This is one of the times I think the old “Well you feed the full grown hog until it dies of old age then”-gambit is a valid reply. “Also, you supply enough land for it to be a happy free range hog.”
This.
Except they weren’t able to save the barn.
If my house was on fire and my wife and son and I were safely outside, I wouldn’t want, let alone expect, firefighters to try to go in and rescue any of our personal property from the blaze. Either they are able to put out the fire and keep the house from burning down, or they aren’t. Afterwards we see what’s salvageable from fire and water damage once the fire is out.
There’s at least an argument for this. But (a) I have a hard time seeing how they could be too late to save the barn, yet in time to rescue animals from the barn with little risk, and (b) it would really have to be minimal risk, for the modest gain of saving some animals from an inhumane death only to turn around and kill them humanely.
Saving animals from a fire is a lot easier than it is for most property. Just make a hole big enough for them to get out of, and they’ll do the rest.
I raised a batch of lambs for an SCA feast one year, and I had a polaroid of the little darlings so I could introduce people to their dinner =)
Hard to eat food when you have a personal connection to it.
My mother would tell the story of how there was a duck that would run around in the living room of her house. She and her siblings would play with it. When the time came for the duck to be killed and cooked, she and her siblings had a hard time eating the meat…
What do people think the farmer was going to do? Raise them and milk them and make pig cheese?
Pigs, maybe. They’re pretty smart for livestock. But you could open the door in a burning barn and half the cows inside wouldn’t go outside. And sheep are dumber than cows. And chickens are dumber than sheep. And turkeys are dumber than chickens.
It stops there though. Nothing is dumber than a turkey.
Fire spreads. You can see a fire moving towards a building before the building is actually burning. You can get stuff out of the building but you’re not going to be able to move the building itself.
I guess my mother had it better than some farm kids. When it was time for the cows to go to slaughter, there was one that didn’t get loaded on the truck, because it was her cow.
This is all the fault of “Babe”.
Heh. That reminds me of the Portlandia bit where the waitress brings out a fact sheet for the chicken that they’ll be having for dinner.
“His name was Colin, here are his papers.”
“He looks like a happy little guy…did he have lots of friends?”
That would never work! Stools built that low to the ground are custom jobs.
Nobody has mentioned The Restaurant at the End of the Universe yet?
“Would you like to meet the meat?”
Wild turkey are some kind of idiot savants, though.
I’d like to remind you that the director of both Babe films is also the guy who made a movie series featuring torture, murder, and rape; people being kept as blood and milk puppets, a dwarf using a giant mentally challenged man as locomotion, hacksaw on ankle action, and horror of horrors, Mel Gibson.
If there had been no fire, the pigs would have been raised & sent to slaughter/made into sausages.
Had the fire dept not gotten there so quickly, the pigs would probably have perished in the fire, but not cooked well enough to consume. IOW, she would have received no compensation for them.
Since they saved her from significant financial loss, she make a ‘thank you’ donation to them in the form of edibles from one of the multiple pigs they saved.
I have a vegan friend who is freaking out all over Facebook about how AWFUL and SICK this is, and how it shows that animals are so much better than people. (Never mind that pigs would probably eat a firefighter quite happily if one happened to fall into their pen.)
Vegans may be shortly joining Trump voters on my list of “people who may be perfectly likeable face to face, but should never be friended on social media.”
Pigs don’t remain cute for long. Hogs are big and will go feral quickly in the woods. Feral hogs are a big problem in East Texas, Louisiana, and other states.
Death by fire is a horrible way for any creature to die. I’m glad the firemen saved the farm animals from a painful and terrifying death.
The pigs were always a farm product and intended for sale & public consumption. I would hope they were humanely killed by the butcher.
I’m not sure what else could be done for them. They grow into huge animals quickly. Good luck making a pet out of one.
If I dropped a lunchbox with say, a PB&J sandwich, in it on the road in front of a car, then the car stopped, and I was able to retrieve the lunch before it got squashed, should I not eat the sandwich because it was “saved”? Silly. Nothing wrong was done here.
Any animal under human control deserves a humane life and a humane death. We owe them that. If it’s all just for sausage, that’s fine, but our obligations are even more important.
Apparently people used to do things like this; there’s a scene in “To Kill A Mockingbird” where Atticus helps some neighbors remove furniture from their burning house. No, they don’t attempt to put out the fire; they throw furniture out the windows. :smack: