1 Introduction

Picture an extravagant bouquet of white flowers, rich in luscious textures and shapes, very much like something you would see at a wedding. Expecting a sweet smell, you approach the bouquet, only to be met with the sweaty musty odour of Boar-mate—a commercial synthetic boar pheromone used in pig breeding. To people, the smell of porcine pheromones is unpleasant—ruining the pleasure of being near the beautiful flowers. By entering into this arranged situation you have experienced Naive Boar, an art installation by one of the authors of this chapter, Agata Kowalewska. Sprayed onto the flowers, synthetic boar pheromones symbolise the unabating human attempts at strict control over plant and animal sex and reproduction. As plants’ sex organs, flowers became powerful symbols of sexual desire and romance. Just as humans have been selectively breeding domestic pigs for more muscular bodies and numerous litters, some plants have been cultivated to grow enormous flowers. As part of the political and symbolic economy, such cultured plants and farmed pigs alike have their sexuality distilled, purified, and controlled in the service of human pleasure and profit. By juxtaposing botanical and porcine sexual cues that are harnessed for human aesthetic and culinary satisfaction, Naive Boar serves a grotesque sensorial clash. This shows how such “purified” sexual signals plucked from radically different domains of agriculture cancel each other out, thus exposing the limits of human control over nonhuman worlds. We provide this imaginative situation as the introduction to our chapter in order to bestow on you a multisensory impression of the modern factory farm. We hope through this simple exercise the lingering memory of Boar-mate as you have just imagined it will accompany you through this text, further marring the image of purity, hard stived-for by the industry.

…

In July 2020, the Polish Minister of Agriculture proposed a decree that would ban outdoor pig pens in those areas of the country most affected by the African Swine Fever (ASF). Since the 2014 outbreak, this viral disease has been decimating porcine populations in up to eleven European Union countries and is further spreading south and westward.¹ Worldwide, it has been destabilising global food trade, international relations, and financial markets. Separating livestock from wildlife is one of the biosecurity measures recommended by the European Food Safety Authority. It is aimed at preventing the spread of the deadly virus from wild boars to domestic pigs by minimising spatial interactions between the two closely related subspecies (Fernandez‐Lopez et al. 2020). According to this scenario, the inside of the pig farm is supposed to remain clean and sterile, possibly sealed from the outside environment and its inhabitants that pose a danger of contamination. Free-roaming wild boars are believed to spread the lethal disease that seriously threatens the European pork industry, which reports nearly 1.4 million pigs lost to ASF between 2016 and 2020 (“ASF Report N°47: 2016 – 2020” 2020). These estimated losses are not just of animals that died from the disease, but also from the mass of healthy and potentially infected pigs culled preventively when an outbreak is reported on a farm. The number of wild boars killed by the ASF is more difficult to estimate, but with four times the number of outbreaks than in farmed pigs and given the large-scale extermination campaigns as one of the first responses to the epidemic, some 1 or 2 million wild boars could have perished so far (“Swine Health Information Center” n.d.; “Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations” n.d.).

According to Neel Ahuja “outbreak narratives obscure the important ways in which nonhuman animals are entangled in forms of government that attempt to manage bodily transition and risk” (2016, 10). Even before the incursion of the ASF to Europe, wild boars have been the target of eradication due to their recent geographical expansion and surge in population sizes. Their perceived overabundance across Europe is partially owed to climate change and patterns of crop production that affect the species’ fecundity and higher survival rates (Vetter et al. 2015). This metabolic connection implicates wild boars into the so-called “industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex” (Weis 2013) as an outside intruder damaging crop fields and posing danger to the pork industry due to possible disease transmission. In the face of ASF, agribusiness considers the reproductive capacities of wild boars threatening because population density is a major factor in disease spread. Paradoxically, wild boars’ reproductive success endangers the farm pig herds whose own super-fertility is key for meat production.

Whereas most biopolitical analyses of meat production focus on the slaughterhouse and its deadly operations (Cronon 1991; Burt 2006; Lee 2008; Pachirat 2011), we propose to shift attention towards animal reproduction that sustains the agro-food system. At the same time, discussions of reproductive practices and technologies in wildlife management typically privilege endangered species conservation (Wildt and Wemmer 1999; Friese 2013; Comizzoli, Brown, and Holt 2019). But what about those wild animals who are not considered invasive species, yet became a source of conflict and thus mobilise the rhetoric of invasion (Subramaniam 2001), like the case of wild boars illustrates? What about pigs and wild boars belonging to the same species,² while occupying radically different ecologies? In this sense, we recognise the close interconnections between sex and reproduction in animal breeding and wildlife management as biopolitical practices. Therefore, what we broadly term porcine sex constitutes the main avenue of inquiry for unravelling the discourses of purity and sterility mobilised in Poland for the sake of biosecurity and population control. In what follows, the embodied ethical implications of livestock breeding and managing wild populations are discussed in the context of fears over economic losses due to the ASF epidemic. For the sake of this analysis, we use the wide category of porcine sex that encompasses three levels: (1) intimate practices, (2) reproduction, and (3) species categorisation, with particular emphasis on control over animal bodies targeting both domestic pigs and wild boars. Mobilising the notion of sex, rather than just reproduction, enables us to explore this porous intraspecies boundary as a site of power relations that are central to the politics of purity at stake.

Analysed together, pigs and wild boars inform us about the economic, social, and ecological dimensions of politics of purity, an approach criticised by queerfeminist philosopher Alexis Shotwell. She identifies purism as “a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control,” and one that is bad “because it shuts precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic” (Shotwell 2016, 8–9). A large part of this chapter is concerned with control over farmed animals whose lives and embodied experiences become an “absent referent” in meat-eating because the linguistic category of pork to a certain extent erases the pig (Adams 2015).³ We follow Shotwell’s materialist approach to the embodied ethics of eating that complicates and muddles the hygienic forms of “classifying the eaten world and ourselves in it” (2016, 113). Such analysis needs to navigate the complexity of the particular agro-food system—pig farming implicates ethical questions of land ownership, use of water, energy sources, human labour, veterinary care and use of pharmaceuticals, crop production for fodder, which in turn uses soil fertilisers, herbi- and pesticides, waste management, etc. This reveals the material, environmental, and ethical mess behind any eating practices that are necessarily entangled in complex food production systems. By tracing the disturbed viral biopolitics at stake when porcine populations are managed inside and outside of the pig pen, we show that defending purity is a futile strategy for living together on a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017).

2 Growing Meat, Growing Apart

Domestic pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) and wild boars (Sus scrofa scrofa) are deeply entangled not only through the epizootic event, or an epidemic in nonhuman animals, discussed here in detail. Most pig breeds derive from a Eurasian wild boar ancestor. Given multiple domestication events and continued selective breeding, this process is not fully over yet. Taking into account that “for thousands of years prior to the agricultural revolution, Sus scrofa’s relationship to humans covered a spectrum of possibilities, including fully feral, semi-feral, and domesticated” (Fleischman 2020, 162), farmed pigs and wild boars are embroiled in messy histories of mutual genetic exchange. Centuries of selective breeding changed pig bodies. Longer torsos with bigger rumps and smaller heads with floppy ears (no need to stay alert in a piggery) give domestic pigs a distinctly different shape than that of the formidable wild boar. Some have even argued that they are already a separate species, not just a subspecies (Gentry and Groves 1996).

Interestingly, domestic pigs that escape captivity often grow coarse fur and their appearance becomes much more similar to that of their wild cousins in just one generation: “if a young pig is exposed to hardship shortly after birth, and a series of transformations take hold—its skull and legs will grow longer, its ears will stand erect, and bristly hair and spiked mane will burst from the crest of its skull to its tail” (Fleischman 2020, 163). Such feral pigs seem to revert some of the effects domestication had on their bodies. Additionally, these escapees will sometimes mate with wild boars and propel what geneticists call hybridisation. It has been estimated that about 25% of wild boars are genetically part domestic pigs (Frantz, Massei, and Burke 2012; Frantz et al. 2013). This shows sometimes, when among the regular-looking greyish-brown boars there is, for example, a black and white spotted individual. The close entanglement between wild boars and domestic pigs serves as a good illustration of the porosity of species as a category and unit of scientific analysis, as well as the importance of reproductive sex within it. This is a reminder that there is no such thing as a genetically pure species and that domestication and wildness are interweaving in the evolutionary journey of many species.

Though they may share genetic material with wild boars, domestic pigs have been denied their cultures, practices and expertise accumulated over generations. In the industrial farm setting, the pigs’ ability to pass on any newly formed knowledge or practices is often blocked by strict limitations on contact between animals from different age groups. Wild boars live in multigenerational matrilineal sounders, led by an older matriarch, consisting mostly of females accompanied by their offspring. Adult males are usually solitary. The reproductive cycles of sows in a sounder are often synchronised, and piglets are nursed communally (Canu et al. 2015). Wild boars can live well over 10 years and older individuals can pass on their experience. The ones living in Poland usually only reach 2–3 years of age due to high hunting rates. Intensive hunting can lead to disruptions in the transfer of experiences and practices because, unlike in the case of animal predators, human hunters often target older individuals. As long as some mature sows remain alive, however, these social skills can rebound because sounders often merge and accept new individuals, e.g., survivors of a harsh winter or hunting. Farmed hogs usually go to slaughter between the ages of 5 and 9 months. Whatever practices they accumulate disappear along with the hogs, as they do not get a chance to teach the younger generation. Kept in separate pens, farmed pigs cannot form multigenerational social groups. Even the intimate setting of birth-giving is stripped from porcine customs. The sows kept in small gestation and farrowing crates cannot build nests because most large farms do not provide them with straw. Similarly, farmed sows do not help piglets free from the membranes and often do not eat the placenta, and so this aspect of their reproduction—the immediate post-birth care—is also taken over by human workers (Powell 2003, 279). Industrial pigs and wild boars inhabit radically different worlds. However, as exceptionally adaptable animals, once pigs escape captivity, they form groups and sometimes join wild boar sounders, creating hybrid cultures (Iacolina et al. 2009).

Behavioural differences demonstrate a radical disparity between domestic pigs and wild boars; however, it is the body that has undergone the strictest control in selective breeding. After all, the humans who farm pigs are after their flesh and fat. An average wild boar sow weighs 35–140 kg (Komosińska and Podsiadło 2002, 98). Farmed pigs are much heavier—an adult sow of the Puławska breed weighs 200–280 kg. Additionally, the commercialisation of porcine reproduction gave rise to the industrial pig—a cosmopolitan swine that is more uniform across geographies, and whose body has been moulded according to the production process and the dietary preferences of the consumers. After World War II, when the demand for healthier fats grew, once popular traditional lard breeds were supplanted by pigs bred for leaner meat.⁴ In this sense, breeds are designed—they constitute material outcomes of artificial selection and are to be understood as socially constructed (Eriksson and Petitt 2020). Intensifying pork production has led to genetic narrowing with some traditional breeds going extinct. In Poland, the National Programme for the Protection of Farm Animal Genetic Resources conserves the breeding stock of three breeds considered native: Polish landrace, Puławska, and Złotnicka (white and spotted). Other non-native breeds popular in Poland include Belgian Piétrain, American Duroc and Hampshire, and Polish large white, which paradoxically is the result of interbreeding English and German pig breeds. This peculiar nationalised tableau of pig breeds is ambiguous: on the one hand, it cherishes the politics of purity (e.g., with higher meat prices for heirloom breeds), while on the other, it protects the genetic diversity of pigs from the homogenising effects of the global pork industry. Of course, it does so in the national interest by treating rare breeds as livestock heritage (Calvert 2013). Historian Margaret Derry points out that since the nineteenth century, in animal husbandry, “the idea of ‘purity’ was irrevocably attached to the concept of consistency of type and the ability to breed truly” (Derry et al. 2018). What is at stake in the purebred politics of pork are the reproductive capacities of the sows.

A few decades ago, before a number of factors which are discussed below came into play, a wild boar sow in Eastern Europe would typically have one litter per year with 4–8 piglets. For comparison, a modern farmed sow gives birth to around 30 piglets a year, with at least two pregnancies on average. The source of this bodily and behavioural discord between the two most wide-spread swine is human activity. On the one hand, intensive factory farming with captive breeding radically alters the pigs’ bodies (and narrows the genetic diversity making them more susceptible to diseases), while on the other, human-induced climate change affects the wild boars’ reproductive cycle. With milder winters and longer vegetation seasons, wild boars get easy access to agricultural crops, particularly to high-energy corn that is subsidised in the EU.⁵ As a result, sows bear larger and more frequent litters—twice or even three times per year (Tack 2018). In other words, human agricultural expansion fosters the superfertility of wild boars that now threatens one of its pillars, namely, livestock production. Moreover, the history of hybridisation with domestic pigs also affects the reproductive seasonality in wild boars (Canu et al. 2015). This feral quality (Tsing et al. 2020) further demonstrates the leaky character of human control over animal sex and reproduction. Whereas the booming populations of wild boars are considered out of (ecological) balance, the domesticated pig bodies are made superfertile in the service of agri-capitalism. In 2018, the estimated population of wild boar in the EU was about 10 million (Acevedo et al. 2020), while that of farmed pigs reached nearly 150 million, making it the largest livestock category raised for meat by millions of tons (Augère-Granier 2020). The wild boar “population bomb” discourse rests on a peculiar kind of sex panic over the wrong bodies reproducing.

This contrast illustrates how the logic of the Capitalocene (Haraway 2015; Moore 2017)⁶ inscribes itself differently onto the bodies of nonhuman animals categorised as “livestock” and “wildlife.” The biomass of all mammalian bodies consists in 96% of combined humans and livestock (dominated by cattle and pigs), and only 4% of wildlife (Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo 2018). At the same time, not all species that belong to livestock or wildlife share the same environmental history or visibility within the critical studies of the planetary transformations summed under the new epoch of the Anthropocene. Considering growing concerns over the rapid rate of biodiversity loss and declining wildlife populations, wild boars are categorised as being of least concern for conservation. Thanks to their incredible adaptability, omnivorous diet, and high intelligence, they became one of the most cosmopolitan species, which in evolutionary terms benefits from human-induced changes in the environment. Meanwhile, domesticated pigs were subjected to the modern dietary and agricultural transformation that put their bodies into industrial-scale production. Despite growing public awareness of the adverse effects of large-scale animal farming on the environment and increasing numbers of people choosing vegan and vegetarian diets, we observe a rapid global increase in meat consumption in the last decades (Godfray et al. 2018). With the growing demand for cheap meat, the numbers of pigs bred in captivity soar. Controlled reproduction ensures stable supplies of killable bodies within the capitalist logic of this agro-food system. Within this system, the fertility of pigs becomes a manageable resource.

3 Porcine Sex

A forty-millilitre bottle of Hog Mate Boar Odor Spray, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, can be used to effectively train up to fifty naive boars with a dummy sow. Another similar product named Boar-mate™ “creates the ideal insemination moment” (“MS Schippers: Boar-Mate” n.d.). These descriptions come from online stores supplying pig breeders with these and other similar merchandise essential for increasing and stimulating animal fecundity. The spray contains artificial pig pheromones that replicate the characteristic odours of a boar. Many animals secrete chemical substances as means of intra- and inter-species communication to serve various purposes, an important one of which is sex. Pheromones present in boar saliva accelerate and intensify heat in sows. In the case of Hog Mate and similar products available on the agro-market, androstenone is synthesised in a laboratory to be utilised in artificial insemination procedures such as heat detection in gilts and sows, and training selected boar studs for the collection of semen. For the latter process, another piece of breeding equipment is needed: a “dummy sow”, which is a simple rubber-covered metal construction designed to harvest sperm. The so-called “naive boars,” or young studs with poor interest, need to be tricked into mounting this abridged mating partner. This is when the boar odour spray comes in handy. The directions for use advise applying 2–3 sprays directly onto the boar’s snout for proven effects, including heightened attentiveness, vocalisation, and increased semen volume.

This swine aphrodisiac, along with its applications, brings attention to the practices and materials employed in human control over porcine sex. They rest on the commodification of one aspect of animal physiology through breeding as a form of genetic governance. In this case, animal sexual instinct is harnessed for the industrial mode of reproducing porcine bodies for meat consumption by humans. In other words, extracting and manufacturing the sexual drive of boars constitutes just one stage in the capital-driven meat production that inevitably ends in the slaughterhouse. Engineered boar desire becomes a function of the system that massively reproduces pig bodies, from the beginning destined to be killed. Swine sex largely determines what ends up on the plate—in many ways literally. Male boars that are not used as breeding stock are castrated when very young, because the meat of uncastrated males has a noticeable boar taint disliked by consumers. Focusing on the technologies and practices of livestock breeding allows for shifting attention from thanatopolitics⁷ of the slaughterhouse to feminist analyses of the biopolitics of reproduction (Murphy 2012), which strongly rely on cultural ideas about human heterosexual sex.

However, as queer and feminist scholars show, matters of nonhuman sex extend far beyond the reproductive drive. Sex is crucial for the scientific definition of species as a way of classifying different forms of life, but also for the gendered and racialised economies of difference that permeate the species boundaries themselves. Sexual acts understood as breeding in livestock management involve the selection of individual animals deemed fit for reproduction. Breeders are always careful about pedigree. These breeding practices are often expressed through the non-innocent categories of “good” and “bad” blood (Ritvo 1992; Derry 2003). When breeding boils down to managing bloodlines, such distinctions between “purebreds” and “mongrels” or “razorbacks” inevitably mobilise discourses on purity. As Donna Haraway reminds us in her discussion on vampire cultures embedded in biological kinship categories of Western modern medicine, “where race and sex were, worries about hygiene, decadence, health, and organic efficiency” abounded (2004, 251). Is this the case for veterinary science and animal husbandry? Tracing exactly those moments when porcine and human racial discourses overlapped in the North American pig business in the early twentieth century, historian Gabriel Rosenberg argues that “hog breeding functioned as a popular laboratory of racial knowledge and biopolitical management” (2016, 51). The disturbing confluence between the categories of race and breed that easily crossed the species barrier allowed for spelling out and exercising popular discourses on racial decline and contamination in the arena of livestock breeding. In this context, “compulsory reproduction determined the lives and deaths of millions of swine and was embedded at the very core of the food system” (Rosenberg 2016, 50). From this perspective, the history of control over sex for improving the marketability of porcine flesh involves acts of sexual violence, and at the same time, implicates knowledge and practices of captive breeding in naturalising and solidifying racial hierarchies as yet another form of violence.

Nonhuman sex is not obscene as long as it serves the capital. In his later work on the modern history of antibestiality laws and animal husbandry in the United States, Rosenberg points to “the agricultural exemption” in the laws criminalising human-animal sexual contact that grants an exceptional status to meat animals to ensure the continuation of meat production. He argues that “it is this underlying reproductive economy that begs for critique precisely because it is the space in which humans and meat animals are still entangled and viscerally bound as life not yet irrevocably marked for annihilation” (Rosenberg 2017, 499). The same is true for dairy animals. This reproductive economy of the factory farm dictates how and when sows and boars meet, or even separates them completely.

When it comes to infrastructures of breeding, they rest on various types of enclosures. Those include “breeding crates” or “mating boxes” designed to restrict the sow’s movement during the act of forced copulation. These devices have been developed because in selective breeding boars often grow much bigger and heavier than the sows and can injure them during sex. In intensive factory farming, a sow that gives birth is often kept in a “gestation” or “farrowing” crate that gives piglets access to her teats, while keeping her immobilised to prevent crushing the piglets.⁸ This horrific system of crates restricts the sow’s movements and removes her volition, but also isolates reproductive and maternal behaviours into dedicated phases (and spaces) of meat production. In their ethnographic study of the Danish pig industry, Inger Anneberg and Mette Vaarst observed that “being confined as farrowing sows without the ability to turn around and then being brought back into heat as fast as possible to produce more piglets carries the price of a very short, often painful life, a life full of frustrations” (2018, 110).

Porcine sex and reproduction become compartmentalised. With new technologies, a sexual encounter between animals becomes obsolete for reproduction. Artificial insemination, which removes the risk of injury during sex, entered the pig breeding industry in the 1970s, but became prominent only around the early 2000s (Derry 2015, 124). The “dummy sow” that harvests sperm from the boar tricked into mounting this artificial sex partner is a perfectly immobile substitute for the living sow. It symbolically removes her from the crate, only to bring human workers into the picture to perform the work of insemination. In this capitalist human-porcine intimacy, the workers are also tasked with arousing the breeding sows (sometimes with the help of mare hormonal substances) to improve conception rates. Thanks to the “agricultural exception” human actions such as stimulating a boar, harvesting his sperm, arousing a sow, and inseminating her manually are not considered sexual acts.

In order to maintain the growing productivity of farmed pigs, both in terms of herd numbers and their body size, porcine bodies have been pushed to their limits through selective breeding, farm management, feeding, and medication. Paradoxically, this overstretching results in increasing fragility of pig bodies that are becoming more vulnerable to disease and stress. This, in turn, threatens the profit margins. In order to navigate this precarious balance, all the aspects of porcine lives on industrial farms are carefully controlled. But it is not just the animal lives that industrial farming governs, but also the lives of human workers (Porcher 2011; Blanchette 2020). They are targets of increased control, particularly with heightened biosecurity measures dictating what the workers can and cannot do when at the farm, as well as what they do outside working hours. Alex Blanchette, in his anthropology of U.S. hog farming, argues that “these interventions into human spheres are premised on reproducing the reproductive capacities of boars and sows. […] People are coming to form kinship ties with the hogs they touch, as the state of hogs’ immune systems is conjoined to the everyday lives of individuals going about their daily routines” (2020, 49). He uses the figure of the machine to write about the industrial pig not to deny its status as a living being, but rather to frame the relationship of labour between human and animal bodies. It is not only the porcine body that is trained into submission as described earlier, but also the human worker who has to adapt to the body of the pig, to its rhythms and the logic of (re)production dictated by the profit-oriented pork industry. Such intimate choreography between human and porcine bodies, one worked out in the setting of captive breeding, forms the main avenue through which biosecurity enters into a wider array of human-animal relations.

4 Biosecurity as a Purification Practice

Radical control over porcine bodies requires them to be separated from the outside world to minimise uncontrollable factors and prevent disease. This means limiting access to pigs for both people and other animals, disinfecting tools, clothes and vehicles, cleaning, and separating herds—these are the biosecurity measures which are part of everyday farm practices. They have significantly intensified and become mandatory during the ASF outbreak. Keeping pigs separated and controlling access constitutes the first most obvious facet of politics of purity at play. The study of pig farming in Poland in the context of biosecurity, sterility, and policing borders offers a narrative complementary to that of fully industrialised large-scale farms, which have been studied in greater detail (Anneberg and Vaarst 2018; Blanchette 2020; Dutkiewicz 2019), because only 1.2% of Polish farms that keep pigs have herds larger than 1000, and 55–60% of all pigs are kept on smaller farms.⁹ These smaller farms cannot afford investing in advanced biosecurity measures, technologies and procedures, and their operations are significantly more porous than those of large-scale farms—the same person is responsible for many tasks across the different stages of the pigs’ lives, which in large-scale operations tend to be separated.

As we are writing this in early 2021, governmental requirements¹⁰ for everyday biosecurity measures against ASF in the regions that do not have active ASF cases include a strict separation of swine fodder from the pigs themselves, and away from any other animals, domestic or not. Similarly, pigs cannot be fed food waste because the ASF virus can survive for months or even years in contaminated pork products. Giving food scraps to pigs is commonplace, especially on the many thousands of Polish farms that only keep a few animals for sustenance, so breaking this food chain further separates these farmed animals from humans. Additionally, farmers need to keep track of people coming in and out of the piggery, making it a zone of high surveillance. Only authorised persons can come into contact with the pigs on a given farm, and the workers must wear protective clothing and sterilise it along with all the equipment they use before and after contact with the animals. Moreover, disinfecting mats need to be placed at all entrances. People who go wild boar hunting cannot come into contact with farmed pigs for 72 hours afterwards, and dogs that participate in those hunts are strictly forbidden from being in any proximity to the pigs. Tall double-fences need to be put up wherever pigs are kept in outdoor pens, as on organic farms where the animals are often kept free-range.

Along with several other similar rules, the main message behind biosecurity in farming is to totally separate pigs from the rest of the living and non-living world and introduce strict control of those who come into contact with them. In areas of the country marked as yellow or red zones designating the risk of ASF, added restrictions further tighten this separation and are mostly related to the conditions of transporting pigs. Animals need to be tested by a veterinarian not more than 24 hours before they are moved, they cannot come into contact with other animals, and if they are to leave the higher-risk zone, they also need to be quarantined for thirty days. As mentioned in the introduction, there was also a plan to ban outdoor pens in red zones, but the measure was rejected. Many other European countries, where the disease is active, have introduced the ban on outdoor pens, in an attempt to seal the pigs entirely inside sterile buildings, filtering and controlling everything that comes in and out. As cultural anthropologist Bettina Stoetzer sums up such practices: “[i]ronically, further industrialization was thus deemed to be the cure for the disease” (Stoetzer 2020). Along with control over sex in breeding practices, biosecuritisation encompasses almost all aspects of porcine life and death.

Despite multiple regulations aimed at sealing the farmed pigs from the outside world and its dangers, the disease continues to slowly spread across Poland and Europe (Schulz et al. 2019). This is believed to be due to both human and nonhuman factors of transmission (Pepin et al. 2020). Biosecurity was recognised as a crucial tool for fighting the ASF epidemic because the virus is extremely resilient and survives in porcine excretions, blood, and other tissues for prolonged periods of time. Given the high tenacity of the virus, human mobility becomes the primary factor of its transmission, as it is often carried on boots or tires contaminated with swine blood or faeces, or in cured meat in uneaten sandwiches. According to the Polish Supreme Audit Office’s report from 2017, the implementation of biosecurity measures was inadequate at 74% of the audited farms, and only 6% of the farms met the highest standards (Najwyższa Izba Kontroli 2017). The national biosecurity program failed to stop the spread of the disease, which by November 2019 reached the western part of the country. The report indicates that the programme also failed to meet its second goal, which was to limit pig keeping only to farms that fulfil all the biosecurity regulations. As part of the programme, compensation was offered to those farmers who would resign from keeping pigs because of being unable to introduce the biosecurity measures. It had been anticipated that the cost of their implementation would be prohibitively high for many. However, hardly any farmers decided to claim the compensation. The report is highly critical of the programme’s implementation, it did not provide any legal tools to close small pig-producing operations that failed to meet the biosecurity measures and could jeopardise the nearby industrial-scale farms. Sometimes the factory farms that complied with biosecurity measures ended up in a high-risk zone because of a single case reported on a smaller farm with just a few pigs. This further pitted big pork business players against small farmers who keep pigs primarily for sustenance. In this sense, biosecurity contributes to an increasing concentration and industrialisation of meat production.

In Poland, the discourse around the current ASF outbreak is perhaps equally marred by racism as it is by classism. While the disease itself is framed as the “beast from the East” penetrating the frontier of the EU, the Polish pork industry largely depends on the labour of migrant workers, mostly from Ukraine (Rabizo 2018, 68). Classism also plays out in othering Polish farmers in the bourgeois narrative claiming their backwardness and incompetence. The ASF epidemic and methods of dealing with it fall on entrenched divisions in society, where inhabitants of large cities are pitted against people from rural areas. In the media and on social media platforms, more liberal-leaning city dwellers, who are largely against mass culling of wild boars, argue that the responsibility of protecting farmed pigs from ASF lies with the farmers who should follow biosecurity measures. Paradoxically, arguing for greater freedom of wild boars, they call for stricter control of farmed pigs and human farm workers. This is another instance of how different the perceived ontologies of “wild” versus “domesticated” animals are, this time rehearsed in the liberal discourse.

Such complex social tensions and the ways in which politics of purification play out in the Polish context have been analysed by a feminist scholar, Olga Cielemęcka, in her study of the conflict over logging in the Białowieża Primeval Forest. She demonstrates how “purity discourses form an elaborate and entangled web which helps to delineate and fortify such classed and racialized boundaries” (Cielemęcka 2020, 67), that further exacerbate internal political divisions between environmentalist protesters and Polish authorities positioning themselves as the representatives of the normative national majority. In the case of the ASF epidemic in Poland, biosecurity forms a purification practice not only in the technical sense of enforcing stricter hygiene rules on the farm and outside of it, but also as a way of controlling human and porcine bodies. The everyday biosecurity practices that have already become standard in industrialised pig farming are now heightened and extended to all forms of human-porcine contact. The politics of purity rest on a critical tension between proximity that makes domestic pigs and wild boars vulnerable to the disease on the one hand, and distance implemented via biosecuritisation on the other, which pushes them further apart both spatially and categorically.

5 Sanitary Hunting and the Invasion Narrative

Wild boars are the most commonly hunted animals and their meat is the second most popular kind of “game” consumed in Poland. Boars, therefore, play a double role in the context of food—they are both a source of meat themselves and a threat to pork production, although the scales of these two meat sourcing strategies differ by orders of magnitude. Since the report outlining poor results of the biosecurity programme came out, the attention of officials responsible for slowing down ASF focused on wild boars as the main suspects of disease spread. Mass culling of wild boar populations perceived as the reservoir of ASF have been introduced. Already considered to be agricultural pests because of raiding crops and transmitting other diseases, wild boars quickly became the number one enemy, portrayed as the main culprits of the new epidemic (Szczygielska 2019). With the government unable to force farmers to tightly seal their pigs from the outer world, strong emphasis has been placed on preventing potentially infected boars from coming anywhere near the pigs by creating buffer zones, where attempts are made to eradicate the boars entirely by indiscriminate and intensified hunting. The Chief Veterinary Officer commented on the national programme combating ASF: “[it] is not about putting out a bonfire, our task is to stop a wildfire. We must also think about prevention to stop the spread of the disease. […] We want to protect the national economy” (“Wojewódzki Zespół Zarządzania Kryzysowego o ASF” 2020).¹¹ These so-called “sanitary culls” (in Polish odstrzał sanitarny) in the fight with ASF represent the same “cleansing with fire” approach towards unruly nonhumans that was adopted in the Białowieża Forest, as described by Cielemęcka, when the sanitary logging of trees attacked by bark beetles was employed to eradicate the “pest”. In some respects, the wild boar shares the fate of the beetle as “a politically charged animal body, a body trapped between its discursive, biopolitical, and material registers. The ‘cleansing of’ the Forest from the pest is entangled with an ideological cleansing. In it, social anxieties around groups considered unwanted or alien spill into existing conceptions of nature” (Cielemęcka 2020, 65–66). In the case of porcine bodies endangered by the virus, these anxieties also encompass domesticated nature, given that farmed pigs feature as a protected life form due to their market value as meat. In contrast, the wild boar represents the unwanted and dangerous pest whose proliferation needs to be curbed. As such, killing wild boars is understood in terms of cleansing both as vermin control and ASF prevention. The danger that the disease poses to wild boar welfare is downplayed due to their abundance and the bumpy history of the human-boar conflict. Thus, hunting in this case serves as an immediate means of wild boar depopulation put in place to restore order.

As Haraway points out, “histories are complex and dynamic in the human-nonhuman animal relations called hunting and do not lend themselves to typological reduction, except for purposes of hostile polemic, dogmatic purity, and hackneyed origin stories, usually of the Man-the-Hunter genre” (2007, 296). Nevertheless, the discourse of hunting as a sanitary practice, mobilised in Poland in the face of the deadly virus decimating porcine populations, forms a distinct type of animal killing, representing yet another facet of purity politics. This is not just wildlife population management—hunting becomes sanitisation when more than just wild boars are at stake. In this sense, killing off wild boars en masse for their potential transmission of the ASF virus is an extension of biosecurity measures applied to protect farmed pigs from infection. This is while noting that hunters are also required to follow strict biosecurity regulations because they can easily become mechanical vectors for the spread of the disease. As opposed to the times when wild boars are hunted for sport, these sanitary culls permit hunting with no restrictions, including shooting pregnant sows, and for a hefty fee. Additionally, the use of silencing and night-vision devices is granted to allow for hunting at night and closer to urban areas. Since the first ASF outbreak in Poland, hunting legislation has been modified multiple times to facilitate the large-scale eradication of wild boar populations. Significantly, a special act from 2019 allowed the possibility of mobilising the military and police to cull boars (Mikos 2019). With a goal of killing up to 200 thousand animals, these mass hunts have been heavily contested by environmental activists who organised protests and direct actions to disturb the hunts. This lasted until another law imposed high penalties for such disturbances. Between January and September 2020, hunters killed 84.5 thousand boars out of which only 458 tested positive for ASFV (Ptak-Iglewska 2020).

Much like with the Białowieża Forest bark beetles, the anti-ASF hunts turned out to be an ineffective and often counterproductive strategy. This is because the highly contagious blood and other body parts of shot boars would often contaminate the hunters’ vehicles, clothes and equipment, thus posing a greater danger of disease transmission to farmed pigs than the free-ranging wild boars themselves. In this sense, wild boar bodies are unruly not only due to their high fecundity, but also because they are leaky bodies. Hunting is a messy practice even when employed as a means of sanitisation. As anthropologist Garry Marvin observes in his distinction between “domestic” and “wild” killing, the latter kind “brought about in hunting is disorderly and certainly not inevitable, because it is based on the lack of continuous control of wild animals by humans” (Marvin 2006, 24–25). In terms of implementing biosecurity, it is predominantly human actions that pose the biggest challenge and are subject to control. Despite scientific reports on the low risk of transmission from wild boar mobility and higher efficacy of detecting infected carcasses (Podgórski and Śmietanka 2018; Taylor et al. 2020), culls in Poland continue to a manifestly military and nationalist tune. A new narrative on hunting emerges—the hunter becomes the defender protecting Polish agribusiness from an alien invasion. In this sense, an enemy at the gates helps to define the “we” of the national body. The foreign character of the disease is double: linguistically coded in its name as caused by a virus from Africa, and at the same time being widely reported as an invasion from the East, as it is believed that the first outbreak in Poland came from Belarus (Gallardo et al. 2014). As Sara Ahmed notes, “a good or healthy neighbourhood [or nation state] does not leak outside itself, and hence does not let outsiders (or foreign agents/viruses) in” (Ahmed 2000, 25). This narrative is also employed with regard to the increased presence of wild boars in cities, where they disrupt the orderly aesthetic, cause fears of zoonotic diseases, and break into people’s gardens, while also sometimes becoming objects of significant affective attention and protection, but only once they become “our local boars” (Kowalewska 2019).

The militarised defence strategy against a disease that brings economic losses to meat production is also realised through erecting physical barriers.¹² Denmark famously built a fence on its border with Germany to stop the spread of ASF. Polish authorities planned to do the same along the eastern border with Belarus and Ukraine, but the plan did not come to fruition.¹³ Meanwhile, with the disease moving from East to West, Germany erected 300 kilometres of fence on the border with Poland, thus marking the moving frontier of viral danger zones. On yet another level, these operations disturbingly coincide with the openly anti-immigrant stance adopted by the governments of Denmark and Poland. In 2022, Poland constructed a 186-kilometre steel wall on that very border where the anti-ASF fence had been planned. This border wall is supposed to block the movement of refugees and migrants entering from Belarus. Therefore, such securitisation of national borders indirectly binds nonhuman and human others in the rhetoric of invasion. This is how one of the prime facets of the politics of purity plays out in racist undertones transposed onto porcine bodies: brown, hairy, and promiscuous wild boars from across the border are presented as the main threat to pink, clean farmed pigs. The fear of contagion turns the porcine body into a site of vital warfare. What these fears over immigration and wild boar mobility have in common is the anxiety over the unruly proliferation of foreign bodies that dangerously over-reproduce. This is how we circle back to sex as the primary site for the politics of purity at play.

6 Conclusions

In this chapter we have focused on the epidemic of ASF in Poland that marshalled discourses on purity via biosecurity measures implemented inside and outside of pig farms, thus implicating free-ranging wild boars as possible vectors of the lethal disease. The politics of purity is understood in this chapter not only as the sum of sanitary and cleansing practices, but also more broadly, as an ideological stance attempting to impose order, police borders, and sort out the messy intra- and interspecies relations. Despite such high concern over keeping things neatly separated, discourses on purity harbour gendered, classed, and racialised divisions that, ironically, cross the species barrier easily, implicating human and nonhuman animals alike. In his Bioinsecurities, Ahuja argues “for the need to account for orders of representation that cross the subject through the affective, that shape the forms of interface available to humans, animals, and viruses, and that subtly vest governmental force into the lifeworlds of interspecies contact” (2016, 15). Our analysis of the changing human-swine relations during the ASF epidemic in Poland demonstrates that control over porcine sex plays a pivotal role in the mediation of space, labour, embodiment, and risk. Optimised sexuality of pig bodies on farms, their life-cycles divided into manageable, quantifiable units of protein content, coupled with ever-tightening biosecurity, are all manifestations of the broader attempts by the capitalist production mechanisms to subdue sex and life (nonhuman and human alike) to its own logic of perpetual growth and accumulation.

In this process, the industrial pig breeding operations in Europe and North America are willing to transgress traditional Christian prejudice against sex and even stronger tabooisation of bestiality, as having human workers perform the act of insemination became the preferable strategy. This is both due to profit margins and the practical organisation of pig breeding, where the bodies of male and female pigs of high-efficiency breeds grow “out of sync” with one another, nearly unable to mate without endangering the sow. It is worth noting that altering pig bodies for maximum profit bears direct consequences for human health as well, given that the unprecedented amounts of cheap meat in European and American diets are believed to be linked to widespread obesity (You and Henneberg 2016) and a number of cancers, including invasive breast cancer (Lo et al. 2020) and colorectal cancer (Aykan 2015). Similarly, altering pig bodies also influences human health indirectly, as factory farming contributes to groundwater pollution and climate change (Nicole 2013).

Such immense control over porcine bodies renders them increasingly more fragile as they reach beyond-production limits. The increased risk of viral outbreaks seems to be the logical consequence of the industrial animal farm. With higher vulnerability to diseases, biosecurity becomes a necessity in everyday operations of factory farming. From surveillance zones, through “sanitary” culling, to anti-ASF fences, these biosecurity measures frame wild boars as invaders from the East, while domestic pigs as an endangered food resource, protected only to be slaughtered. In this context, biosecurity could be easily framed as one of the mechanisms for ensuring food security (Lougheed and Hird 2017), but we show that a lot more is at stake when purification practices and border policing are enforced on a large scale. Porcine bodies become a manifestation of ideological purity, even though the differences between wild boars and domestic pigs result from centuries of human intervention. The idea that wild boars and domestic pigs remain strictly separated from one another is merely a fantasy of purity and an illusion of control over nonhuman animals. Although they seem set apart by industrialised agriculture—with farmed pigs subjected to increasing forms of captivity and wild boars expanding their territories and becoming more present in urban and suburban areas—their ecologies still overlap. The main concern behind biosecurity measures mobilised in the face of the ASF epidemic relates to the spatial proximity between these animals. However, as of yet, the attempts to fully separate indoor pig farms from the outside world have failed. The impossibility of purity is manifested not only in the imperfections of human actions, but also as a result of the resilience of the ASF virus, livestock vulnerability in factory farming, and the agency of wild boars crossing national borders (or farmed pigs escaping captivity, becoming feral and joining wild boar sounders!).