When I was a kid, a neighbor from the neighborhood lent my dad a vinyl record with jokes from a café concert comedian, as we call in Argentina what Americans call stand-up (I still don't know what they call it here in Spain). Jokes from back then, the seventies, that sound innocent today. I remember one in particular that my mom often quoted whenever she found an analogy in real life.
In front of the farmhouse where I currently live, there is a pig farm, if you could even call these establishments farms. On the satellite view, you can see the five sheds where they raise the animals confined:
In turn, each one locked in a locker:
Oh, look at that mom and her babies, how adorable!
Methods that follow what can be deduced: researching online, I find out that this “animal processing plant,” as it seems more appropriate for me to call it, which is not coincidentally run by a feed manufacturer (grain-based food and who knows what additives, which here in Spain are given to the animals), has already received two awards for top productivity.
In the four years I've been living here, every summer night I've had to put up with the squeals of these animals. It's no coincidence that many beast sounds we hear in sci-fi and horror movies use pig squeals, I dare say created by humans, because of the way humans have modified these animals, since no wild animal (for example, their close relative, the wild boar) does this at night, for obvious reasons.
Everyone must have seen similar photos and even more extreme ones of what is done with cows in dairy farms, not to mention chickens, probably the most mistreated. Yet it doesn't seem to catch anyone's attention. I don't know what the state of meat is in Argentina, but here in Spain, the pork you normally buy at butcher shops and supermarkets will soon be indistinguishable from fish because of how transparent it is. They raise sick animals, we eat the meat of sick animals, and by sick I don't mean issues like the recent African swine fever, which only worries producers for economic reasons. Even less does anyone seem to notice the environmental destruction that these kinds of farms cause. In this one I have in front of me, they recently had to build what, if I'm not mistaken, was a large pool to contain the pigs' waste (months of enduring huge machines breaking granite ground, by the way), supposedly to prevent them from contaminating the groundwater (in the satellite view, in the upper left corner you can see something that looks like an exclamation mark, the dot is a water tank and the stick that completes the mark is the container I'm talking about). The funny thing is that, as you can also see in the satellite view, these farms are surrounded by hectares of wheat monoculture, where fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and so on are used to an excessive degree. Sometimes manure is used as fertilizer, but nowadays they generally use a compound here that, just like with the feed, only they will know what it's made of and what chemicals it contains, and they will probably claim it is more “environmentally friendly” than manure (this would be another analogy with the joke).
In summer, forced by the unbearable heat, which breaks its record every year (why is that?), my wife and I take a couple of sleeping bags and spend the night in the forest that starts at the back of the house. We suffer exactly like pigs. This isn't Andalusia, it's Catalonia, and at 700m above sea level, even so, the temperature this year, in July (2026), didn't drop below 32ºC, and there was a day when it reached 36. Our changes to the environment don't just affect long-term global warming, but local warming in real time as well. When the sun goes down, the temperature difference between the farmhouse (the house is surrounded by stone floors and walls) and the forest (just a few meters away) is huge, which obviously is because the stone heats up during the day and at night gives us a nice 'outdoor oven' effect. That's exactly what happens in the concrete hives we call cities, and people solve it with air conditioning, which just adds more pollution and greenhouse effect. You also notice a big difference when, instead of using a tent (sometimes we have to because of the rain), we just lay down with our sleeping bags, with the stars as our roof. Do I need to add more details for it to be clear why these pigs complain at night in the summer?
You can imagine my frustration, considering the place I chose to live. Many, in their innocence, would think that life here is really peaceful, but nothing could be further from the truth. Besides the screams of these pigs, the harvest machines work all night long (luckily, they finish once the harvest is over). You also have to put up with hard techno blasting from parties held in the local farmhouses, occasionally some street drinking gatherings, sometimes lasting until seven in the morning, and, as a cherry on top, some idiot who goes out at night on his motorcycle or car with a loud exhaust to race on the road that separates the farm from our farmhouse. And it's not just on weekends. Going back to the new noise, on the fourth night of having to endure it, around one or two in the morning I went down with my bike to check where it was coming from; as I had suspected, it came from one of the pigs' sheds, the biggest shed. Back in the woods, half-joking, I tell my wife, “I wouldn't be surprised if they installed air conditioning for the pigs!”
Another point I always talk about with my wife is that if you analyze what humans do purely and exclusively from what matters to them in their own short-sighted view, they end up losing too: not only do we live worse every time, we also pay more for everything. And it's not just the end consumer. The case of this farm is no exception; when I went to talk to the couple in charge of it, they not only confirmed the air conditioning for pigs, which they say they installed because of some so-called “animal welfare” laws (when you read the joke at the end you'll tell me if this isn't a perfect analogy), but also that lately their sales have been running at a loss, currently losing 35 euros per pig sold. However, when I pointed out to them that this whole setup and its maintenance involves a huge cost and that with the amount of land they have they could raise the pigs outdoors, as common sense loudly demands (and as animal welfare laws should require), they looked at me as if I were talking nonsense. She, who had already been mistreating me since hello, responded by insulting me and suggesting that I find another place to live. He, who at least was kind, also warned me that they would soon be adding these fans to the other four sheds, quintupling the noise, so for me, the only solution is going to be following the advice of this lovely lady; the question is where to move, to Mars? I rule out the Moon because surely the hard techno can already be heard from there.
A countryman sits on the train across from two women. Halfway through the trip, he takes out a chamber pot, puts it on the seat, pulls down his pants, takes a shit, cleans himself with a piece of newspaper, throws the shit out the window, pulls up his pants again, sits down, and takes out a cigarette. Before lighting it, he looks at the two women and asks: “Do you mind if I smoke?”