During my three years of living in Iowa, the country’s largest pork producer, I have seen pigs on three occasions. Once, while driving through a small town on the way to Dolliver Memorial State Park, when someone’s pet pig—small and rotund and dark gray—sniffed up our slowed sedan as we cooed to him through the window. Once, at the state fair, where families brought their farm animals for competitions, including the “big boar” contest, in which two disturbingly large hogs lay against each other, unmoving in the excruciating heat except for their enormous flanks that heaved up and down as they breathed.

My third sighting multiplied like a trick mirror: Dozens of snouts poked through the metal slats of an anonymous transport truck as it barreled down the highway. Driving through a country with nearly seventy-five million pigs, this is how most of us encounter them: Whizzing by on the road, their pink poking out from their mobile entrapments. Besides these highway hogs, many folks in the US are surrounded by pigs unseen: Millions of creatures tucked quietly away, guarded in their sprawling feeding sheds.

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In Iowa, pigs outnumber humans by almost eight to one.^[1] Hog density, they call it.

On my way to teach at Iowa State University, I walk by the Swine Facilities and Farm, where I imagine grad students in lab coats poking at bright red intestines. All around campus, the bodies of these pigs are represented only by the divisions that own them: The Iowa Pork Industry Center boasts the recently celebrated World Pork Expo right here in Ames, and Iowa Swine Day is on July 25, the day before my birthday. Promising students are offered the Jeff Hansen/Iowa Select Farms Pork Industry Scholarship, funded by Iowa Select Farms, the biggest pork-producing corporation in the state. My school is also one of the select few land-grant universities that partners with the pork industry to offer a PhD in essentially pork PR: Students earn a doctorate in building public trust for the pork industry.^[2]

In class, my students ask me who I think would win in a fight: Pigs or people. Their bets are on the pigs. But despite their enormous population, the pigs surrounding us have been disappeared into the mechanics of an industrialized landscape. Surrounded by oceans of very visible corn, it wasn’t until recently that the connection fully clicked: Corn for pigs, pigs for humans. While we never see the pigs themselves, their food sources, corn and soy, are widely visible. Slowly but surely, the pork industry has shrunk to a “simplified food chain of corn and soybeans to pigs to people.”^[3] In other words, as my friend Finn muses, “the only pig we see is pre-pig (corn) and post-pig (pork).”

On a run through the back roads of a lake town in northwestern Iowa, it’s corn for miles. But the breeze makes quick work of gallons of pig waste: A wind shifts, and there are the pigs again. Quiet—no snorting, no squealing. No snouts, no pink-pale rumps. Just the smell of their gone-bad living in the air. In these preharvest fields, there’s nothing but wind carrying their living to me.

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How do we love, or fight for, what we can’t know or see? In Iowa, “ag gag” laws have a stronghold on industrial farming. That means that no camera footage is allowed within factory farms, no drones overhead, no kind of documentation that isn’t branded by a company itself.

In an Iowa Select Farms promo video, young piglets crowd the camera, ears flapping. How coo-worthy, these babies, these future foods. But even in this carefully packaged media, there are small glitches. As an anonymous employee walks through a light, ventilated feeding room, a group of pigs scatter at his approach. In at least two shots, they run frantically, terror-struck, away from him. The footage cuts right at the edge of their fleeing. 

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There’s disappearance all the way down. One essential layer of that disappearance is language: Pork, not pig.

Carol J. Adams refers to this kind of linguistic disappearing in the meat industry as the absent referent. “The absent referent,” she says, “is the literal being who disappears in the eating of dead bodies.” The hog industry doesn’t deal in living beings, but in “animal units.” Those in charge of designing the doctoral program for pork PR professionals are sure to know this well: The power is in the language, the story.

Even when I say hog, I summon a kind of brute energy, a hardier vision of the piggos that wriggle through my Instagram feed: Bellies bared for scritches, sudsed-up teacup pigs with light pink snoots poking through the foam, rolled into blanket burritos and stretching their maws, yawning. Those piglets aren’t hogs, and they’re certainly not swine. Their cuteness protects them, for a while, from our teeth.

The contempt in our language for pigs follows a real-life contempt, particularly for folks who work in the hog industry. Over three-dollar gin and tonics at the local watering hole, a stranger joined a group of us grad students for a few hours while he sobered up from his brother’s bachelor party. Somehow, the conversation turned to pigs—Cal had it out for them, he told us, nursing a grudge from his nightmarish days working in factory farms. Hogs are vicious creatures, he said. Awful. When I balked at his venom, feeling a small fury bubble inside, my partner was game for a good debate: To judge pigs trapped in the toxic gut of an industrial system was like judging prisoners whom the violent system had turned violent, or mad.

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I am, admittedly, not a vegetarian. We all have our own personal ethics about what, who, and how we eat, and I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all prescription. Living on a grad school budget—and more recently on a working artist’s budget—I’ve tried my best to make mostly sustainable, mostly ethical choices about who I eat and how often, and from whom I buy the animals I do consume. The less frequently I’m confronted with the reality of who I’m eating, though, the easier it is for my cognitive dissonance.

Once, driving across the state (as a passenger) and forty-five minutes deep into a weed gummy, we pulled up alongside a particularly full truck of pigs. Their bodies pressed against the slats, puckering out into a mosaic of pink ovals. One of the pigs’ ears stuck out of the frame, flapping in the wind, and, reader, that thin little ear rocked me. Fuzzed, sun-struck. Unbearably precious, that delicate, untouchable living. I wanted to weep. The wind of the highway whipping—the world touching it back.

But by the time we stopped for lunch, I had momentarily forgotten the encounter and unthinkingly ordered a chorizo burrito. After my first bite, I thought I might puke. I tucked the rest of the burrito back in its tin foil, gagging. Seeing that creature up close, being confronted with their bodily, twitching, sniffing life, had shifted things around inside me. Even if fleeting—even as the world slowly clouded itself back over.

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All the world hinges on relationships—or their rupture. Settler colonialism and racialized capitalism are both practices of severing relationships, of snipping our tethers to one another at the umbilical nub. And like its imperial parent, as Báyò Akómoláfé teaches, whiteness is “the genocide of relations.”^[4]

Centuries ago, when European settlers first arrived on these lands and carried out the displacement and attempted genocide of the Indigenous peoples across it, they brought pigs. But what began as a few families owning pigs to sell locally or for personal consumption metastasized into a lucrative economy, one disproportionate to the size of relationships. As the bodies of the pigs became translated into financial value, settlers’ responsibility and relationship to those companion species—as with our responsibility and relationship to this land, its original peoples, and one another—dissolved.

Industrial farming is one of the many arms of a relationally severed, colonial beast. Its tactics are the tactics of an ongoing settler colony: If the animals mass bred and mass consumed are made out to be dirty, violent animals—or better yet, if they can’t be seen at all—their place in our food system is justified. So, too, can I ignore my responsibility to them if I move through my days without seeing a single pig, without questioning what’s underneath the sun glinting off that CAFO’s metal roof.

It’s disappearance and relational severance all the way down: If I can’t see the pigs, neither can I see the humans working alongside them—most often migrant laborers brought in by agricultural corporations to do the grunt work. They too have been disappeared, maligned, and deigned “dirty” and “stupid” (particularly by the current administration), while they shovel shit or clear the bodies of hogs who could not survive the conditions of confinement.^[5] Amid expanding ICE raids and anti-migrant policies, the corporations are quick to discard those whom they imported, to renounce any semblance of relationship.^[6]

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Despite all the efforts to disappear them, pigs are pushing themselves back into visibility. Escaped hogs—rewilded hogs, you might say—are taking matters into their own hooves.

In my home state of North Carolina, the country’s second-largest pork producer, pigs who have escaped from factory farms are quite literally giving the state a run for its money.^[7] Rogue swine cost the state tens of millions of dollars per year in damages—several times the national average of $1.5 billion in damages from wild hogs.^[8] Across the Southeast, they’re grazing and trampling acres of corn and soy.^[9]

The state’s newly formed Feral Swine Task Force is in charge of trapping and “handling” the pigs. The hogs are “removed” (read: “harvested”). Self-identified Carolina Hog Stopper David Moore suggests that trapping hogs requires some relational building: “You’ve got to gain their trust,” says Moore. He baits his traps with corn, raspberry jelly, and molasses.^[10]

“You wail feral like we stepped out of our lane,” writes Jaz Sufi in “Poem in the Voice of Thirty to Fifty Feral Hogs.”“Try to hunt us. We eat bullets like you.”^[11]

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Going too fast on the way to the airport, late to pick up a friend and distracted on the phone, I pass another semi full of pigs. One of them sticks her nose out the metal holes—face full of wind. That snout, that air-gulping curiosity for the world barreling by, shocks me back into myself. Here we are, piggo. I want to reach out and touch her. I slow the car. I let the grief of her realness, her living, take up residence for one elongated moment.

Years ago, my friend drove by a tipped-over semi full of them. The flipped truck unleashed a flood of pigs, blinded by a world they’d likely never seen. All those creatures spilled out on the side of the highway, dazed in the new sun. The pigs didn’t run. They just stood there, loosed, taking in their surroundings. Set free in wide fields, light breeze, they froze, like they had made contact with the alien world at last. They waddled uncertainly, circling one another, shivering in the maw of that empty space—surrounded by rows of newly budding corn.

Cover image credits: by Zoë Fay-Stindt

Notes:

[1] Mary Trachsel, “The Destructive Ecology of Human-Pig Relations in Iowa Since 1950,” in Bellwether Histories, ed. Susan Nance and Jennifer Marks (University of Washington Press, 31 Dec. 2023, pp. 181–205), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780295751436-009.

[2] Sophie Kevany, “Inside the Pork Industry’s Attempts to Charm and Influence Academia,” Sentient, March 21, 2024, sentientmedia.org/pork-industry-influence-academia/.

[3] Trachsel, “Destructive Ecology.”

[4] Báyò Akómoláfé, “Báyò Akómoláfé and Indy Johar,” The Edges in the Middle, III, For the Wild, https://forthewild.world/listen/the-edges-in-the-middle-bayo-and-indy.

[5] Rosenbloom, Raquel. “A Profile of Undocumented Agricultural Workers in the United States,” The Center for Migration Studies of New York, Aug. 2022, cmsny.org/agricultural-workers-rosenbloom-083022/.    

[6] Morris, Frank. “Deportations Are Set to Explode – a Huge Worry for Farmers Already Facing a Labor Shortage.” Wisconsin Public Radio, 5 Jan. 2026, www.wpr.org/news/deportations-worry-farmers-labor-shortage-harvest.

[7] US Department of Agriculture, “September 2024 Hog Report,” September 30, 2024, www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/North_Carolina/Publications/Press_Releases/HogRelease09.pdf.

[8] “Four Ways Feral Hogs Cost Farmers and Ranchers.” Noble Research Institute, 5 Nov. 2024, www.noble.org/regenerative-agriculture/wildlife/four-ways-feral-hogs-cost-farmers-and-ranchers/.

[9] “Feral Swine Bomb.” Feral Swine Bomb | USDA Climate Hubs, www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/southwest/topic/feral-swine-bomb. Accessed 21 Dec. 2025.

[10] Cullen Browder, “Man Vs. Beast: Wild Hogs Are a Growing and Destructive Problem for NC Farmers,” WRAL News, February 3, 2022, https://www.wral.com/story/man-versus-beast-wild-hogs-a-growing-destructive-problem-in-nc/20115210/.

[11] Jaz Sufi, “Poem in the Voice of Thirty to Fifty Feral Hogs.” Black Warrior Review, 2023.