Maatiaissika Pommin (1917–1924) suku, elämä ja maailma

Abstract

Farmed animals have traditionally played a marginal role in historical research and have mainly been examined in numerical terms or as raw material for products of animal origin. Although interest in animal history has increased in recent decades, attention has been focused particularly on species acting as close companions to humans, such as dogs and horses. Pigs, on the other hand, have rarely been studied as individuals. By focusing on the Finnish Landrace boar Pommi (‘Bomb’) and its family, this article explores what we can find out about the lives of pigs who died a century ago and the world they shaped together with humans and other animals. The article relates to the multi-disciplinary field of Human-Animal Studies, in which farmed animals are understood as co-constructors of histories, cultures and societies alomgside humans. It shows how Pommi’s life was inextricably linked to the modernization of agriculture and the international revolution in animal breeding, which gave a new meaning to the breed, lineage and pedigree of pigs. Pommi and his parents, Fiia and Alku, were among the first pigs to be registered in the herd book of the Finnish Landrace breed, founded in 1914. Within a few years, they thus went from being “foundlings of unknown lineage” from remote villages into the valuable pure-bred Finnish Landrace pigs bought by large manors. In the 1960s, however, the Finnish Landrace swine breed became extinct when the goal of pig breeding turned to reducing fat and increasing meat content, and artificial insemination created a global market for “pig material.” Over all, the lives of Pommi, Fiia and Alku may appear in many respects to be the sum of coincidences in which the constraints and circumstances defined by the era left them little room for individual manoeuvre. It is, however, characteristic of the industrialized factory-farming of our own time that we no longer have the opportunity even to write pig biographies such as this.