Pigs are supposed to be our friends. They’re intelligent for subhuman lifeforms, but filled with so many delicious meats you’d have to be crazy not to eat them (or vegetarian, or vegan, or an orthodox Jew or Muslim). And maybe it’s because we humans keep wantonly nomming their loved ones, but the honey-glazed swine hordes are finally striking back with a vengeance, threading pandemic-level deaths, further economic erosion and the demonization of tax inspectors.
The Swine Flu crisis may be dying down in its point of origin Mexico, but for the rest of the world (or at least Canada, Austria, New Zealand, Israel, Spain, Britain and Germany) any time someone has the sniffles the public health apparatus goes into high alert. Egypt has taken proactive steps to protect its citizenry from something that hasn’t emerged within its borders by killing every last pig they can find. There’s a degree of unchecked paranoia in the way some governments are reacting to this threat, but people are dying: 152 have succumbed in Mexico, and a little closer to home, a Mexican toddler in Texas got the United States’ death toll rolling.
Frankly, I don’t know what to think about pigs anymore. Was Charlotte’s Web lying about spiders, too?
