Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History Of The Humble Pig - Plot & Excerpts
One April morning in 1825, two hog catchers went to work in New York City’s Eighth Ward, in what is now Greenwich Village. They were accompanied by four city marshals because they were expecting trouble—and they found it. As they rounded up stray pigs and locked them in their cart, the hog catchers attracted what a newspaper described as “a large mob of disorderly people” who demanded the return of their livestock. Someone threw a brick that hit one of the marshals in the face, and the crowd rushed the cart and “let loose all of the hogs, who quickly scampered off.” This was just one skirmish in Manhattan’s hog wars. On one side were poor city dwellers—mostly English, Irish, and African American—who raised pigs for food. The city’s streets functioned as an urban commons that provided food for “the defenseless poor,” one advocate explained. On the other side was a rising middle class who saw the animals as a public nuisance—dangerous to children—and upsetting to ladies who might glimpse swine copulating in the street.
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