this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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They actually don't. I've raised pigs, and they keep themselves clean- they pick one corner of the pen to shit in and a different corner to sleep and eat in, given the opportunity. The idea that they shit where they eat is probably (dunno for sure) because they clean themselves by taking dust baths, and when it rains, the wallow turns into mud. They roll in the mud to stay cool when it's hot sometimes, but it isn't shit.
We had a pig when I was a kid who could work the lock on her pen and escape into the fields next door to eat grass. They're pretty smart.
Unclean doesn't always mean "dirty". A lot of things that are considered unclean by different religions are considered so because they're spiritually unclean, rather than literally filthy. Historical riligious objections to pork are probably because of human-transmissible parasites and disease like trichinosis, which aren't as much of a concern anymore.
Pigs were kept near to people and were a vector for disease because they share similar biology to us. They weren't unclean because they didn't wash their hands or something stupid. They were unclean because they made people sick because of they way we kept them after domestication.
Okay.