Pigs I Have Known

Today I am home with a mild dose of flu. It’s been percolating around my system for a few days without amounting to more than a couple of sore muscles and a table tennis like competition between temperature extremes. It’s a pig of a thing, but not, I hope, Swine Flu. However, prudence on my part and a pervading paranoia by others have kept me at home where, without any likelihood of an immediate duck (see last Fryday), my thoughts have swung to pigs and their lack of a spokesperson or advocate. You see, this morning on Morning Report, Charge d'Affaires at the Mexican Embassy in Wellington, Luis Enrique Franco, made a pretty compelling case for not blaming his country for the outbreak. He pointed out that the number of confirmed cases in his huge country was fewer proportionately than in many other countries currently. So, we can dispense with Mexico. However, as it is entirely natural in such matters for us to seek to blame someone, I guess it has to be the pigs. Poor buggers. Not only do they have to cope with having their very own flu, now they get blamed for giving it to us. Might they (pigs) well say that they are simply keeping it in the family—I believe pigs and humans are closely related, some closer than others. But the problem is they have no-one to say that for them. Not for your average pig, a charge d’affaires with an ornate, authoritative name. The last pig of note was called Babe and the most famous of all Piglet had a friend called POOH. No wonder nobody can take them seriously. As for activist pigs, there has been none since Animal Farm and that was a dystopian allegory, which sounds like a disease in itself. So your average pig is on a hiding to nothing on this matter. Even past “animal” pandemics such as bird-flu and horse-flu garnered more sympathetic attention because birds are cute and horses stately. But pigs? As I said, poor buggers. My croaky cry this Fryday? Give them a break, they have enough problems already.


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