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OUTDATED RITUAL?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.”
The depressing numbers continue to pile up, like casualty lists after a lost battle. This week, after the government announced the 19th straight month of population decline, the Ministry of the Interior said that Taiwan is expected to lose 6.67 million workers in two waves of retirement over the next 15 years. According to the Ministry of Labor (MOL), Taiwan has a workforce of 11.6 million (as of July). The over-15 population was 20.244 million last year. EARLY RETIREMENT Early retirement is going to make these waves a tsunami. According to the Directorate General of Budget Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), the
Last week the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) announced that the legislature would again amend the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) to separate fiscal allocations for the three outlying counties of Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu from the 19 municipalities on Taiwan proper. The revisions to the act to redistribute the national tax revenues were passed in December last year. Prior to the new law, the central government received 75 percent of tax revenues, while the local governments took 25 percent. The revisions gave the central government 60 percent, and boosted the local government share to 40 percent,
Many will be surprised to discover that the electoral voting numbers in recent elections do not entirely line up with what the actual voting results show. Swing voters decide elections, but in recent elections, the results offer a different and surprisingly consistent message. And there is one overarching theme: a very democratic preference for balance. SOME CAVEATS Putting a number on the number of swing voters is surprisingly slippery. Because swing voters favor different parties depending on the type of election, it is hard to separate die-hard voters leaning towards one party or the other. Complicating matters is that some voters are
Sept 22 to Sept 28 Hsu Hsih (許石) never forgot the international student gathering he attended in Japan, where participants were asked to sing a folk song from their homeland. When it came to the Taiwanese students, they looked at each other, unable to recall a single tune. Taiwan doesn’t have folk songs, they said. Their classmates were incredulous: “How can that be? How can a place have no folk songs?” The experience deeply embarrassed Hsu, who was studying music. After returning to Taiwan in 1946, he set out to collect the island’s forgotten tunes, from Hoklo (Taiwanese) epics to operatic
RSS