, hunting children out past curfew.

It's a pretty blokey magazine [Bacon Busters, 'Australia's only magazine dedicated to pig hunting'], but they have women in it too. There's a 'Boars and Babes' section: women in bikinis sitting on big old pigs.

When we were little, Scarlett and I were utterly convinced that we'd originally been one person in our mother's belly. We believed that somehow, half of us wanted to be born and half wanted to stay. So our heart had to be broken in two so that Scarlett could be born first, and then I finally braved the outside world a few years later. It made sense, in our pig-tailed heads--it explained why, when we ran through grass or danced or spun in circle long enough, we would lose track of who was who and it started to feel as if there were some organic, elegant link between us, our single heart holding the same tempo and pumping the same blood. That was before the attack, though. Now our hearts link only when we're hunting, when Scarlett looks at me with a sort of beautiful excitement that's more powerful than her scars and then tears after a Fenris as though her life depends on its death. I follow, always, because it's the only time when our hearts beat in perfect harmony, the only time when I'm certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are one person broken in two.

[The skeet tournament] It's a competition that I've entered – and won – every year since I was thirteen. And here's the thing – it really pisses them off. All these hunting boys and their daddies show up decked out in camo gear, determined to beat the girl who has the audacity to challenge their masculinity. And, okay, I'll admit it … I like to needle 'em just a bit. I purposely wear the girliest outfit possible – little flowery sundresses with cowboy boots, most years. Drives 'em nuts. If they're going to be beaten by a girl, they'd rather it be some tomboy wearing overalls and a flannel shirt, you know? Stupid sexist pigs.---(Jenna Cafferty)

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.

It was one of those red-gold early October days, the air crisp and tart as heady as applejack, and even at dawn the sky was the clear, purplish blue that only the finest of autumn days brings. There are maybe three such days in a year. I sang as I lifted my traps, and my voice bounced off the misty banks of the Loire like a challenge. It was the mushroom season, so after I had brought my catch back to the farm and cleaned it out, I took some bread and cheese for breakfast and set out into the woods to hunt for mushrooms. I was always good at that. Still am, to tell the truth, but in those days I had a nose like a truffle pig's. I could smell those mushrooms out, the gray chanterelle and the orange, with its apricot scent, the bolet and the petit rose and the edible puffball and the brown-cap and the blue-cap. Mother always told us to take our mushrooms to the pharmacy to ensure we had not gathered anything poisonous, but I never made a mistake. I knew the meaty scent of the bolet and the dry, earthy smell of the brown-cap mushroom. I knew their haunts and breeding grounds. I was a patient collector.

Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother’s ankles, was banished to the freezer before she developed a taste for small children.

To further complicate the matter, we are altering the dynamic with pathogens simply through our encounters with them. By venturing into the microbes’ homes deep in rain forests, for logging, planting, and hunting for bushmeat; by concentrating large numbers of people together; by breeding millions and millions of pigs and poultry and keeping them in close confines; by overusing and misusing antimicrobial drugs, we humans are forcing microbes to adapt to continual stresses and giving them opportunities nature never did.

The names of the dogs were Pretty and Amandier. Pretty was a little dog with silky, ivory-coloured fur. He was what people call a lap dog, though this was not at all how he thought of himself. Amandier was a pale hunting dog, fine-boned, rough-coated and sensitive in nature. I do hope there’s no bears or wolves in this part of the wood today, she said. Can you smell wolves? She was rather an anxious person. I love wolfies, said Apple happily. They’re so-oo darling! Pretty looked at her. You have odd ideas for a pig, he said.

Pig Higgins, is that you?" Andrew asked. "Oh, it is. Yes, I'm surprised. Did you forget I don't like surprises? What? No, don't stall. You wouldn't hunt me down after all this time just to chat, so what do you want?" Andrew went quiet for a few seconds to listen, then said, "No," and hung up.

What was the human animal in the midst of the siege? An herbivore that crawled on all fours, browsing on dirty grasses. A predator that hunted alone or in packs. A social animal that spoke of noble art and wound violin strings from the guts of dead sheep and pigs. A creature with canine teeth for tearing, but with a tongue for speaking. A mouth that could devour or sing.

nasty little dragon. It wouldn’t happen again. He was St George and he would slay the dragon. That was how it worked, wasn’t it? He knew the story. He was a hero, a patron saint. He was England. This country was his. His people were marching towards him from all corners. He would take his throne. But first he had to destroy the dragon. He would butcher him like a piece of meat; a long pig, that’s all he was: cutlets, chops, ribs and chitterlings. He would make sausages out of him, ha, because in the end he was nothing more than a side of pork … No, smaller than that. He was just a lamb. A leg of lamb. Yes. He would slaughter the lamb.

Where’s the training ground?” He thought he knew my reason for asking. “Oh no you don’t,” he said. “This isn’t Sparta. You heard what Lord Oeneus thinks of women who act like men. You’ll offend him.” “What offends him is women who do better than men,” I said. “Don’t worry, I don’t want to do sword practice with any of them.” I indicated the still-swaggering hunters. “If one of them beats me, he’ll claim I had twelve arms, six heads, and spat poison. I just want to watch how you’re all preparing for the hunt.” “Well, well, so you want to watch men exercising?” Castor snickered. “My little sister’s growing up!” I gave him a hard look. “The boar isn’t the only pig around here.” That made him laugh outright. “Ah, Helen, I’m only joking.

I had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat, but I was afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny, and, worse, might ruin some appetites. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace. But as the conversation at the table unfurled like a sail amid the happy clatter of silver, tacking from stories of hunting to motherlodes of mushrooms to abalone adventures, I realized that in this particular case, words of grace were unnecessary. Why? Because that's what the meal itself had become, for me certainly, but I suspect for some of the others, too: a wordless way of saying grace.

The king needs riders,” Mother Blackbeak said, still staring at the horizon. “Riders for his wyverns—to be his aerial cavalry. He’s been breeding them in the Gap all these years.” It had been a while—too damn long—but Manon could feel the threads of fate twisting around them, tightening. “And when we are done, when we have served him, he will let us keep the wyverns. To take our host to reclaim the Wastes from the mortal pigs who now dwell there.” A fierce, wild thrill pierced Manon’s chest, sharp as a knife. Following the Matron’s gaze, Manon looked to the horizon, where the mountains were still blanketed with winter. To fly again, to soar through the mountain passes, to hunt down prey the way they’d been born to … They weren’t enchanted ironwood brooms. But wyverns would do just fine.

The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons—more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of existence—the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers’ fruit and had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies’ hat. In 1914, the last surviving members of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity. A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s. These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.

Living in America exposes a citizen to the refined genteelness that draws some people to public services as well as the glad-handing politicians and their bucket brigade of minions fervidly running interference for their party’s headline hunting political agendas. The clash of social tension, imagery of racial and class outrage, and frequent raucous celebrations inundate America. Americans are also targets to the ceaseless wave of propaganda spewed out by national and international companies hawking their plastic products. The unadulterated grotesque mélange spit out by the American publicity machine exposes its citizenry to more meaningless mental pulp than other any other county’s citizens must tolerate. Public debates, scandals, violence, political grandstanding, and crisis management drive much of the public discourse. American politics is an oily affair, akin to watching a pack of overfed, flushed face, and breathless contestants chasing a greased pig at a county fair. Politics is class warfare and American politics contains its share of Rambo politicians. Warring American political parties include Taliban subgroups, people who would prefer to cut the heads off their ideological enemies.

This day, however, was a special day. Everyone had breakfasted on the remains of the Christmas feast, and now the boys, along with a dozen noblemen and Prince Llywelyn, were going to hunt boar, apparently a tradition the day after Christmas. Anna’s comment when she’d heard about it resounded in David’s ears: That sounds about right. Good will and peace to all men, and now, let’s kill a giant pig!

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training race-horses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.

I have little fear walking up to a pig on a farm or my neighbor’s dog, but I wouldn’t dream of approaching a wild boar or a wolf in the same way. Over generations of breeding, farmers have reduced the aggressiveness of these and other animals by selecting for lower levels of testosterone and higher levels of serotonin.36 Correspondingly, many domesticated species have smaller faces. Intriguingly, some wild species also evolved reduced aggression, less territoriality, and more tolerance on their own through another kind of selection known as self-domestication. The best example are bonobos. Bonobos are the rarer, less well-known cousins of chimpanzees that live only in remote forests south of the Congo River in Africa. But unlike male chimpanzees and gorillas, male bonobos rarely engage in regular, ruthless, reactive violence. Whereas male chimpanzees frequently and fiercely attack each other to achieve dominance and regularly beat up females, male bonobos seldom fight.37 Bonobos also engage in much less proactive violence. Experts hypothesize that bonobos self-domesticated because females were able to form alliances that selected for cooperative, unaggressive males with lower levels of androgens and higher levels of serotonin.38 Tellingly, like humans, bonobos also have smaller browridges and smaller faces than chimpanzees.39 Many scientists are testing the idea that humans also self-domesticated.40 If so, I’d speculate this process involved two stages. The first reduction occurred early in the genus Homo through selection for increased cooperation with the origins of hunting and gathering. The second reduction might have occurred within our own species, Homo sapiens, as females selected for less reactively aggressive males.

Among the animals cited as having a connection to the Wild Hunt, it is quite startling to find the pig, Freyr’s sacred animal (F III), but also a beast that plays a role in Celtic funerary gifts during the Hallstatt (1000–500 BCE) and the La Tene (500–300 BCE) eras. The pig is one of the most often cited ghost animals, and it appears most often around Christmas and during Advent, which is hardly surprising, for we know that the restless dead—sinners, suicides, the sacrilegious, the greedy, and the usurious—often appear in this form21 and that women who slew their children emerged in the shape of a sow accompanied by her piglets.

Oh pshaw, Freddy,” said the cow, “you know perfectly well that you can’t shadow anybody unless you hide from them, and an animal as big as I am can’t hide behind one or two little spears of grass the way a cat or a dog can. And besides, you said yourself that an animal couldn’t be a good defective without a lot of practice. What else could I do?” “Why, you’ll just have to give up being a detective, that’s all,” replied the pig. “At least that kind of detective. Because there’s lots to detective work besides shadowing. You have to hunt for clues, too, and then think about them until you can figure out what they mean.” Mrs. Wiggins sighed heavily. “Oh dear!” she said. “You know thinking isn’t my strong point, Freddy. I mean, I’ve got good brains, but they aren’t the kind that think easily. They’re the kind of brains that if you let ’em go their own way, they are as good as anybody’s, but if you try to make them do anything, like a puzzle, they just won’t work at all.” “Well,” said Freddy, “detective work is a good deal like a puzzle. But I do think you ought not to try to do this shadowing. Mr. Bean certainly won’t like having the corn spoiled this way, and he’s been pretty touchy lately anyway. Not that I blame him, now that all the animals have started to play detective all over the farm. I heard him tell Mrs. Bean that he was getting sick and tired of having about fifteen animals sneaking along behind him every time he leaves the house. And whenever he looks up from his work, he says, no matter where he is, there are eyes peering at him—dozens and dozens of eyes watching him from hiding-places.

In such prototribal societies, individuals who found it harder to play along, to restrain their antisocial impulses, and to conform to the most important collective norms would not have been anyone’s top choice when it came time to choose partners for hunting, foraging, or mating. In particular, people who were violent would have been shunned, punished, or in extreme cases killed. This process has been described as “self-domestication.”71 The ancestors of dogs, cats, and pigs got less aggressive as they were domesticated and shaped for partnership with human beings. Only the friendliest ones approached human settlements in the first place; they volunteered to become the ancestors of today’s pets and farm animals. In a similar way, early humans domesticated themselves when they began to select friends and partners based on their ability to live within the tribe’s moral matrix. In fact, our brains, bodies, and behavior show many of the same signs of domestication that are found in our domestic animals: smaller teeth, smaller body, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness, carried on even into adulthood.72 The reason is that domestication generally takes traits that disappear at the end of childhood and keeps them turned on for life. Domesticated animals (including humans) are more childlike, sociable, and gentle than their wild ancestors. These

I picked one of the black dirt-encrusted beauties up and breathed in its earthy, sensual scent. This gift of gourmet delights, worth its weight in gold, was clearly delivered by the cooking gods. "D'Artagnan and Aramis are not only hunting dogs, they're wildly talented truffle trackers,"said Phillipa. Thanks to the Times, I knew dogs had mostly replaced pigs years ago on the quest for truffles because they were easier to train and didn't chow down on the fungus after they found it.

When he gave me his cell phone the other day, I may have glanced at his text messages. Okay, fine, I burrowed through that shit like a pig on the hunt for truffles. Because I’m a murderer. I’m pretty sure snooping through someone’s phone is the nicest thing I’m expected to do.

You speak so easily of war, when so many of your brothers and sisters lie dead at the bottom of the ocean, at the hands of the King’s navy. That is war.” “When the maggot infested, mouldy bread runs out, and you’re so desperate for food that you daydream about finding a rat to cook, and stare contemplative at your fingers. That is war.” “When you’re conscripted, spend years killing people, for a king, who look just like you, and come home to find your wife in bed with a man who dodged the call of battle. That is war.” “When your people, your kind and everyone you love are hunted down and butchered like pigs in their sleep whilst they lay abed, just because of their ancestry. That is war.” “When mothers put their daughters to the sword, rather than letting the victors have them as spoils of war. That is war.” “When your wife fades away in your arms, simply because you and your kind have been labelled persons of interest for the knife. That is war.” “When you sacrifice everything so that your daughter might live a better life, away from persecution, prejudice and fear, and then she is taken from you anyway. That is war.

A helpless elephant hunted by sharpshooters waiting by the water hall, a deer fleeing the hunter or dying on a highway, a pig or lamb or calf trapped amid the bedlam, - they cannot draw a meaning from their hardship, or find refuge in God, or pray for deliverance. That still leaves the enduring of it, the deprivation and fear and panic and loneliness. We know those feelings too.

Island life, with all of its quirks and anachronisms, also fascinated Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection before Darwin published his, but the fact that he was not an independently wealthy gentleman who owned a country house with a swan-encrusted ornamental lake and hedge maze meant Darwin got all the glory. Wallace’s Island Life considered how isolation could preserve animals such as Mauritius’s dodo and New Zealand’s moa, but left them totally unprepared for contact with dogs, pigs and hungry sailors and/ or Māori, which rapidly population-bottlenecked them into extinction.

lane to let four trucks enter the highway. Gaspar tried to move over into the right lane because traffic was still moving there, albeit slowly. Kim checked her side mirror and saw Gramps coming up in his panel truck on the right. Gramps waved and grinned as he and his pigs

A helpless elephant hunted by sharpshooters waiting by the water hall, a deer fleeing the hunter or dying on a highway, a pig or lamb or calf trapped amid the bedlam, - they cannot draw a meaning from their hardship, or find refuge in God, or pray for deliverance. That still leaves the enduring of it, the deprivation and fear and panic and loneliness. We know those feelings too.

Hunt had helped set up the Bay of Pigs, was one of the Watergate “plumbers,” and was alleged by one Lee Harvey Oswald familiar to have involved him in a mind-control operation.25

Environmental historian Valeria Fogleman wrote that perhaps the early Christian colonists saw themselves figuratively as the wolves’ prey based on the New Testament’s anecdote of Jesus sending his followers out as sheep among wolves. Their antipathy and fear toward wolves was a physical manifestation of their spiritual protectiveness, she wrote, for “wolves were considered capable of murdering a person’s soul.” Wolves were also viewed through a religious and cultural lens as animals that made pacts with the devil, thereby garnering them the stigma of being full of trickery and evil. Livestock damages may have been the rational argument for clearing wolves from the woods around settlements, but wolves likely also symbolized a potent religious threat in the minds of some early colonists. The Native Americans did not view wolves so negatively, and some even tattooed images of wolves - along with moose, deer, bears, and birds - on their cheeks and arms, according to William Wood, writing about New England in 1634, described the “ravenous howling Wolfe: Whose meagre paunch suckes like a swallowing gulfe” in a passage that imparts the belief that wolves consumed more prey than was necessary. Wood wished that all the wolves of the country could be replaced by bears, but only on the condition that the wolves were banished completely, because he believed wolves hunted and ate black bears. He also lamented that “common devourer,” the wolf, preying upon moose and deer. No doubt, the colonists wanted the bears, moose, and deer for their own meat and hide supplies. Yet Wood also observed the wolves of New England to be different from wolves in other countries. He wrote that they were not known to attack people, and that they did not attack horses or cows but went after pigs, goats, and red calves. The colonists seemed to believe the wolves mistook calves that were more coppery colored for deer, so much so that a red-colored calf sold for much less than a black one.

The mythic journey to the village of the pig people can be compared to the first trip into space and the view of Earth afforded thereby: the space trip does not actually distance us from ourselves as much as the mythic trip does. The journey from human reality to pig reality reprises an ancient 'reversal' in roles, from hunter to hunted, which has been an important wellspring of metaphoric thinking. The universal human value of being able to look back from a different place was noted by Wittgenstein, who also noted the difficulty of doing so - a dilemma of the human consciousness.

They aren’t native to the area. These wild pigs are a cross between free-ranging domestic hogs and massive, wary Russian wild boars imported by a wealthy businessman for his private hunting lodge on Hoopers Bald, North Carolina in 1912.

Even after Wes’s full recovery and the opportunity to unwind on a Fijian surfing safari, the close call seemed to set Steve back emotionally. The devastation of losing his mother and then nearly losing his best friend weighed heavily on his mind. Steve was not worried about his own mortality and was always very open about it. But the recent events only gave him more cause to think about life and death. “I can’t even think of anything happening to you or Bindi,” Steve told me. “I just wouldn’t cope.” Seeing Wes lying in a hospital bed made Steve so emotional. It never ceased to amaze me how tough Steve was on the outside, but how deeply loving he was on the inside. He showed his feelings more than any man I ever met. Years after he lost his dog Chilli to a shooting accident (a local man accidentally killed her while he was hunting pigs), he still mourned. During our nighttime conversations, we spoke at great length about spirituality and belief. Steve’s faith had been tremendously tested. At times he would lash out and blame God, and sometimes he would proclaim that he did not believe in God at all. I knew he was just lashing out, and I’d try to use humor to get him back on track. “You can’t have it both ways,” I would gently remind him. When bad things happened to good people, or when innocent animals experienced human cruelty, it shook Steve to the core. His strong feelings demanded deep spiritual answers, and he searched for them all his life.

Perhaps his most imaginative media operation was taking control of the animated film version of George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian classic Animal Farm. The book’s ending, in which animals realize that both ruling groups in the barnyard are equally corrupt, is a trenchant rejection of the binary worldview. Allen realized that this message implicitly contradicted much of what the United States was saying about the Cold War. By investing in the film and influencing its content through a team of operatives that included E. Howard Hunt, a veteran of PB/Success, he arranged for the film version to end quite differently. Only the pigs are corrupt, and ultimately patriotic rebels overthrow them. Orwell’s widow was disgusted, but the film reached a wide audience. The United States Information Agency distributed it around the world.