Fear of Pigs

What the only citation says

The dictionary defines porcophobia as a fear or dislike of pigs, marks it rare, and collects exactly one quotation. It comes from Christopher Hitchens's book of September 2007, from a chapter titled as a short digression on the pig, or why heaven hates ham, and it reads that porcophobia and porcophilia probably originate in a nighttime of human sacrifice and even cannibalism at which the holy texts often do more than hint.

The word is most likely his. An essay on the subject describes porcophobia as a term most likely coined by Hitchens in that book, which makes this one of the few phobia words with a probable author and a probable date.

It was coined to make an argument rather than to describe a patient. Hitchens needed a name for the disgust so that he could set it against the appetite and treat the two as a single phenomenon with one origin, which is a claim about religion rather than about anybody's fear of a pig.

Nobody has settled why the taboo exists

Both Jews and Muslims consider pigs unclean, and the reason has not been conclusively resolved. Several explanations compete:

• transmission: the Quranic rule may follow the Jewish one
• medicine: raw or undercooked pork can carry roundworm larvae that cause trichinosis, and a connection between pigs and disease could produce a taboo built on fear
• ecology and economics, from the anthropologist Marvin Harris: pigs need a great deal of water and shady woods with seeds, and both are scarce in the Middle East

The difficulty is that the pattern does not hold. Whether pigs count as clean or unclean has varied between cultures with no clear dividing line based on climate, which leaves open the possibility that the taboo was chosen more or less arbitrarily and served to bind a community of believers together. To the Egyptian pharaohs pork was unclean. To the ancient Greeks it was not.

How the Romans treated pigs

The Romans were fond of pigs, and one of them in ancient Rome was given a tomb. The inscription says a piglet rests here. The animal had lived three years, ten months and thirteen days, which somebody had counted.

Modern descendants of that pig are generally slaughtered between six and ten months old.

The Christian record is mixed rather than hostile. Saint Anthony, a monk born in Egypt, is the patron saint of farmers, swineherds and butchers, and legend has him working as a swineherd at some point, which is why Hieronymus Bosch painted him with a pig at his side. In the Middle Ages pigs, like other animals, could be held culpable for criminal acts, taken to court and executed. The reputation is poor and the consumption has continued regardless.

Why the animal attracts this much feeling

The essay that discusses the pairing gives a plain account of the closeness involved. Pigs are omnivores, as people are. They are not pack animals and they give no milk, so humans used them for meat from the beginning and for nothing else. Wild boar sucklings can be domesticated and domesticated pigs can turn feral, so the boundary between the wild animal and the farm animal is thin in both directions.

There is also the resemblance that Hitchens reached for. The taste of pig meat is supposed to resemble human flesh, and the essay notes the related observation that firefighters do not care for roast pork.

That combination, an animal kept only to be eaten, close enough to a person to be uncomfortable and capable of reverting to a wild state, is a reasonable candidate for the strongest food taboo in two major religions and for an appetite of equal strength in others. It is not a phobia, and no source treats it as one.