Fat Pigs

The Tories seem to be neck and neck with Labour in the polls now, which means we almost certainly won't be having an election any time soon. This is good and bad news. Good because it means that Gordon and his insidious bunch of tax and spend monkeys are not doing as well as they thought, and bad because the scum bags will be in power for at least another year or so. In fact, I don't think they have to call an election until 2010.

I was going to show you a magic trick, but I don't have it recorded. Tomorrow my friends, tomorrow.

So, you want to know about the Taiwan fat pig contest I suppose?

First off I need to tell you that, although Taiawan was my home for five years, I never went to the Giant Pig contest. The Telegraph calls it the Pig of God Contest, but I have never heard it called that. In case you don't know, it's an annual event in Taiwan. Competitors attempt to produce the fattest animal, and then on the day of judging, they kill it, skin it, and stretch the skin. It's fairly macabre I imagine, but as I say, I've never been to it. In fact I almost went one year, and I really wanted to see it, but it never happened, for reasons that I simply don't recall now.

The Telegraph reports that the animal rights groups are up in arms about the practice and have labelled it cruel and barbaric. I'm not going to take a moral position, other than to state that I simply don't care about a few pigs being treated badly. My reason for mentioning this is to illustrate how uninformed the animal rights idiots are.

The first thing to note is that this is not a mainstream practice. It is a Hakkanese tradition. It happens in a few places in Taiwan, but it certainly isn't everywhere. The Hsin Chu event is the most famous. I have been to Hsin Chu many times. It is a large Hakkanese community. It's one of the most amazing places that I have visited. It's very much stuck in a time gone by. The roads are not surfaced properly, there are no real shops to speak of, and there are very few cars and modern conveniences. Being a white man in this place is a very odd experience.

The Hakkanese are a sub culture, found all over China, Taiwan, and other areas. They are very proud of their history, and they have their own language and traditions. But like all minority cultures, it diminishes a little each year as it becomes swamped by the tide of mainstream life. The Taiwanese government recognises the need to preserve the Hakkanese way of life, and quite rightly offers it protection the same way that it does for the Taiwanese aboriginal communities.

The animal rights groups have no respect or understanding for the Hakkanese culture. They're probably not wrong when they say the pigs are force fed stones and lead weights. I've heard these stories before. I'm not even going to suggest that they are wrong to call the practice cruel. I will say that the danger of meddling in a culture about which they clearly know almost nothing, is unforgivable. These communities have been doing this since before any of the activists around today were even born. I know that the report says that the practice is only 30 years old, but I suspect it, or something similar, has been around much longer than that.

They have no understanding of the ritual element of the event either. The burning of money (it's not real money by the way) has nothing to do with the pig ceremony. It's a Buddhist thing. It happens all the time in Taiwan on specific days.

I wasn't aware that the practice is illegal in Taiwan. Though it doesn't surprise me. Taiwan is a troubled island that is constantly trying to make a name for itself as a country. It has a habit of making rules that are then not enforced. The government feels that it must be seen to make politically correct moves, but at the same time, it wants to preserve the cultural status quo, and I applaud that.