I finally made it to Cornell Ag on my second try. The first (failed) attempt was inspired by a passion for the outdoors and fascination with the wild animals of the African savannah. The second came after I discovered on a Devonshire farm that nature and her animals, once domesticated and managed, yielded food.
This realization came at the same time that famine in Africa was making headlines. Horrific skeletal children and dead cattle were the outcome, we were told, of primitive farming methods and burgeoning populations. Food aid could do only so much.
It seemed to me, then, that agriculture was nature put to practical use. I would reapply to Cornell, study agriculture, and address the ills of global hunger, malnutrition, and poverty. It seemed straightforward. It wasn’t.
Becoming an Aggie
The Livestock Pavilion stands across from Morrison Hall, Animal Sciences, on the outer edge of the Ag quad at Cornell, the last campus outpost before the wide-open spaces of the vet school, the equine barns, and the experimental apple plots. The Ag quad was not charming when I was an undergrad there, late in the 1970’s. No ivied stone arches or carved portals marked our gateways to knowledge. No sloping lawns above Cayuga’s waters, no carillon ringing our class changes. That graceful bower of liberal arts lay a stressful twelve- minute sprint or five-stop shuttle slog away. Here at Ag, squat beige brick buildings did the job of a publicly funded school. Our garden featured stamped-tin labels, dutifully informing us of genus and species. The greenhouses held only carnation clones, all white in one, red in the other. The fancy new tall building suffered a construction defect that made it spit bricks, requiring yellow tape barricades around the base.
To get to the Livestock Pavilion, you threaded through parking lots jammed with pickups and scruffy cars, some with government plates. Metal garage doors high and wide enough for a stock truck to back in formed the facade. Students pushed through a steel door off to the side, cramming in to get a good seat on the stadium benches that ran the length of the arena. Deep sawdust gave off a faint whiff of animal. As cold and gray as Ithaca was, it was colder inside. It was thrilling. I was a born and bred New York City girl, there for Swine.
Two TA’s stood below us, boots in the sawdust beside a small table. A cardboard carton nested at their feet, wobbling slightly. From two rows up, I could see in: three flop-eared piglets milled about — live piglets! — puffing out soft grunts. The TAs introduced themselves as Greg and Dave, and the piglets as week old males. With no further remarks, Greg grabbed a piglet by one back leg, pulled it up out of the box, and passed it upside down and swinging over to Dave, who grabbed both it’s hind legs, holding the tiny pig feet about 8” apart. Greg produced a scalpel, razored two lines across piglet’s satiny scrotum, pressed in his thumb, popped out a peanut sized testicle, fingered out the cord, stretched it, sliced it, tossed the testicle away, then repeated the pop, pull, slice for the other testicle, cutting all the while right through the screaming — screaming, not squealing, not oink oink — through the piercing shrieks that filled the arena, ricocheting off the metal walls, surely terrifying any passersby outside. We watched, some rigid, some pale, some shifting in their seats. Through the din, Greg was shouting, waving about a bottle. “Spray Betadine for antiseptic.” Had he been talking all along? He sprayed the bloody gap orange, blazoning the change from boar to barrow. “Doesn’t hurt,” he bellowed. “It’s not in pain.” Ululations continued. Dave bent to put the piglet back in the box, but halfway there, it wrenched itself free and dove the last foot, hitting the box head first. It scrambled to a corner. Stopped screaming. Complete silence.
Male students unclenched their legs. The three or four women exhaled. “See?” Greg wiped his hands on his jeans. “He’s back on his feet, he’s fine. Watch: I pick one up,” he pulled another out by a back leg, “it starts squealing.” Yes it did. That same tsunami of twisting, winding wailing. “Nothing to do with being cut.” Greg was shouting again. He sliced, popped, pulled, cut and sprayed, and screaming piglet 2 went back in the box. Stopped screaming.
“They just hate being off their feet. That’s all it is,” Greg reassured us in a normal voice. Dave nodded: we all know this. We blinked and shook our heads, reorganizing our thinking, grasping as fact that something so tangible in our guts and groins was actually — why, nothing at all! An overreaction! These babies had already had their ears notched, tags stapled on, teeth clipped and tails chopped off. This was just one more step of piglet processing.
Someone asked why. “Boar meat smells terrible when you cook it.” “What about an anesthetic?” another student asked. “No need.” Greg said. “Waste of time and money. It really doesn’t hurt.”
But how do you know? I wanted to ask. Maybe they scream when manhandled, but suffer silently otherwise. The class moved on. Greg talked about faster growth rates and better feed conversion. Students took notes.
Maybe “doesn’t hurt” is what you tell yourself to do the job, I thought. Or, it dawned on me, maybe it hurts, but it doesn’t matter. There’s a higher purpose, a more important end: pork. Food, and lots of it.
I had come to Cornell to learn about farming and food production and this was it. I’d better harden up, if I was going to make it in this man’s business of feeding the world. I was an aggie, now.
I plunged into the biology, chemistry, animal sciences, and plant sciences that made US agriculture the envy of the world. Remedially, I took tractor driving. Cattle judging taught me the difference between a big black and white cow and a big black and white cow. Green sprigs in cold fields became ‘crops.’ The finer and coarser details of animal reproduction sprouted endless jokes. I loved it all.
But still I wondered: Is the piglet in pain? Does it matter? It would be years before I really thought about it. Philosophy was on the other side of the campus.
Uprooted 