it's good . . . it's natural

TV reader surveys are back and after careful analysis, it appears that a full 1/3 of TV readers have an abiding interest in the native intelligence of swine.  

As such, w/out further ado, here is the latest from Saul Bellow on smart pigs:

When I came back from the war it was with the thought of becoming a pig farmer, which maybe illustrates what I thought of life in general.

Monte Cassino should never have been bombed; some blame it on the dumbness of the generals.  But after that bloody murder, where so many Texans were wiped out, and my outfit also took a shellacking later, there were only Nicky Goldstein and myself left out of the original bunch, and this was odd because we were the two largest men in the outfit and offered the best targets.  Later I was wounded too, by a land mine.  But at that time, Goldstein and I were lying down under the olive trees--some of those gnarls open out like lace and let the light through--and I asked him what he aimed to do after the war.  He said, "Why, me and my brother, if we live and be well, we're going to have a mink ranch in the Catskills."  So I, or my demon said for me, "I'm going to start breeding pigs."  And after these words were spoken I knew that if Goldstein had not been a Jew I might have said cattle and not pigs.  So then it was too late to retract.  So for all I know Goldstein and his brother have a mink business while I have--something else.  I took all the handsome old farm buildings, the carriage house with paneled stalls--in the old days a rich man's horses were handled like opera singers--and the fine old barn with the belvedere above the hayloft, a beautiful piece of architecture, and I filled them up with pigs, a pig kingdom, with pig houses on the lawn and in the flower garden.  The greenhouse, too--I let them root out the old bulbs.  Statues from Florence and Salzburg were turned over.  The place stank of swill and pigs and the mashes cooking, and dung.  Furious, my neighbors got the health officer after me.  I dared him [sic] to take me to law. "Hendersons have been on this property over two hundred years," I said to this man, a certain Dr. Bullock.  

By my then wife, Frances, no word was said except, "Please keep them off the driveway."

"You'd better not hurt any of them," I said to her.  "Those animals have become a part of me."  And I told this Dr. Bullock, "All those civilians and 4Fs have put you up to this.  Those twerps.  Don't they ever eat pork?"

Have you seen, coming from New Jersey to New York, the gabled pens and runways that look like models of German villages from the Black Forest?  Have you smelled them (before the train enters the tunnel to go under the Hudson)?  These are pig-fattening stations.  Lean and bony after their trip from Iowa and Nebraska, the swine are fed here.  Anyway, I was a pig man.  And as the prophet Daniel warned King Nebuchadnezzar, "They shall drive thee from among men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field."  Sows eat their young because they need the phosphorus.  Goiter attacks them as it does women.  Oh, I made a considerable study of these clever doomed animals.  For all pig breeders know how clever they are.  The discovery that they were so intelligent gave me a kind of trauma.  But if I had not lied to Frances and those animals had actually become a part of me, then it was curious that I lost interest in them.

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King 20-21.  

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In addition to pig stories, in response to requests from readers from near and far the coming month will bring pictures of both the beautiful fall foliage, a measure of time's ceaseless tumble forward, and my johnson.