"A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but"

A peasant’s relationship to their pig embodies an earthy, paradoxical kind of intimacy. There is tenderness in the care and affection a peasant shows to the animal, and yet when the time comes, there is gladness, not shame or regret, in preparing its meat for the winter. The point lies in the connective logic: these two realities coexist without contradiction. The affection and the consumption, the companionship and the slaughter, are held together by “and,” not opposed by “but.”

For an urban observer, this may feel jarring. Modern, urban sensibilities often draw a sharp line between loving and consuming, between reverence and utility. The expectation is that love for an animal rules out its killing and eating; to care for and then kill might seem contradictory or even cruel. The urban worldview is shaped by distance from production, food comes from stores, and the processes behind it are sanitized, invisible. With such distance, empathy for animals might turn toward abstraction: love, then, opposes killing. “But” is inserted in the city’s moral grammar.

For the peasant, however, the animal is part of a familiar, reciprocal cycle. Care is not sentimental; it is practical and profound. To rear the pig is to recognize its place in the flow of life, as source of food and presence in daily work. Gladness in salting away its pork is not callousness; it is the satisfaction of knowing both parties’ roles have been fulfilled. There is gratitude and necessity, and these feelings coexist without shame.

This awareness speaks to a mode of living where survival, affection, and mortality are tangled and accepted. One can love, genuinely, and consume without hypocrisy or rupture. The “and” holds the truth of rural life: sentiment and necessity are not adversaries but companions in the ongoing story of making a life from the land.