A festival where enormous pigs are slaughtered and displayed is drawing smaller crowds as animal rights activists alter perceptions of the controversial tradition.
The annual ritual is a cultural cornerstone for the nation’s Hakka community, who make up about 15 percent of the population. But it has long been a polarizing custom.
Local Hakka families compete to display the largest pig, with the winner taking home a trophy.
Photo: AFP
To a fanfare of traditional music played on gongs and horns, 18 slaughtered pigs were wheeled out on trucks Monday into the Hsinpu Yimin Temple in Hsinchu County .
The heaviest weighed a whopping 860kg — three times the average adult swine. The carcasses, bristles shaved and pinned with decorations, were displayed upside-down, the heads with pineapples stuffed in their mouths, dwarfed by their bloated torsos.
After the festival, the carcasses are taken home by their owners and the meat distributed to friends, family and neighbors.
Photo: AFP
Tseng Jia-yun’s family spent three years fattening up their pig, which was slaughtered last week weighing 400kg.
The sacrifice fulfilled the wishes of his 86-year-old grandmother.
“As a Hakka, I am proud of this divine pig culture, it’s worth preserving,” he said, describing the concerns of animal rights groups as “nonsense.”
“There’s no cruelty to animals, contrary to the rumors being spread around,” he added.
OUTDATED RITUAL?
Animal rights campaigners disagree.
They say the heaviest pigs are force fed, often in small cages to the point where the morbidly obese animals are unable to get up.
The pigs are so heavy that they can’t even stand,” said Lin Tai-ching (林岱瑾), director of the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan.
Lin has been documenting the “holy pig” festival for the last 15 years and says attitudes are beginning to change.
Crowds have begun to thin and the number of sacrifices has fallen dramatically.
“Fifteen years ago there were more than 100 swine in the contest, compared to 37 this year,” she said.
The number of animals over 600kg had also plummeted, she added.
Two submissions this year were made up of rice packets displayed in the shape of a pig, a sign that some participating families are rejecting animal sacrifices.
Researchers and locals say that while the festival dates back centuries, the tradition of sacrificing fattened pigs is a more recent phenomenon.
The Hakka are one of the many ethnic groups from China who settled in Taiwan over the last few hundred years. Each summer the Hsinpu Yimin Temple commemorates a group of Hakka who died defending their villages during a period of political upheaval in the late eighteenth century.
However, it was during Japan’s colonial occupation of Taiwan in the early twentieth century that the sacrificing of fattened pigs became a commonplace part of the celebrations. The custom then became turbocharged in the 1980s and 1990s with the pigs getting bigger and bigger.
“The Yimin festival is to honor our ancestors who died defending our homeland, a display of loyalty and brotherhood,” Tseng said.
Lin and other animal rights activists say they have no desire to end Hakka cultural customs. Instead they want to see the festival’s more cruel elements tamed. “We are not against the sacrifice of pigs,” she said, “but we are against competitions based on an animal’s weight.”
In recent weeks the Trump Administration has been demanding that Taiwan transfer half of its chip manufacturing to the US. In an interview with NewsNation, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that the US would need 50 percent of domestic chip production to protect Taiwan. He stated, discussing Taiwan’s chip production: “My argument to them was, well, if you have 95 percent, how am I gonna get it to protect you? You’re going to put it on a plane? You’re going to put it on a boat?” The stench of the Trump Administration’s mafia-style notions of “protection” was strong
Every now and then, it’s nice to just point somewhere on a map and head out with no plan. In Taiwan, where convenience reigns, food options are plentiful and people are generally friendly and helpful, this type of trip is that much easier to pull off. One day last November, a spur-of-the-moment day hike in the hills of Chiayi County turned into a surprisingly memorable experience that impressed on me once again how fortunate we all are to call this island home. The scenery I walked through that day — a mix of forest and farms reaching up into the clouds
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
“How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout” screamed a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) headline last week, yet another of the endless clickbait examples of the energy threat via blockade that doesn’t exist. Since the headline is recycled, I will recycle the rebuttal: once industrial power demand collapses (there’s a blockade so trade is gone, remember?) “a handful of shops and factories could run for months on coal and renewables, as Ko Yun-ling (柯昀伶) and Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) pointed out in a piece at Taiwan Insight earlier this year.” Sadly, the existence of these facts will not stop the
RSS