Pooping Pigs in a Poke

Would you buy a pig in a poke?
I'm sweating like a pig.
You're a filthy pig.
You're a sloppy pig.
You live in a pigsty.

These are all expressions using a pig as a reference. But would you say "I poop like a pig?" Would Jack Palance have told Billy Crystal at he Oscars one year that a pig poops bigger than Billy? Well, you might once you finish reading an A-Head piece in the Wall Street Journal about how farmers raise pigs.

Sanitizing is big these day with trying to stop the spread of coronavirus. But the extent the pig farmers go to sanitizing a pig's environment is nothing new. I always heard pigs are not "filthy animals." After reading the piece, I can see why.

The reporter Jacob Bunge tells us that after showering and putting on fresh clothes, Brad Greenway checked out his pig farm, "We've always tried to practice good biosecurity." His farm produces 13,000 pigs a year, all very squeaky clean.

Mr. Greenway explains, "you don't want to bring anything back and forth" between the breeding and the hog operation. The pig farms are hyper-hygienic.

Kevin Turner, a manager of Michigan State University's swine teaching and research farm near Lansing, Michigan, has taken as many 12 showers a day going back and forth from the classroom to the farm.

Mr. Turner further explains, "right now, I feel safer health-wise if I'm in and around my pigs than if I go to the grocery store."

With as many animals as these folks have, you have to expect there is animal waste—poop. Ryan Hageman a co-owner of NEIA Pumping Service Inc., a Calmar, Iowa-based manure hauling business, minces no words about why he tries to keep clean with constant hand washing. "You're going to get dirty, you're dealing with shit."

And there it is. A four-letter word that made it into a major newspaper without ** between the first and last letters. Shit.

Okay, shit is not fuck, where you're still going to see **, but it's use has long been foretold, even by Cole Porter, who so long ago wrote the lyrics to "Anything Goes."

Good authors too who once knew better words

Now only use 

Four-letter words.

Anything goes.

And how much poop can there be on a pig farm? Apparently A LOT. There doesn't seem to anything that cannot be measured. Mr Bunge writes:

"Even stringent methods run up against natural limits. One is found in the pits beneath Mr. Turner's Michigan State research farm, which gather the roughly 1.3 gallons of manure each hog produces a day. 'It's clean, but it still smells," Mr. Turner tells us. "Pigs poop a lot."

And there we have it. If you think you exceed 1.3 gallons a day—nearly 5 liters!—you are entitled to say, "I poop like a pig."

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