All about pigs

You can’t fatten a pig on market day.

That’s a cry heard around election manifestos that offer a variety of  enticements to voters that fall short of real solutions.

A British contender in their upcoming vote says pensioners’ benefits will be improved so they can live out the rest of their days with dignity.

Vote catching pigshit, if you ask me.

Elderly who have worked their fingers to the bone for decades are at the mercy of conniving, pig-like politicians and money moguls.

We all know how the pigs took control of  Animal Farm in George Orwell’s masterpiece. Head pig Napoleon is a parody of Joseph Stalin who makes the other animals suffer.

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. 

As my namesake George Barnard Shaw put it, “Never wrestle with a pig because you’ll both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

The pig is a much maligned creature – loved, hated or avoided altogether for religious reasons. Humans “pig out,” “make a pig of themselves,” eat too much, “live in a pigsty,” a messy abode, “sweat like a pig,” not actually correct as pigs don’t sweat, “live on the pig’s back,” prosperity well above all the mud below, and “if pigs could fly” we would all be in trouble.

Pigs are omnivores. They’ll  eat anything. In the annals of criminology murderers have thrown their victims’ bodies into pig sties. They break up bones and leave just traces of hair and teeth.

In the Rwanda genocide we reporters never ate pork or bacon and eggs. Chickens pluck and eat human corpses too. If meat was to be had at all , it had to be that of the vegetarian ruminant goat.

I like pigs but not all the time. There’s so much more in life to be concerned with.