The True Life Adventures of a Swineherd in the Promised Land

 “… vegans (are) the Hezbollah-like splinter faction of vegetarians…” Anthony Bourdain

At the end of a recent interview about a performance project I was doing I was asked, “What is the question that you're never asked, but are excited to answer?” I glibly but truthfully responded,“How can one tell when a sow is in heat and what does one do when one finds out that she is?”

But thinking about this more, I realized that while the nine month period in the 1970s when for eight hours a day / six days a week my life, was occupied with the mating, birthing, raising and slaughtering of swine seems to be very important to me and my present identity, it also seems completely detached from anything I do now. I rarely speak about the specifics of this period of my life. In 2000 when my Mother died and I was cleaning out my parents’ house I came upon a cache of air letters I’d sent to them during this time in my life – the year before turning 21. I transcribed every letter and posted them on my website. <<http://ishmaelhj.com/id13.html>> But even in those letters, my day-to-day life as a swineherd is not revealed. Now nearly 40 years later, I want to try to remember some of those details.

·      I arrived in Israel in July 1971 after spending a month flying, hitchhiking, training, bussing and sailing through Europe for the first time. I’d turned 20 somewhere over the Atlantic. I traveled from Brighton to Paris to Dijon to Geneva to Verona to Trieste to Belgrade to Zagreb to Athens to Crete to Haifa.

·      I came to Israel to visit a high school friend who’d recently immigrated there from Central Pennsylvania where I’m also from. When I arrived, my gentle, peace-love-happiness flower child friend had morphed into a staunch and rather militant and insipiently racist Zionist. She was engaged to a Sephardic soldier and was about to enter the Israeli army herself.

At 19, I considered myself to be a socialist. I’d taken Philosophy of Communism my sophomore year. I’d read Bruno Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream about the philosophy of collective child rearing on kibbutzim and was curious to see how this worked in practice. Since things between Judi Zimmerman, (now Sharona Ben-Ami), and me were not working out, I enlisted her help in getting me onto a Kibbutz as a summer volunteer (mitnadev). She got me onto Kibbutz Lahav in the south of Israel in the Negev Desert, 25 kilometers north of Beer Sheva. Lahav sits on the 1966 border with Jordan. It is surrounded by Bedouin villages. The Kibbutz had good relations with the Bedouins who were Moslem but had no allegiance to the Israelis, the Jordanians or to the Palestinians. They were desert nomads who had total disregard for 20^th century political boundaries.

Because pork is neither kosher nor halal, there were only two places in the country where swine was raised. A Christian Arab community in Nazareth and Kibbutz Lahav. At Lahav the pig raising activities were conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Animal Research and the person in charge was a scientist. In truth, the animals were raised to be slaughtered and sold for extremely high profits to Israeli Air Force lieutenants and others with enough disposable income to buy the exotic and the forbidden. Some actual research was conducted at the Institute – more about that later.

·      The whole operation, which supplied Lahav with a sizable portion of its revenue, was spread out over a compound of several “houses.” There were the swanky private covered pens for the five or six boars and the open muddy corrals where the 80 or so sows were collectively kept. The difference in accommodations was not purely sexist, but was hormonal. Boars had to be housed separately. They instinctively viciously fought when they were brought together. I found this out the hard way when I once accidently let two out at the same time. It took about an hour to separate them as our Bedouin neighbors looked on and laughed. The Bedouins would usually not go anywhere near the pig houses but the sight of this Black American hippy trying to separate two 300 pound battling beasts with sheets of plywood and broomsticks proved too irresistible for them not to watch.

Next to the sows’ corrals were the enclosed farrowing pens where mothers-to-be were taken 3 days before their due dates. There they were bathed, their nipples swabbed with iodine, they were given a fresh clean bed of saw dust and penned into an area just larger than the size of their pregnant bodies.

Away from this interconnected mini-compound for boars, sows and piglets were a series of other houses, each designated by a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, where the livestock was moved along in its six-months process of becoming meals for Air Force lieutenants. At the end of this series of houses was the small slaughterhouse where every Friday I would …

·      But let me get back to the original question: “How can one tell when a sow is in heat and what does one do when one finds out that she is?” First, there was quite a bit of scientific protocol involved in the naming of the every piglet. They were catalogued by the names of their fathers. Patterns designating their paternity were cut into one of their ears immediately after birth with a hole puncher similar to the one I’d used as a paperboy back in Harrisburg. Their other ear would be marked with a unique number. For a sow, she was not allowed to mate with her father, (or son or uncle and these holes sliced into their ears prevented that.) A Bat-Tzalaf could not be bred with Tzalaf himself or his son or father. When our records showed that certain sows were nearing heat one of the pristinely clean boars was paraded back and forth just outside the confines of the muddy sows’ sty. If a sow came running toward the fence we’d check her ear numbers and see if our records showed that she was nearing “ready.” I’ve forgotten how long it took a sow to go into heat after weaning, I believe it was something like a week. If the sow was only nearing heat we could mount her, hold her by her ears and ride her around the pen like some demented “Lawrence of Poland.” If she were indeed ready, she would stand stock still as we sat on her back. When that happened, we’d double-check paternity via her ear holes; select a boar with whom she shared no blood lines and set them up in a cozy barred pen just a tiny bit wider and longer than their huge but slender bodies. Since these are domesticated pigs, bred and fed to produce lean meat they had lost much of their natural libidinal instincts and abilities, particularly the males. On more than a few occasions part of my experience in socialist living required me to manually insert a boar’s long, pencil-thin penis with its corkscrew tip into the vagina of a waiting sow. (Yes, the penises looked surreal and one of the great regrets of my life is that I didn’t steal one of the pig dildos that were used for artificial insemination.) Once inserted, we’d leave the happy couple alone for about 20 minutes. When they were done, we’d lead the male back to his private suite and the sow back to the mucky corral with her sisters. We’d make notations into the chart and wait the 110 days until it was time to lead her into her farrowing pen.  I wonder why no one has ever asked me about this when I’ve been interviewed about post-modern dance

·      In reality, I didn’t often work at this end of the operation. After impregnation, the care of the sows and newborns was left mostly to another volunteer, a tall blonde Danish woman named Bente who would become my best friend during my stay there. While Bente loved working with the sows and their piglets, she would almost always call me to help when there was mating to be done. She hated “smelling of boar.” I had a fantasy of photographing Bente topless when she’d have to bottle feed one of the piglets rejected by its mother. A sort of Alice through a perverse Looking Glass.

·      The year before I arrived there had been another female volunteer named Giulianna. She was from Italy and everyone spoke of her with great fondness especially the members who worked in the Pigs (hazirim). It seems she had rescued an abandoned piglet (sows would sometimes do that) and nursed him into a fine big boar that she named Pancione. He became one of our breeders. Of course at some point after Giulianna left Pancione was replaced by one of his sons and the old Pancione became someone’s dinner. That winter Giulianna came to Israel on vacation and when she visited Lahav she immediately ran to the piggery to see her beloved Pancione. I believe there was some feeble attempt to pass the son off as his father, but she knew…

·      The boars, sows and maternity ward were in the compound called Alef v Beit (the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet). I worked in the houses Gimbal, Dalet, Hei, Vav, and Zayin. These were the buildings where, after they were weaned, the piglets were sequentially led on their six-month journey from animal to meat.

·      I didn’t actually work “in” the slaughterhouse. Or I did, but I didn’t actually do any slaughtering. Every Friday, after choosing the pigs that had reached the optimal weight, I’d mark them with red grease pencils and lead them from Zayin to the narrow enclosure outside the place where they’d meet their end. After coming back from lunch, the grunting and squealing was now silenced; it was my job to go into the small clean white tiled building where the pork, now gutted and split in two, hung from meat hooks. I carried a clipboard, and I would measure their fat in millimeters in three places along their spines. This was part of the “Institute’s” “Research.” It seems that people nowadays, or at least in the 1970s, wanted leaner and leaner pork so we were constantly adjusting the food pellets we fed the pigs to achieve this new physique.

·      Saturday (Shabbat) was my one day off. Sundays through Thursdays my days were organize mostly around hosing out the pens and throwing the proper number of buckets of the proper recipe of food pellets into the proper pens. This was determined by the rate of growth and weight gain. Sometimes I had to herd groups of piggies from one house to another as the pens in the lower houses became empty. The Kibbutz also had goats, though I don’t know why. But what I learned is that goats have a strong herd instinct; if you can capture one goat all the others will follow; pigs have no such instinct. Sometimes they would all run together, though rarely where you wanted them to, and other times they would scatter and it would take Bente and me and whoever else was volunteering a long time to get them into their new digs. And although the days were often similar in terms of activity, I don’t remember ever being bored.

There were some variations on the routine. I once helped with a tooth transplant on a wild boar. I helped with a castration; it is said that once a boar reaches a certain age, if he is not castrated, the meat will be “tainted” when he is slaughtered. My own scrotum contracted all during this procedure. So far away from Contact Improvisation and Releasing Technique.

·      During this time I called myself a vegetarian although I ate fish and probably chicken. When I got back to The States I continued this diet and vegetarian posturing for about a year but I know I also ate bacon. Now I’m a proud omnivore and as I’ve grown older I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a species-ist. I think how we treat people in our daily lives trumps the eating of the occasional pork chop. I’ve met too many “friends of animals” who had no problem smugly treating their human friends like crap.

·      My scariest memory is the day I drove a tractor into the Negev Desert and almost didn’t make it out alive. There were two places where we could dispose of dead animals when we needed to do so. “Auschwitz” and “Dachau.” Before anyone gets all 1990s Politically Correct on my ass, I offer the lame defense that these names were given by my Israeli co-workers. Israelis, at least most of the Israelis I met during this time, exhibited a dark gallows humor and appreciation of the ironic. These were the exhilarating years between the “triumph” of the Six Day War in 1966 and the losses of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Anyway, “Dachau” was a small outdoor oven on the road between the Pigs and the Turkeys where smallish creatures and other debris could be tossed. Poisoned rats or birds, (we had a starling invasion that winter; some mornings the scene around the pens looked like it was straight out of Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”) But when larger animals died unexpectedly, calves or adolescent swine for example, they’d have to be hauled out into the desert and thrown into “Auschwitz” which was a huge open pit. One day there was some sort of epidemic rampaging through the pens Gimbal and Dalet and several of our 2 to 3 month olds were found dead. Now, I’ve never had a driver’s license and have only driven a car with stick shift once. But driving the tractor was a perk, a treat. When the director asked me if I could take a large bucket of dead pigs out to the pit, I jumped at the chance while neglecting to tell him that I’d never driven a tractor before. And of course away from the tidy buildings of the Kibbutz the desert landscape looked completely uniform. Sand. More sand. Long story a little less long, I was lost in the desert on a rickety old tractor with a bucket of dead pigs in its wagon for several hours. In that time I managed to almost decapitate myself on a barbed wire fence that I almost plowed through and when I finally found “Auschwitz” and got down from the seat, I looked in the wagon and the bucket and its contents were all gone. Somewhere in the Negev Desert, where we were surrounded by our Moslem neighbors, there was a bucket of the most forbidden flesh rotting in the sun. But I didn’t have it in me to go search. Even though I didn’t confess any of this, I was never allowed to drive the tractor again.

·      There was a book in the “Institute’s” office called “Diseases of Swine,” and I thought that would make an excellent title for my first novel.

·       I remember when I first started working in the Pigs, it was July; it was hot. Not Pennsylvania hot, desert hot. 104º F for days. It wouldn’t rain for a few more months. English Peter was about to leave Israel and I was to be his replacement. We were given full body jumpsuits and high heavy rubber boots. Even though we were cleaning out the pens with fire hoses the heat was nearly unbearable. English Peter stripped off his jumpsuit and boots and began cleaning the pens in his Kibbutz-issued dark blue shorts, gray tank top and bare feet. After a bit I gave in and did the same. This meant that we were walking in ankle deep pig shit in our bare feet, squishing it between our toes. I think I did have a fleeting concern about possible diseases but it felt so sexy in a Lord of the Flies kind of way that I just went with it. I never did that again though.

·      I can remember two other instances of transgressive behavior happening during my tenure as a swineherd. We had, for a short time, a group of young Israeli soldiers brought in to help with the farm work. The one assigned to work with us was named Zvika. So strange that I remember his name nearly forty years later. And that he was funny, and not a very good worker. One day he took a grease pencil and wrote the name of God on the back of one of the sows. There is an Old Testament prohibition against writing or saying the name of God. Even in English, Orthodox Jews will write G-d instead and it referred to as "ha shem," "the Name ". Lahav was a Hashomer Hatzair, (Socialist Zionist), Kibbutz, and officially atheist. Members had to leave the gates of the Kibbutz to have weddings because rabbis were not allowed onto the grounds. They served pork on Yom Kippur, the holiest holy day. But despite all this, Zvika, (and by extension all of us pig workers,) got into trouble over the name of God written on a sow’s back.

·      The other incident of transgression is what Dance Magazine later called “an intense erotic experience.” In the early 1980s I was doing an initial version of my piece “Relatives,” it’s the piece in which I picked my mother up from her seat in the audience and carried her over my shoulder as I asked her questions about our family history. In this early version, I had just grilled Mom about her decision (or non-decision) to have me circumcised and I then told this story: When I was newly arrived at Kibbutz Lahav I knew a certain sow was about to have piglets; I had prepped her earlier in the day. I went down to the farrowing pens that evening after dinner to watch her give birth to her litter. It took quite a while for all of them to come out. There were 15 I think. I was mesmerized. While standing there, pressed to the stone wall, I became aroused and ejaculated in my pants while watching the piglets being born. I honestly believe this had more to do with lack of any privacy in the volunteers’ housing situation (we all had multiple roommates and there was no place that was not public) than any sort of latent bestiality.

The most perverse part of that story is that 10 years later I would be telling it in a theater full of people that included my mother and a critic from Dance Magazine. Five or six years after that in “THEM” I would perform a duet with a goat carcass on a mattress to exorcise my fear of AIDS and dying. But those are things about which I’m never questioned.

 Ishmael Houston-Jones, 2010