After reading Stuart Pimm’s essay “O brave new world of fantastic beasts” in Nature’s “A View from the Bridge” blog, I was delighted to discover that others had found, and were puzzling over, similar undercurrents of natural history, ecology, and conservation to those I had noticed in the recently released film “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”
It was with no small amount of wholly unintentional irony that I began reading Mark Essig’s Lesser Beasts; A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig while eating a ham sandwich. Such is the ubiquity of pigs. Yet for all the many ways the lives of modern humans have and to this day continue to intersect […]
“In addition to acorns and grains, pigs happily devour that which most disgusts us – rotting garbage, feces, carrion, even human corpses. Of all the animals commonly eaten by humans, the pig is the only one that will return the favor.”