Razorback
Razorbacks , often only Feral Hogs ( feral pigs ) are a population of feral pigs , which since the 16th century in the Southeast and Midwest of the United States to live. Since hunters also imported some real wild boars into the USA in the late 19th century , their populations have partially mixed.
The pigs hardly resemble today's domestic pigs: They are long, thin, high in the shoulder and low in the torso. Unlike in breeding programs on the farm, it was not the most meat-rich pigs that survived in the forests, but those who were best able to defend themselves, to which their “unfriendly attitude” towards people also contributed. They are faster than today's domestic pigs and can also jump fences, for example. They have long snouts and large heads with impressive tusks. The name comes from a line of upright back hair that pure domestic pigs do not normally have.
distribution
The pigs are found throughout the southeastern United States from Texas to Florida on the Gulf Coast and up the Atlantic coast to New Hampshire, especially in the coastal regions. In Florida, they inhabit the entire state, but they are most commonly found in the Everglades . Estimates of the current population vary between 500,000 and 2,000,000 specimens, of which around 100,000 are shot by hunters every year.
In addition, real wild boars can be found in mountainous areas inland, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee there were around 800 animals in 1998, as well as around 1500 in the Cherokee National Forest and neighboring areas in the same state. In Kentucky , there were around 300 Specimens secured in the Appalachian Mountains . Whether there is a residual population in western Virginia is controversial, in West Virginia, however, the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources were successfully reintroduced.
history
North America originally had no pigs, the closest relatives originally found in northern Mexico and southern Texas are the collar peccaries . The first domestic pigs reached the continent with the Spanish conquistadors . The unfortunate expedition Hernando de Sotos , which brought pigs to the southeast of the USA, which at least partially escaped from him, was particularly decisive for the development of the pig herds in the USA . In the centuries that followed, there were numerous other cases of domestic pigs being imported from the Old World into North America and abandoned or escaped.
Until the early 20th century, even the domestic pigs lived mostly semi-wild in the woods and were usually only collected by their owners in autumn, a system similar to that of Central European acorn fattening . This form of pig farming was widespread in the founding years of the USA. Pigs were able to establish themselves where there was uncultivated land. The forests (swamps, marshes, etc.) could be used as common land for animal owners, even if they were privately owned. The average farm in the southern states was a lot larger than in the north, but on average produced less yield, as large parts of the land consisted of forest and other uncultivated areas.
Especially in the 18th and early 19th centuries, wholesalers collected these pigs and drove them in large treks to ports or directly to the markets. In 1733, the governor of North Carolina reported that 50,000 pigs had been herded from his colony to the Virginia ports. In 1824 alone, 124,000 pigs passed the “Great Kaintuck Hog Highway” in North Carolina on their way to the seaports on the Atlantic coast.
Since 1830, the states of the northern United States began to close the commons . The forests were no longer freely accessible, the pig farmers could not continue their economic activity and were mostly dependent on becoming wage-dependent. Despite efforts by plantation owners like Edmund Ruffin in Virginia, this did not succeed in the southern states, and the razorback economy continued to flourish there. Since then, most of the pigs have been in the border states of the south. Frederick Law Olmsted reported from Virginia in 1852 of almost deserted areas with seemingly endless pine forests, in which huge numbers of large groups of pigs would beat their way through the undergrowth as if they were fox hunting.
A census from 1860 shows twice as many pigs as humans for southern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. The numbers are probably far too low because they neither took into account completely overgrown populations nor were they able to systematically record all smallholders and their property. In relatively newly developed areas such as southern Mississippi , counts come to rates of four to one, and in individual counties even 13 to 1.
While the smallholders continued to practice razorback farming as they had in the previous decades, the picture began to change on the plantations from around 1850. Several plantation owners began to fence in all of their lands, thus ending the semi-wild keeping of the pigs. They also began to cross domestic pigs from other areas into their razorbacks, so that the wild and semi-wild razorback populations began to diverge.
As recently as 1860, Wilson was able to note in a magazine that the South was "fat ham and pork, only fat and pork, and that all the time, morning, noon, evening for all classes, genders, age groups and in all conditions." that "lard is the oil that moves the machinery of life." The historian McWhiney estimates that in the 15 years before the outbreak of the Civil War, southern farmers brought a total of 67 million pigs to market, an average of 4.5 million pigs Year.
By the Civil War , the situation changed. The soldiers of both parties ate massive amounts of pigs (and other animals) without worrying about their offspring. For example, a census from 1870, after the population had five years to recover, showed only half as many animals as in 1860.
The southern states suffered badly economically, so that the economic conditions became generally worse. At the same time, the population grew massively in the years after the war, the freed slaves in turn found themselves at the lowest end of the economic situation and competed with the former smallholders for the same resources. Significantly fewer animals now had to feed significantly more people, more land was fenced in and used for marketable crops, so that the razorback owners often got into disputes with the owners of the fields. The southern states began importing pork from the Midwest.
At the same time, the large landowners were able to make progress in closing the commons and enforcing purely private rights of use in forests, swamps, etc. At the beginning of the 20th century, national legislation finally banned semi-wild pig farming. The remaining pig farmers had to join the system in the rest of the US and keep their pigs in fences. From this an industrial pig breeding slowly developed with a few large farms.
The razorback population, however, continues to exist. They occur in a total of 19 US states, mostly in the south, but up to the northeast. The largest single population lives in Texas . So they are still a popular target for hunting today, particularly impressive specimens, such as Hogzilla , can become known nationwide .
Free-range pig breeding
For a long time farmers in the southern states also farmed semi-wild pigs. Spread all over the south, this had its greatest distribution in the "ham heartland" on the border between the Midwest and South - Virginia , Maryland , North Carolina , Tennessee and Kentucky . They tagged their pigs on their ears and let them roam freely through the forests of the area during the summer ( free-range husbandry ).
Free-range livestock farming
The farmers hardly had to provide food for the pigs. For the most part the pigs looked after themselves, only in autumn it could happen that the farmers caught the pigs in the last weeks before slaughter and fattened them with maize, or at least drove them into the maize fields in order to achieve something similar. The pork is held in close up, farmers could also supplementation with corn or vegetables, especially beechnuts should have proven themselves here.
Since the pig was born in the spring and was slaughtered in the fall, the farmers only had to bring the part of the pigs that was needed for breeding over the winter. Even in the cities, semi-wild packs roamed the streets, feeding on the rubbish lying around.
In autumn they caught their pigs and slaughtered them for household use or resold them immediately after the first night frost . If the pigs got too wild, they hunted them down with a shotgun. The slaughter festival was a common ritual at the end of the year. Chitterlings (offal), liver and brain had to be eaten shortly afterwards because, unlike ham , these did not last for long periods of time. The pork meal, however, was the barbecue , be it on the plantation, in the extended family, in the neighborhood or in the parish, a celebrated part of the food culture across the range of pigs.
This form of keeping in the commons made it possible for even completely landless people to achieve prosperity. The historian Grady McWhiney identified individual pig farmers in Alabama who owned no land but 70, 250 or 300 pigs.
In addition to the advantages that this animal husbandry offered, especially the low costs and the low effort involved in breeding, it also had serious disadvantages. On the one hand, it was by far not possible to recapture or hunt every animal, so that the wild population kept increasing. On the other hand, there could be problems enforcing one's own property rights. Although it was mostly forbidden to slaughter other pigs or to change the earmarks - at the latest when the pig had been slaughtered and cut up, it was impossible to prove one's own possession.
Impact on the environment
The pigs ate nuts and plants, especially pine seeds, berries, amphibians, insects and snakes (even rattlesnakes) when they can catch them, including mammals and birds. Widespread, if not proven that it ever happened, is the legend of the old farmer who went to feed pigs, suffered a stroke in the pig area, and was completely eaten by his animals. The pigs made ample use of the plants in their new home, churned up the ground and dirty water holes.
It is unclear what impact the pigs had on the forests of their new home. For one thing, nuts are one of their favorite foods and so it is possible that they have helped stop hardwoods like walnut , chestnut or oak from spreading in favor of pine . But although in the last few centuries the composition of the forests has probably really changed in favor of the pines, this probably has much more to do with the slash and burn operations that the large plantation owners carried out at the same time and after which pines can recover much more quickly. The biggest victim of pig breeding is probably the swamp jaw , as it remains in a grass stage for a long time and the protein-rich end bud is at the tip, almost exactly at eye level with the pigs. Until the rediscovery of a small remaining population in 1980, it was considered extinct in Virginia in 1843.
Role in nutrition
Until a few decades the word "meat" (meant meat ) in the southern states "pork", as opposed to beef ( beef ). Together with maize, pork dominated the diet of the southern states, and the form of farming allowed comparatively poor farmers to have regular meat meals and relative independence. On the other hand, they got into regular conflicts with the plantation owners who planted tobacco or cotton and who accused the pig farmers of spoiling their harvests. In general, however, even poor white southerners were considered to be significantly better fed than their European peers.
If pork was therefore mainly the food of poor farmers, it drew criticism from the circles of plantation owners and the upper class. On the one hand, the plantation owners complained that the pigs went to their fields and that lawsuits against the pig owners were mostly unsuccessful, as the juries generally ruled in favor of the pig farmers; On the other hand, however, it contradicted the planters' image of society that often neglected-looking people without any land ownership actually had enough wealth in their animals to be independent.
The plantation owner and historian Robert Beverley , Jr. complained in the early 17th century, "Pigs swarm the earth like vermin," William Byrd II , also plantation owner, founder of Richmond and probably the inventor of the term white trash , blamed pork for scurvy among farmers, just as he blamed pork for losing peasants' noses, the generally porky temperament of the people, and also the fact that Byrd believed that they would grunt rather than talk. Doctor John S. Wilson, on the other hand, wanted to call the USA the Republic of Piggy or the Big Pig Eating Confederation . Fanny Kemble , English actress and temporarily married to a plantation owner from Georgia, writes of the Pinelanders (pine woods) that they are “the most degenerate race of human beings who claim to be of Anglo-Saxon origin - filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, dispossessed savages and without any of the nobler qualities that are usually found in common with the vices of the savage. ”Kemble, however, blamed the slavery in the south, which undermines all work ethic.
Cultural representation
The pig played and continues to play an important role in southern culture. Restaurant signs with laughing pigs are omnipresent. But it also went into language. A “Hog Heaven” is a place where all sensory wishes are fulfilled. If someone is “high on the hog”, then they are doing particularly well.
While the pig itself occupies an important point in the iconography of the southern states, the razorback is present, but is found less often. The most famous feral pig is likely to be the mascot of the University of Arkansas , whose sports teams compete as the Arkansas Razorbacks .
literature
- Bethany Ewald Bultman: An Ode to the Pig. In: Lolis Eric Elie (Ed.): Cornbread Nation 2 - The United States of Barbecue, University of North Carolina Press 2005 ISBN 0-8078-5556-1 , pp. 23-29.
- Jack Temple Kirby: Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South. University of North Carolina Press, 2006, ISBN 0-8078-3057-7 .
- John O. Whitacker, Wiliam John Hamilton: Mammals of the Eastern United States. Cornell University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-8014-3475-0 , pp. 513-516.
- Charles Reagan Wilson: Pork , in: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Vol. 7 Foodways , The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2007, ISBN 978-0-8078-3146-5 , pp. 88-92.
Remarks
- ^ A b c d e f Joe G. Taylor: Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History, LSU Press, 1982 ISBN 0-8071-1013-2 , pp. 21-24
- ^ A b c d R. Douglas Hurt: The Ohio Frontiert: Crucible of the Old West, 1720-1830, Indiana University Press, 1996 ISBN 0-253-21212-X , pp. 211-218
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Kirby 2006 pp. 115–129
- ↑ a b c Whitacker, Hamilton
- ^ Ronald Nowak: Walker's Mammals of the World . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1999. ISBN 0-8018-5789-9 , p. 1057.
- ↑ a b c d e f Wilson 2005
- ^ A b David Stehen Heidler, Jeanne T. Heidler: Daily Life in the Early American Republic, Greenwood Publishing, 2004 ISBN 0-313-32391-7 , p. 58