Man with a pig's heart

Last week a pig's heart was transplanted into a man.

David Benett, 57, was the receiver of the muscle that as I write these lines, more than a week later, has not stopped beating in his chest.

The medical community is optimistic that it could be the ultimate opportunity for patients waiting for organs that do not arrive.

The point is that the world has not changed only for these patients, but for everyone else.

As I write this I have the watchful hoof of a ham right at my back, behind the kitchen table where I type, as if a friendly hand is about to land on my shoulder. It is what remains of a Christmas present, the classic leg stretched out on the ham stand, with the very fine steel knife on the right, ready to tear meat that promises to have eaten only acorns. I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish it now that the heart of a brother of his beats in the body of one of mine.

"I don't eat anything that has eyes or a mother." That was said by a woman I had over for dinner just a few weeks ago. And I thought that there are more and more labels to censor what is served at a table: no eggs, no meat, no eyes, no mothers, no intensive, no industrial, no sugar, no dairy, no gluten... My friend said it before the transplant and even before Alberto Garzón's statements about the macro-farms. That is to say, when the pigs did not appear on the covers and, therefore, did not matter to anyone. I have always eaten everything, sentient mammals included, but after reading the

by JM Coetzee, I spent a few months trying not to eat meat for strictly ethical reasons. “Animals do not have a face because they lack the delicate musculature that surrounds the eyes and mouth of human beings, that blessing that allows the soul to manifest. So their soul remains invisible”, explains one of the protagonists of these stories.

Chewing souls doesn't seem like an option to me, so I decided to stop eating mammals, because since Coetzee wrote that they had no faces, I began to see them clearly. But I was not able, I suspect for ideological reasons. At the moment of truth, it did not seem ethical to me to reject food on the table in a world where there are so many people going hungry. Of course, Coetzee illuminates in this book how we make use of ideology to build an ideal image of ourselves (as ethical, caring, empathetic, generous people...) or of our societies, while at the same time accepting a dose of violence and cruelty that is very raised on the very basis of our survival: food.

So, according to Coetzee, my ideology (or my culture, if you prefer) did not allow me to keep cruelty out of my mouth. Because the times I tried to reject tender and young mammals, I felt that I also despised the cook who offered it to me, the rancher who had taken care of it, the delicate work of the butcher... It almost seemed that I despised a way of life, the livestock culture, a certain kind of rural life, the beautiful oaks of the charro countryside, all the herds that root the homeland and, in short, all the civilization that throbs behind what happens and is served at a table. So in the end, all my attempts to stop eating meat ended with a phrase like: “rare, please”.

After that I came to the conclusion that our way of looking at animals is completely cultural, it does not even come from personal affection or empathy, even when it contradicts feelings. Thus it is very different to be part of a society that sees pigs as food than one that understands them as pets. If we see them as food (and this is not just an individual decision), the debate about their suffering at the time of death can even be cynical. “If we are willing to inflict death on another, why do we want to spare them pain? What is unacceptable to us about inflicting the pain of death, other than death itself?” writes Coetzee.

The point is that while the whole of Europe is discussing the way in which we should treat and kill the pigs that we are going to eat, it turns out that in that same Europe pigs are about to stop being food. Because in an advanced society (in the sense that the need for food has largely been overcome) animals begin to occupy a new place, not just on the table or in the slaughterhouse, but in the gaze: they are no longer seen as food to be looked at as animals. Being a farm pig is not the same as

. And this is not an opinion but a law that will come into force this year in Spain and that considers pets to be sentient beings, who must be taken into account in case of separation or will. Thus, a pet pig may be the object of shared custody, while its congeners are exhibited sliced ​​in polystyrene trays. Or what is the same: animal slavery has become patent and, therefore, it can only be abolished.

Be that as it may, for a man to wear the heart of a pig is a step further. Because being a pet is not the same as being a component of the human body. “I don't eat anything whose organs can throb in a person's body,” my friend will say the next time I invite her to dinner. What I'm trying to say is that the relationship between species may have changed forever now that a man is capable of love, hate and risk with the heart of a pig. Circe was a forerunner.

They will tell me that this text does not reach any conclusion regarding the conflicts it raises, precisely now that this conflict has become a simplifying political banner.

However, there is something that we can conclude and that is that we live pronouncing certainties in a culture crossed by contradictions.

I believe that these contradictions work like the bars of a small cage.

There is no way to eliminate them, but forgetting them is like throwing the key into the sea.

Sign in to continue reading

Just by having an account you can read this article, it's free

RegisterLogin

Thanks for reading THE COUNTRY