The Half-Pig.

At the Tolson museum in Huddersfield there are some very interesting exhibitions. Best of all are the dead animals. And best of all the dead animals is the Half-Pig. It is the first thing they visit.

 

The Half-Pig is in a glass box in the middle of the room, so you can walk all the way round and see it from every angle. There is nothing more thrilling for a young vegetarian than this, circling a perfectly butchered creature, pausing indulgently before each “whole” view. It is an encounter with death, held quite apart, quite safe, quite separate - but close. Close enough to feel its arcane significance. 

 

First, the insides: a dark, complex maze of gore. R takes very seriously the responsibility of knowing what this pig could never have known about itself. Something horrific is in evidence here, and yet it is so coolly presented, so entirely demystified and detached from the grunting, tramping pigs R has known, that all grasping at sadness falls flat, and an emptiness looms where hysterical empathy would usually rush forth. She decides that this uncharacteristic composure is symptomatic of a growing wisdom in the face of scientific violence and quietly congratulates herself. 

 

On the other side, the outsides: the deceptive “whole.” This version of the Half-Pig is a pig to whom R can immediately attribute personality. Everything is as it should be, as it was in life. The only thing that stops him returning to life is the glass box. Where glass had made palatable the spectacle of death, it now imprisons the spectacle of life, and does not yield to probing fingers or flights of fancy. The pig must be resigned to living out his death in a glass house.

 

But he isn't any old pig - oh no. He is brown and hairy, swarthy and proud. Almost a wild boar. He would have been alive in another age, R imagines, would have roamed medieval forests, rooting in the dirt and leaves, ears pricked for the sound of horns. He never did see the miserable fate of his children, how their skins turned pale in the jails of industrial squalor, how their deep grunt of vitality became a squeal that was silence to the world, and how all the blood and death, the last hurrah, would transform invisibly and continuously into neat, pink shapes. You can find them on display at the Supermarket. They are the voiceless insides of the Half-Pig's children.

 

Now that his face and all her empathy have come back to her, R reflects desperately on the relative luck of the Half-Pig. She tells herself that he is free and noble, and that that is a marvellous thing, because although he is dead, and therefore pitiful, R will not patronise him with pity because he escaped. He escaped the humiliation of suffering.

 

 

It was only half a pig. So where was the other half? R will ask herself one day, when she is older and the Half-Pig has left the Tolson Museum. It was only a half, but there was a kind of wholeness, too. A wholeness of perspective: of inside and outside, of blood and hair, of past and present. And in learning of something so wide and borderless, from a half-body in a small room so suddenly removed without explanation or justification, there came a feeling. A feeling that everyone knows, of being a grain of salt at sea.