Remind You of Anything?

Yesterday in the Guardian, AC Grayling noted a most striking similarity;

At the Anaplasmic Institute at Valles Marineris, an interesting experiment is being conducted into the appetite-passion cycle associated with the feeding habits of Sus scrofa peculata, this being the Latin zoological name of an otherwise familiar large semi-domestic mammal, the naked pin-striped hog. When released into a feeding pound, a square formed by full feeding-troughs, the hogs struggle, fight and squirm to get at the troughs, and eat as fast and as much as they can, typically submerging their whole faces into the swill and both swallowing and inhaling it in large quantities. Because of the speed with which they eat they almost as often regurgitate the swill as quickly as they ingest it, so that the volume of swill plus regurgitate stays almost constant for a time, though insensibly it diminishes in volume (some of it begins to find its way out of the other end of the hogs; but because many of them are in the troughs with all four feet this does not decrease the volume in the trough as much as it might otherwise do).

Because the nature of the contents of the trough are changing as they come to consist more and more of regurgitate and defecate, the capacity of the hogs' digestive system to cope with what they ingest begins to change. There are some warning signs: a few of the hogs begin to look a little green, and only then do their neighbours at the trough start to edge away, subconsciously aware perhaps that the gastric secretions and enzymes mixed into the regurgitations of the greener pigs are adding greater degrees of toxicity to the regurgitate. But at a certain point the level of toxicity in the swill-cum-regurgitate as a whole reaches a level at which the entire herd of hogs flips into a sudden panic mode: now aware that they cannot continue to eat very fast and in large quantities without doing themselves injury, they all immediately stop eating, and begin to run around the feeding pound emitting loud fear-and-warning noises – and at the same time emitting noisome efflations resulting from the degree of toxicity of the swill over-indulged in, which has caused them tremendous bloating. It is a truly pitiable spectacle to see so many frightened flatulent hogs dashing fruitlessly about, begging for the keepers to come and clean out their feeding troughs and to administer medications to solve their digestive crisis.

Researchers at the Valles Marineris institute point out that the noise and efflations of frightened squealing hogs have a serious effect on other animals in the farmyard, peaceably trying to go about their business. Although there is relatively little wrong with the rest of the farmyard, the disruptions caused by the furore in the hogs' feeding pound is seriously disruptive, and without swift firm action the whole farm can be harmed by the hogs' panic-attack.

The researchers further say that their original assumption had been that the hogs were intelligent creatures, able to self-regulate their feeding habits; they somewhat abashedly say that they had thought that the gobbling and elbowing that went on at the troughs in normal times was simply bad manners, not something systemic and dysfunctional, and not in need of keepers with sharp sticks to stop the hogs going too far. Fat hogs, they say, were thought to be good for the farmyard's income because of the revenue they generate, earning more than eggs and pick-your-own strawberry promotions. They now say that their studies of appetite and emotion in hogs has revealed that hogs have only one appetite – greed – and one emotion – fear – and that these govern all their behaviour in the feeding pound. In fact, they have concluded with surprise that the hogs' brains consist almost entirely of an amygdala, the organ responsible for arousal, autonomic responses associated with fear, emotion generally, and hormonal secretions. The hogs appear to be functionally bereft of higher cortical layers of the brain that in other animals are associated with rationality and intelligence; which makes them a much more dangerous farmyard animal than they had hitherto been believed to be.

Asked what solutions the researchers propose, the answer is: more keepers with sharp sticks, and encouragement to the public to eat more roast pork.