[Granville-Hough] 30 Jun 2009 - Razorbacks

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:39:13 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Razorbacks - 30 June 2009

    I am very pleased to have permission to give you some of Harold 
Hopkins experiences with hog-killing and with the use of razorbacks as 
research animals for the FDA

From: Harold Hopkins
Date: April 2, 2006 6:42:17 PM PDT
 
 Subject: Re: Memories by Lucille Dickinson Ainsworth

Lucille's memories pretty much agree with mine,  although I lived in the 
town of Mize, MS, and we raised one or two hogs at a time in pens and 
fattened them with food leftovers and grain or grain products..  Once my 
Grandma Molly Jones Butler's fourth husband,  named Hezikiah Johnston,  
helped us butcher a  hog. He was getting a little long in the tooth and 
short in responses, so he nominated me to help him  kill a hog, with an 
ax, not a gun.  I was told what to  do and got into the pen with the hog 
and when he became still enough I swung the blunt end of the ax at his 
head to hit him "between the eyes," as  Grandpa instructed. Just about 
the time I came down with a mighty stroke of the ax, the hog moved his 
head slightly, and the ax instead caught his lower jaw and tore it 
almost loose from his head and  it dangled there while he squealed and 
slung blood on me and the adjacent area of the pen.    That was the only 
hog-killing in which I ever participated.  I never remembered that event 
with pleasure.

One of the delicacies Lucille didn't mention -- she probably forgot  -- 
was that when the hog's liver was chopped  up into cookable chunks or 
cubes  -- frying or boiling pieces, I think they were  -- the animal's 
lungs also were chopped up the same way and mixed with the chunks of 
liver.  The resulting dish was called "liver and lights," the lights 
being  spongy part of the mixture.  I suppose "lights" meant simply that 
the  lung tissue was lighter in weight by volume than the liver.  
Another usable part of a hog was the animal''s ankle knuckles and part 
of the foot, which were usually pickled and called pigs feet.  You can 
still buy pickled pigs feet in places that  specialize in unusual 
foods.  I've seen them in jars on store shelves.

I worked nearly 20 years as a  writer and editor  in the Food and Drug 
Adminstration and I found out a few  things I hadn't known before about 
the use of pigs -- as laboratory experimental animals at  FDA's 
establishment in Maryland outside Washington. The place was called 
SPAL.  I've forgotten what the letters SPAL stood for but the AL stood 
for "animal laboratory."  I once  wrote an article for our monthly 
magazine,  FDA Consumer, titled "At SPAL They're High on the Hog," which 
was reference to the high value of hogs as lab animals.  The FDA found 
that dealing with live hogs was difficult because some hogs weighed a 
half-ton or more and these hogs didn't enjoy the experiments our 
scientists and lab employees were conducting that involved them and made 
the work as difficult as possible.

The value of hogs is that they are -- like humans and a few other 
mammals  -- omnivorous, meaning that they eat anything whatever that 
contains nutrients of any kind -- animal  or vegetable.  So in this 
sense the FDA found that drugs and cosmetics intended for use on humans 
could also be tested in hogs whose skins and digestive tracts, 
circulatory systems,  and other organs are remarkably like those of 
humans.  But  how do you handle a 1200-pound hog handily?  The FDA's  
answer: random breeding of Razorback hogs, which keeps the animals that 
have bred randomly in the forest down to fighting weight, animals that 
pick their own mates instead of  being bred by humans.  This points more 
specifically  to what we know as Razorbacks, hogs that in their wild 
state  long ago were native to parts of Asia, I believe, but in this and 
other civilized countries hogs have been bred deliberatedly to increase 
their size and weight for bacon, ham, lard, and such.  Razorbacks    
have bred randomly in the wild for so long in this country that they've 
reverted to the original feral animal that weighs about 180 pounds -- 
roughly the size of a man. When you need to handle the hog for your 
experimental purposes, four or five men, instead of eight or ten, can 
handle a 180-pound Razorback. Colonies of feral hogs have spread into 
most states.

Razorback -- or wild hogs, when they revert to type, over many years 
develop wattles and a kind of stripe down the side -- along with ugly, 
dangerous tusks.  These are the animals that can be found in many 
southern states and larger numbers of states to the north, and there are 
some larger hunting preserves where a hunter can pay the owner of the 
hunting preserve to go into the woods and shoot himself a wild hog  or 
razorback, or two, for a good  price, of course.

So the FDA began its   colony from captured  Razorbacks.  How, then, do 
you handle a Razorback for lab experiments? Well, at SPAL, the FDA 
specialists take the piglets immediately when they are born and remove 
their eye teeth --  the  teeth that become tusks as they develop.  So  
when lab  people handle the pig when it reaches adulthood they  won't 
risk being bitten by those long tusks.

If the lab people want to test certain drugs or substances using a young 
pig that has not been conferred with immunity  to many  diseases by its 
sow mother at birth, they must remove the piglets by Caesaran section 
before they are born. How do you do this?   What procedure?   Well, 
first you determine when the sow has become pregnant, by probing its 
uterus with an electronic instrument that detects heartbeats.   Now sows 
don't like such probing, but three or four men can restrain a  razorback 
sow without needing too  much muscle.   When heartbeats are detected in 
the sow they are counted to determine the number of piglets.  Just 
before birth, the piglets are removed by Caesaran section and there you 
have a young piglet ready for any experimenting you want to conduct -- a 
piglet that does not have natural immunity to certain diseases. The 
similarity to humans is remarkable.

When I was  researching for this article, I wondered why -- if the pig 
was originally a Chinese animal species -- how there got to be 
Razorbacks in  Arkansas and some other southern states. I called a  
professor at  the University of Arkansas. He had no ready answers, but 
he had a story.

It seems, he told me,  that when the Spanish explorer DeSoto decided to 
look for gold in the interior of this country, he headed a group  of 
explorers who traveled westward from Florida, the home of early Spanish 
settlements, in search of gold. As they traveled overland  they took 
their own meat, droves of hogs.  The word "drove" is a kind of clue that 
the animals were driven by swineherds, not transported in wagons or at 
the end of a rope.  I presume they were rafted over large streams.

As they traveled across the country, the native tribes were amazed at 
these white men with their horses for transporting, their weapons that 
spouted flame, and their steel implements, including swords.  Like other 
tribes in other parts of the new world, they thought that DeSoto was a 
God who was the leader of these strange travelers, one whom they 
wouldn't  dare to cross or displease.  It was in Arkansas -- after the 
group had crossed the Mississippi River in their quest for gold -- that 
DeSoto sickened and died. The members of the exploring group considered 
what to do, and then moved quickly. They  took DeSoto's remains out to 
the middle of the Mississippi River at night -- so the natives would not 
know that the white god was dead -- and dumped the weighted body into 
the river.  Then they decided to get out of Arkansas and back to Florida 
as quickly as possible.  In their hurry they had no time to tend a drove 
of hogs, so they left the herd of hogs  to shift for themselves.

The hogs they left became feral, a condition that, for hogs, does not 
seem far removed from the tamed version. Hogs, being omnivorous, feed on 
anything they can find and the longer they are left to manage for 
themselves the wilder they get. I have seen feral hogs. I didn't get 
close enough to determine if they'd reverted to Razorbacks. The history 
of our pioneers is full of stories about farmer migrants who brought 
their own hogs and once they settled down,   let the hogs roam the 
woods, fattening on acorns, roots, fruits, and other food, including 
whatever living creatures they can pounce upon and devour.  Early 
farmers notched the ears of their hogs for  identification and 
registered the notch pattern with the county government.  There are 
instances where human blood has been shed over who owned which hog!

I don't  know how  much of the DeSoto/Razorback story by the Arkansas 
professor is true.  I do know that
when  farmers turn their hogs into  the forest to fatten, if they don't 
go to great lengths to round them up at butchering time in  the fall, 
the animals soon become feral and they are dangerous.  I wouldn't trust 
even some tame hogs  near one of my small children,  and even adults can 
be unsafe.   The  Razorback's 180 pounds have made the FDA a fine animal 
for testing drugs and cosmetics.  By the way, I have a first cousin in 
Arkansas whose son owns one of those Razorback "ranches" where the city 
slickers pay him for hunting.