The Horror

I just had a horrible thought.

A horribly horrible thought.

Why does Applejack keep pigs?

Cows provide milk. Chicken eggs are unfertilized, so you aren't eating... you know.

But why pigs?

What do pigs provide that isn't... meat?

I... I think I'm going to be sick.

Comments

[Knight N Gale]

Why are you going to be sick? What's to say she isn't using the pigs feces for fertilizer?

[TheLastBrunnenG]

I buried this headcanon bit in a blog post years ago but the gist of it was that cows, pigs, and other "kept" creatures aren't slaves or prey, they're house elves. They want to be there because ponies provide food, shelter, protection, and a sense of belonging and usefulness. In return they provide milk, fertilizer, grazing to keep the lawn cut, and more. It's mutually beneficial.

[zeus_tfc]

4503845
4503378

Oh, my friends.

Oh, my dear, sweet, innocent friends.

You are clearly not aware of the horror that is pig manure.

I had an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, whose parents owned a dairy farm. Right next door was a pig farm. Both stored manure in cesspools which occasionally needed to be stirred. Once it skinned over, the smell went away, but when they got stirred...

The long and short of it is that pig manure is frickin' awful, and if you have cow manure, there's no reason to use it.

I'm being ridiculous, of course. I know why Applejack has pigs. She has pigs because the writers/animators asked 'what do people do on a farm? Milk cows, feed chickens and pigs. Done.' And that was as much thought as they put into it.

It does raise the question, though. Why does AJ have pigs?

Maybe they're a crack team of highly trained truffle hunters. Porcine truffle ninjas, perhaps.

Yeah. I'll go with that.

[TheLastBrunnenG]

4509278
There might be both pork samurai and live-in-slop farm pigs. I remember when my daughter was 2 or 3 she'd watch a show called "Little Bear" about a girl who had talking, intelligent animal friends. Freaked me out that she also had a dog - a regular, barking, walk-on-a-leash dog. What eldritch horror did its canine ancestors anger that caused dogs to pee on fire hydrants and eat their own poo while literally every other animal on the show apparently evolved sapience? Even in MLP, we have Diamond Dogs but we also have Winona. Selective Anthropomorphism, let's call it. Or, as another Pig would have put it, "Some animals are more equal than others."

[Knight N Gale]

4509278 see that's not where I thought you were heading with this. I thought you were heading towards beastiality.

[zeus_tfc]

4509658
SQUICK!