What sort of broader contexts do we need in order to understand what’s going on in this article? Who is behind the crackdown on piggeries? Who gains and who loses with the passage of sanitary laws that forbid pig-keeping the city? Think about how the following concepts interact in the article: social class, smell, health, and authority.
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Brandon Davis
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natashap, 
eddietastic, 
midara, and 22 others are discussing.
Joyce Lin 9:13 pm on March 14, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hey Brandon, that was actually really difficult to read for me haha (print and language both)
From what I read that I think I understood…the crackdown on piggeries was led by the city authorities (from different divisions such as the police, inspector, etc). The crackdown and passage of sanitary laws leading up to it will benefit the rich because it will drive the pig keepers out of the city. Hence we see here, the city as a space of marginalization. The activities in the city are associated with different classes and they’re used as tools by those who have authority to shape the city as they want it to be.
brandond 11:13 pm on March 20, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Reading materials like this all the time is probably why my eyesight has degenerated so quickly the past few years. .
jonl 9:09 am on March 15, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree Joyce, that was somewhat hard to read and follow. It felt like reading a blow-by-blow report of a fight or an oddly written novel. The losers are clearly the pig-farmers, the lower class folks who – from reading about the use of pigs in the city – took care of the garbage. I’m sure everyone benefited in terms of health and over all living condition but if the pigs were part of a ecological cycle that helped keep cities relatively neutral then really everyone lost.
katehaxt 12:48 pm on March 15, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think the pig crack- down was largely a crack down on the lower classes and on what was perceieved as an old and backwards way of life. The upper classes of the new industrial city wanted to believe they were part of new modern world and living next to an urban pig farmer didn’t fit with this aesthetic. They used a rhetoric of health and cleanliness to enforce their particular view of what a modern city should look like. The same thing happened in Vancouver with keeping urban chickens. Today with all the interest in local food and sustainable cities, the law against urban chickens was recently overturned, proving that it was never an issue of health, just of ideology.
msmith92 2:12 pm on March 15, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Evidently, in this article, it was the pig farmers who lost as their farms were shut down by the city authorities. I think maybe there could have been some more background information on what caused this law to be put in place. Was there an outbreak of disease that lead to this? Getting rid of the pigs probably improved overall sanitary conditions and lowered risk of disease transmission, however, it also made new strategies for garbage disposal necessary. Whether the authorities were actually making this call based on a goal to improve public health or whether it was an effort to marginalize social classes is left to be seen.
youngblutt 7:09 pm on March 18, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think everyone above has summed it up well. One thing I’ll add is that the crackdown also targets immigrants because offals (animal organ meats) were often mainstays in the diets of Europeans and Africans. Therefore, I assume there was some profit to be made in the “boiling” and selling of these meats to the immigrant classes. The upper classes promoted/provoked the crackdown, under the guise of health and aesthetics but perhaps also in advocacy of American nationalism.
emilym 12:17 pm on March 19, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Reading this article I was immediately struck by how different Manhattan would be in there were still pig farms all over Midtown. The crackdown by city health officials and police definitely targeted the lower classes and benefited the upper-class, who I would imagine did not enjoy the sound or smell or potential health hazards of having pig farms in their neighborhood. I certainly can’t imagine modern day Midtown Manhattanites allowing pigs anywhere near their fancy apartments and condos. A couple of years ago, I happened to be visiting family in Manhattan during a garbage strike and the walls of trash bags covering the sidewalks and spilling into the streets were mind-boggling. Our trash outputs certainly are not sustainable and cities like New York are in real need of creative recycling solutions.
sharonshi 10:07 pm on March 19, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I too had extreme difficulty understanding the article, I am not used to reading passages like such and it challenged me quite a big. However, what I picked up on was that the losers are distinctively the pig-farmers who lost their farms as a result of the city authorities. I felt that the law kept a disparity present for the rich and the poor since most of the pig-farmers were poorer citizens. As a result of closed down farms, they lose their source of income. Despite the improvement of sanitary conditions and lowered risk for health diseases, the further widening of social status between the rich and the poor was something that I picked up on while reading the article.
paige 10:36 pm on March 19, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think we need a broader view of what laws are being enforced and who is in charge of enforcing them at this time. It seems to me that a kind of “gang” was going out and bringing what they thought of as justice. I don’t see why they are allowed to go and take down another’s property but that seems to be okay after 3 days of warning. I feel as though it is the general public who loses in these sorts of situations and the men in higher positions who are gaining. The piggeries did make some money selling off their pigs but this can no longer be sustained. This is a little snippet of past societal rules.
bgibson 4:04 pm on March 20, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree with Paige, I don’t know what laws are being enforced, nor under whose authority the laws were passed, but it’s clear that only a three day notification period is warranted to the offenders. It seems likely to be a citywide initiative since the enforcement fell to the city inspectors office (and the force included other civic workers such as nightwatchmen, police officers, street inspectors, etc.). The losers of these sanitation laws are clearly poorer citizens who run the piggeries and offal boilers since they will lose their livelihood. I think most citizens of Manhattan come out as winners in this instance since it sounds like some of the piggeries were kept in poor condition and may have been overcrowded. In an urban environment that does sound like a breeding ground for parasites, disease, and infection. I thin as msmith92 pointed out we need a bit more background information on this case to determine if enforcing such rules was necessary at this point. If the piggeries were dismantled simply because of the offending smell and the stigma of having pigs living within city limits these actions represent a decidedly elitist thought process.
jenniefrench 5:54 pm on March 20, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree with everyone – pig farmers and, as youngblutt mentioned, immigrants would have suffered from the crack down on pig farming. I thought of this question from a greater perspective though – what did this do to western/north american society’s opinion on pigs and farming? Don’t we think of pigs as dirty, stupid, but edible creatures? When pigs, and chickens even, were more integrated into our daily lives, in the cities, we probably had more respect for the interaction between animal and human. Now we are so dissociated – we draw such strict divisions between human, pet, food, and wild. There was a time when these divisions were more ephemeral and I wonder if that was still the case, if we would have more respect for our living planet.
brandond 11:16 pm on March 20, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
You all make some excellent points here, and have keyed in on some of the class and immigration issues. Your reactions do raise some questions for me. Why so much concern over pig odors in the late nineteenth century, and not earlier? Does odor have a history? Another way to think about this is to ask how odors take on particular meanings within particular cultural/historical contexts–an example: manure seems normal on a farm, but not in a modern sanitation-obsessed city. Or, put another way, the smell of manure is experienced differently by farmers, slum dwellers, middle class socialites, etc. (think about the language used to describe smells & how that language reflects class assumptions). Most broadly, these are questions of 1) context (in place and time) and 2) positionality (class, gender, & other things that might inform the assumptions of an observer).
hannahepperson 1:29 pm on March 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’m fascinated with this idea of a city smellscape … I’ve been doing a lot of city soundscape projects, which has had the effect of shifting my focus away from sight as the predominant sense we use to navigate through the city, and have had some interesting conversations about the way we interpret and judge different spaces according to a combination of sensory experiences. Of course odor has a history! One of the biggest issues that’s brought up in discussions about public eating is the imposition of food odour on people sharing close spaces … this is linked, in turn, to ethnic tensions because of the particularity of spices used in various ‘ethnic’ dishes.
Interesting, too … a lot of the fertilizer used on UBC campus is pretty stinky, but you don’t see any students or staff members taking arms against the Plant Operations crews for laying down oppressively odourous manure in the plant beds!
lcoulthard 11:51 am on March 21, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Enclosure much? Even though the people closing the pens down didn’t necessarily take the land and privatize it, this reminds me of Enclosure in pre-Industrial Britain because of the seemingly “higher-ups” deciding to shut down the operations of the lower classes. It seems their only argument put forward in that article was the problem of smell and cleanliness, but nothing scientific about human health or anything that would actually call for true change. It also seems to me that the group that was shutting down the pig pens was more of an angry mob than anything. Even though the police were backing them, these people were going from farm to farm ARMED! The common meat inspector coming to my farm with a pistol or crowbar and threatening me to shut it down without any true authority would not be a good situation, I can only imagine how helpless these farmers would have felt however in the face of roughly 80 people. This all just shows how violent and “sad,” our culture is and it definitely draws back to the social disparities from times when the newspaper looks like it was written in six different fonts and started to run out of ink! (ha!)
hannahepperson 1:18 pm on March 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I was similarly struck by the imagery of the sizable “army of the city inspector”… “armed with pistols, clubs and daggers” – reminded me of that scene from the movie Shrek, where the villagers take arms against the monstrous Ogre. There are some funny narrative parallels to draw from that to be sure. The whole thing sounded like an intentional spectacle, a street performance bent on shifting popular conceptions of the piggeries positionality within the modernizing urban fabric…
jaydee 11:16 pm on March 21, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Is the reason that so much concern over odors at this time because this is around the time that urbanization started to occur? As more and more people began to accumulate in towns due to industrialization, it invited a different class of people. These people were there for the city life, and not used to odors common in farms. Thus, in order for these towns to graduate to cities, the farmers and their smells had to go.
sampethick 4:52 pm on March 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
You’re probably right jaydee, the concern over the odor probably did have a lot to do with urbanization. Cities were getting bigger and people were living in much closer proximity to one another. And also as you said a new class was introduced to these societies and this new class was looking for a much more metropolitan lifestyle than one which included pigs and their smell could offer. I think that what we need to understand here is the drastic changes that towns and villages went through at this time in order to become cities. People were forced to give up certain things and ways of life and make sacrifices to make room for the growing desire to live a city life. The removal of the pigs was a loss for everyone involved because it was a loss of a very eco friendly method of garbage disposal. But I think in this case the desired city life definitely outweighed the benefits of having smelly pigs around. I think that had these pig farmers been a little bit higher up on the social scale then getting rid of them would not have been so easy. But social class comes hand in hand with social power and therefore because the higher class citizens within the city wanted the pigs gone, gone they were.
tsung 4:34 pm on March 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
From the article, we can note that the central component is the odor. I believe that the broader context that needs to be considered is odor and its history. Moreover, we need to consider the time as well as context and traits or personality of different classes. During the 19th century we can note by this article that odor posed a huge problem for people (those who are the upper class). Then, we need to question how is odor perceived by those in the 19th century. Farmers might see odor as natural, however, upper class members might see thus as “objectionable”. I believe perception is important and from the language used in the article, note how classist language was largely used. The upperclass is evidently responsible for the crackdown and clearly the lower class is on the losing end. Since a new law has been passed, they are forced to remove pigs from the city. What are the consequences of this? Well, people will loose their job and evidently, a greater stratification of classes will occur. “Us vs. Them” is evident in this article and by imposing this law, the upperclass is simply perpetuating their dominance in society. The odor has been described throughout the article as “objectionable”. “Odor thereabouts was decidedly disagreeable” is something that caught my eye. This sentence does not only reflect upperclass power and influence but simply denounces the lower class. Their decisions, opinions do not matter as they simply are viewed as “enemies”. They are seen as filthy and what they do is simply unacceptable to society as it threatens the cleanliness of the upper class. I believe context, gender, class and history all affect a perception of an individual.
brenden 5:07 pm on March 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Like my fellow classmates, I found this article tough to read in both it’s printed form and the language used to describe the events. I agree that the conflict over odor was likely due to the sudden increase in urbanization, the development of towns and rural areas in to cities. This debate also reflects the rise of the industrial revolution. As individuals abandoned farming and other artisan professions to work in manufacturing and business sectors, their interests and values changed. Individuals no longer felt comfortable living in close quarters with animals and subjecting themselves to such odours which is likely why issues like the one is this article occurred.
nytsuen 10:16 pm on March 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
It was the city authorities (inspectors, police) who were on the crackdown of piggeries. With the new laws passed, the pig keepers definitely lose because they lose their income in that city and the upper class benefit from having disposed of these people and the odor. With urbanization, upper class might have thought that pig keepers and in general, people who are so involved with nature/keeping animals is a step backwards. Upper class people classified odor, dirt, mud, and wastes as lower class and therefore by getting rid of it, the city could potentially be more grand, and ‘better.’ There’s one line in the article that captured my attention and that is when the pig-keeper’s wife said, “Very poor revinge to tear down people’s buildings after the pigs is all sent away intirely, Very shabby for gentlemen; gentlemen wouldn’t do it.” I thought this was interesting because this proposes a class war. This also makes it seem like what the authorities are doing are very low class actions.
erikaw 7:19 pm on March 24, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I was wondering why it was so difficult to read until I read the date on the article! The health officials and the city seem to be behind the crackdown. The city is looking out for the greater good of the city by cracking down on the piggeries. I guess they are looking for the overall benefits to the city. They are bettering the health and sanitation of the city (which in that point in time I imagine was of vast importance in terms of disease and population health) while hurting the businesses of local piggeries within the city. It seems even back in the day raising animals for consumption is dirty work if done in mass!
phoebe 7:04 pm on March 27, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree with everyone else that the odor was mainly a concern because of urbanization and the increase of middle and upper-class families moving into the city who were not used to the smells of farms and livestock. One interesting bit of classist language I noticed was when one of the farmer’s wives objected to the destruction of her pigpen by sniffing in disapproval “Gentlemen wouldn’t do this.” The bits of colloquial language used by other farmers also seemed to indicate their lower education status as compared to the writer of the piece, presumably on the side of more urban city-dwellers.
hannahepperson 1:37 pm on March 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
This article was hilarious … I wish this kind of journalism still had a niche! For me, one of the most interesting lines in the article was this one: that “there nuisances would be abated forcibly if they did not themselves remove all that was objectionable.” Objectionable? What an incredibly subjective and nuanced word! There are a plethora of ‘objectionable’ smells, sounds, sights, designs, etc. that we tolerate on a daily basis in a cityscape. But this article was pointing to a paradigm shift in a modernizing urban landscape that was declaring piggeries no longer tolerable. This of course ties in to the smart trail of comments that have already been added to this thread.
congo96 6:32 pm on March 30, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The broader context that we need to take into consideration is that society was becoming more and more modernized. As this happened the upper classes became more and more sensitive to things such as aesthetics/smells and public health. The upper classes must have influenced officials who they themselves might be part of to shut down the piggeries despite the loss to these farmers
alyumam 5:37 pm on April 1, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Interesting note, perhaps somehow funny, nonetheless an article that makes you realize the different factors involved the process of urbanization. It seems the pig crackdown was initiated by the inhabitants of nearby areas and obviously not by the pig owners which we can assume involves a social fight. This fight seems to push away recent urban settlers out of the city or change their habits instead.
In addition, those habits ( breeding pigs) seem to be, despite of smelly, necessary for the elimination of certain waste. Most likely the recycling practices from last century. Something that the dominant class seemed not to care much instead they ordered the authority to take charge of their business.
midara 11:10 pm on April 5, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I have to say that I have most part of the news guessing because of the printing and the language used. But considering it a news from 1859…
I guess more background information should be provided in order for us to know and understand better about what is going on in this article. In our point of view it might be very awkward to image piggeries locating in midtown areas of a city, but by their time this might be a common phenomenon that is shared over the country. Some sort of city planning, and related law documents may also be very helpful in understanding and analyzing the article too.
For this piece of news, the loser of the “war” undoubtedly is the piggeries’ owner/ pig farmers generally speaking. The gaining behind the breakdown is the overally improvement of sanitary in the region, and those who live around and possibly disturbed by smells and sounds of nearby piggeries. Yet considering piggeries’ purpose as a city’s recycling station, the breakdown seems to bring a loss to the metabolism of the city as a whole too.
eddietastic 2:10 pm on April 7, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
i feel like raising pigs in urban areas will cause those who are not raising them feel like the pigs may be ugly, smelly, and cause problems in the neighborhood. Furthermore, the people would probably believe that the pigs should be grown but not in my back yard which is a mentality which many people have when it has to do with things that are less then clean .
natashap 9:37 am on April 13, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
It definitely seems that the upper-class – those concerned by the smell – were behind the crackdown. And from the article at least, it seems like the concerns weren’t actually with sanitation, but with “sanitation”. People didn’t like how the pigs smelled or how it looked dirty. The city must have been under enormous pressure to deal with the pigs though, because from what I understood from the article, the piggeries were only given 3 days notice!