This little pig did not go to market

by winecountrydog Jackie Nippers

Have you ever spent time talking with a pig, or running across a farm field together on a sweet summer afternoon?

Pigs are wonderful, smart, playful, social animals. They deserve to be regarded with respect and treated humanely!

So then why does the popularity of factory-farmed bacon continue to grow?

Sadly, not often do humans stand up and say publicly "Eating bacon and other meats is one thing. But if you can't get meats from pastured farm animals who've been humanely raised, we don't want any of it!"

Maybe everybody just needs to see the truth of how pigs are confined and abused on "factory farms" -- intensive industrial facilities that are not farms at all.

Mum sez she does defy anyone to go on eating factory-farmed bacon, ham, and pork once they've seen what those pigs endure.

Howl. Let us now visit with a happy pig. Furhaps you remember Bella the Piglet, rescued from a factory farm back in 2004?



Bella became a spokespig for the Australian campaign SaveBabe.com, which works to bring an end to factory-farming practices there.

Compassion changes the world, and it all begins with taking a closer look at what's in our food bowls.

Paw-notes: If you're interested in learning about sustainable humane pig operations in the U.S. (free-range animals, raised without antibiotics or hormones), have a look at Sonoma County's Black Pig and the Food Alliance certification organization.

Daydreams of The Outermost House

by winecountrydog Tilin Corgi

Myself and Jackie Nippers are lying at mum's feet, listening to her recite a passage from The Outermost House by naturalist writer Henry Beston.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by a complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, seeing thereby a feather magnified, the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.

In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

They are not brethren. They are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Paw-notes: The Outermost House by Henry Beston is a book chronicling a season the author spent living on the dunes of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was published in 1928 by Doubleday and Doran and is now published by Henry Holt and Company.