OK, so here's the scenario.
I am headed over to a friend's house to purchase eggs (fresh, and at a reasonable, if not altogether cheap, price). While I am there, he gives me a discourse on the condition of his animals. The discourse is a thinly veiled sales pitch for his chicks (at almost twice the price I pay at the feed store), and his young pigs.
Now, first of all, to know me, you must know that my Jewish ancestors one day sat around while old Moses declared swine flesh to be unclean. Well, I'm not one to differ with old Mo, and have rationalized that bacon must secretly come from an entirely different animal (ok, if the whole pig were bacon, I might take issue with the pronouncement of unclean). So the idea of raising a big ol' nasty pig is just not my cup of tea, so I do the old charm school trick of nodding politely.
Nodding politely was, in this case, a big mistake, as he goes into a lengthy discourse of needing to castrate his largest boar, whose...shall we say "gems"...are too large for the local vet to undertake the operation (he later insists on SHOWING me the size of these relics of fertility, so I can now cross "viewing large swine testicles" off of my life to do list). He then tells me the recommendation of the local hog grower's association, which is to tie the back leg of the boar to a very large tree, then the other back leg, then to flip the boar over on its back and tie the front legs down one by one. You then circle the animal, tightening each rope at each turn until you are absolutely sure it is as tight as it can go. You then bring out a razor and...well, you get the picture.
Leaving this friend's house, needless to say, I quickly concluded two things:
1.) This individual is FAR too obsessed with the procedure behind castrating swine.
2.) I now know how PETA got started.
signing off,
Gideon MacLeish