Six Human Genes

MRGreenJeans1 Video posted: 5 days ago.

I know I might be wrong about this, but I’m pretty positive one of Owen’s pigs killed him. Also, that this pig is at large, immensely powerful, and even as I speak, probably siring piglets that’ll be just like him, only hardier. We have to contain this before there are too many of them, before they start to organize.

I’m sorry I bailed on the Zoom memorial; I couldn’t have choked out a word. I had to pre-record this because I knew I wouldn’t hold up during any kind of live event. But I’ll check back in when I can.

I met Owen Knightly about a week before they found him and was apparently the last person to see him alive. After his remains turned up—scattered bones picked apart by scavengers in the forest just beyond his farm—the sheriff had questions. Did these scraps look like Owen’s overalls, Owen’s shirt, what about this earbud, did Owen have boots like this one. I did tell them everything I could, and now I need to tell you guys the rest. As soon as someone gets a load of what you are, they make all kinds of assumptions about what you do. But at the moment, we have bigger problems, and so do they; they just don’t know it yet.

So I drove out to Owen’s place three weeks ago, two days before Christmas, to pick up my four breeding pairs of piglets. I don’t know what I was expecting, but Owen in the flesh was this tall, soft-spoken guy, lanky and young-looking. You know, Owen, just nowhere near as homely as he’d always been on Zoom. He started in immediately, asking about my land and outbuildings, and my—nonexistent—experience with animal care. The whole time, his hair kept whipping around and flying into his mouth and eyes, and he just talked through it without brushing it away. And he might be the only man I’ve ever seen wearing a white dress shirt under grubby overalls.

You don’t pick out the little shoats yourself; he would do that. He’d already pulled them together and paired them up for “adequate genetic diversity for now.” As some of you know already, he had designed an Excel template with macros to help him decide when to fold in new lines from the outside and when to breed current lines back in on themselves. Which I’ll be using when it’s time.

“When I brought home my first batch,” Owen said, “their family trees didn’t fork. They still don’t, not very much. You just can’t outcross but so much without losing the one trait this is all about.”

Owen said the eight I was buying were all I needed to get started, and then he took me into the barn nursery to meet them. Six weeks old, barely weaned, and butting heads and wrestling one another like clumsy little goats. Christ, they were adorable. Still are, even doubled now in size. And smart? Don’t get me started. Pretty soon I’ll have to start changing the combination on my gate locks.

My X-piglets were all wearing collars with name tags. Even with mostly similar coat patterns, all eight were easy to pick out from their faces and personalities. Owen said following the template—one of two files on a thumb drive he gave me—should keep us on track for a couple of generations before I’d need to bring in new blood. After that, he said, “Who knows? With any luck, by then we can just buy them on the open market, or from 4H kids.”

Even as juveniles, my piglets are working together, making berms out of straw and burrowing together deep inside to nap—when they’re not napping with me. I know, everyone thinks their own are the best. But if you’re raising X-pigs, I’m begging you: treasure them, baby them, and protect them like the miracles they are. Respect their intelligence, their strength, and their feelings, and reward them lavishly for what you’re taking. Let your pigs live fully as pigs, but make sure they know that every good thing in their lives is there because you put it there. And always embody the role of Alpha Pig of your own herd. Owen got that much right.

We know that Owen was trying to build a network where we can thrive and advance without harming anyone, and without compromising our own well-being. With the X-pigs, he brought us hope, and every one of us knows the cost of life without hope. Without Owen, some of us would literally have destroyed ourselves by now. Whatever he set in motion, we owe him for that lifeline. Now, if we can just hang onto it.

Once I’d met my little herd and we were back inside his house, Owen brought out two goblets filled with red and handed me one. He recited the blessing we all know by heart: “To privacy and lasting peace, doing good without notice, and making amends wherever we’ve caused harm.”

Clink, sip, then a bigger taste. The inside of my mouth was beginning to lose its mind. “Sweet Baby Jesus, Owen. I had no idea this was even possible. Seriously, if I didn’t know, I wouldn’t know.”

Owen said, “Yours will be just like this when the little guys are ready.”

Then he took me back out to the barn, to a small grey sow named Heather, where he showed me how to pull a pint. I watched as he first palpated Heather’s neck to find the vein, then applied some high-test lidocaine so she wouldn’t feel a thing. He then made two puncture marks in the usual way. He withdrew his canines from her neck and inserted two clear tubes into the two little holes. He held the tubes in place until they filled a jar to the sixteen-ounce line. After he’d removed the tubes and rubbed on a dab of spit, both puncture wounds closed up and healed as if in time-lapse photography. Then he scratched Heather’s head behind her ears, thanking her effusively.

“What a pretty girl you are,” he told her over and over, offering a couple of marshmallows that she took from his outstretched hand.

“Some of them would rather have a slice of apple at this point, and I’ve got one that’ll only accept malted milk balls,” he said. “And he won’t touch them while I’m standing there. Roscoe’s never been one for eating out of my hand.”

I knew Owen started out with eight piglets rescued—well, taken—from a research facility: the “foundation herd” that generated his X-pigs. What I didn’t know was that these labs had been breeding for human transplantation: heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, corneas, pancreas, other things. These pigs were developed from lines with at least six human genes to reduce the threat of organ rejection. Those added genes are why our pigs are thinner than food industry pigs, and maybe—who knows—why they mostly bond so readily with us. It must also be why X-pig blood doesn’t taste disgusting or make us sick.

Owen pointed to a section of the barn isolated from the other pigs: Roscoe’s stall. A dark gray pig with a huge white band circling his trunk, Roscoe met and held my stare, following our moves intently with eyes that seemed to be taking note of everything. With or without a treat, I could not imagine ever placing my hand anywhere near that animal’s mouth.

I had to ask the obvious question. “Why drain the blood through those tubes? Why not just drink the regular way, since that’s how we go in anyhow.”

“You mean, besides not wanting to drink through lidocaine?”

Owen said there’s a learning curve to feeding naturally from a pig, that since you don’t know how much you’re taking in, you don’t know when it’s time to stop. Not to mention that when you’re in the moment, it can be hard to makeyourself stop. “Some have mastered it, but how many of your piglets are you willing to spend before you get it right?”

He said rules of thumb are useless for this. He said if I decide to go down that path, I should fill a sixteen-ounce container with water and count how many drinks I take from it before it’s empty. He said it’s not an exact measure, and still wouldn’t solve the problem of slipping inadvertently into Full Gorge Mode, but that it’s better than winging it.

Owen told me that in another couple of months, I could be drawing half a pint per session from the first piglets to acclimate. And that once they reach full size, sixteen ounces from each, twice a month. So I’d be feeding in moderation every other day. Never Hungry, never full.

My eyes began to well up once it hit me that before long, I’d be done forever with the Hunger. No more shady side deals with blood bank donors. No more keeping Assisted Death clients company between their first injection and their second. And no more slinking away from Tinder dates before daybreak, before they’d wake up shaky, pale, and down by a quart.

“Teaching piglets to accept the draw is a multi-step process,” Owen was saying, noting that mine had all mastered Step One: they already accepted being approached, which he said takes some training. I would later find a link on the thumb drive he gave me to a video on this very station. Sandwiched between two halves of a middle-school talent show, after the jazz dancers and before the comedian/magician, was a clip of Farmer Owen: “Howdy, boys and girls! Today I’ll be walking you through every single step of easing your piglets into their brand new life.”

Once back in the house, he was pouring Heather’s pint into two fresh goblets.

“One for the road?” he offered.

Owen said he wanted to go over one more thing before I left: how I would manage my instincts and impulses in the absence of the physical, brain-pounding Hunger: that even without climbing the walls thinking about our next hunt, we still are what we are. That either we find a way to rein this in, or our impulses will sneak out in highly destructive ways.

“Finding an effective way to navigate your instincts will make all the difference between being a person living with vampirism … and being a monster,” he told me. A reluctant monster, maybe, but body counts don’t lie.

Sunk deep in one of Owen’s worn leather-covered sofas, I noticed the goblet from Heather tasted even better than the first had. For one thing, the liquid was still warm, intensifying both the mouth tingle and the notes of iron. I nursed my drink to prolong the experience as Owen began laying out options for keeping my pig population in check. As he saw it, I’d probably be wanting to double the population and keep it steady at about sixteen. I could neuter most of the little boars in the next gen, or mix hormone suppressants in their feed until it’s time to start a new litter. Or sell piglets within our circle as they came available. Or sell to boutique butchers who specialize in meat from lean, pasture-kept, humanely raised animals. Which I couldn’t, and can’t, imagine doing. Or I could cull the herd myself as needed, and by the most obvious means. Or some combination of the above.

Owen said the default size of his herd is sixteen, and that he was selling about as many new piglets as were managing to survive infancy. Then he told me about his annual Christmas hunt, about Roscoe’s role in his plans for it.

“I take one night a year as a safety valve for my predator impulses, so they don’t get out of hand during the other three hundred sixty-four,” he said.

He called Roscoe his logical choice this time around: the one that never connected with him no matter how much effort Owen put in. The problem child, the bad influence. He said he’d normally pick some stolid little thing: maybe one whose blood seemed a bit subpar, or a sow that kept savaging her own litters. It was never personal, not until now.

“This one hurts, mostly because I tried so hard and Roscoe is just hostile to the life. I do better with happy pigs.”

Owen liked pigs that liked him back. If only Roscoe had rolled back his little eyes in pleasure when Owen scratched behind his ears and told him what a good boy he was. If only he’d forced himself to take those malted milk balls from Owen’s hand instead of just standing there glaring at him, Roscoe would be spending Christmas safe inside the barn. Poor guy couldn’t kiss ass to save his own life.

So that was the plan: set Roscoe loose just before dawn and hunt him down after dusk, giving free rein to the side of his nature he mostly kept locked in the cellar. Chasing down a hand-reared domesticated animal and feeding like a fiend one night out of the year so he could sip decorously the rest of the time. Might’ve worked, if Owen hadn’t been so keen on bringing Fair Chase principles into it.

Fair Chase wouldn’t have been anyone’s idea for putting down a farm animal with attitude and six cantankerous human genes, a pig that had never spent an hour outside Pigtopia. But Owen said he’d be wearing earbuds blasting a Modern Bluegrass Christmas playlist from Apple Music. His sense of smell would be distorted by eucalyptus, and each ankle would be carrying a five-pound weight. He’d considered a blindfold, but decided that would be overreaching.

It wasn’t for his conscience that Owen was handicapping himself; the previous years’ hunts apparently ended way too soon after they began. The earlier pigs likely hadn’t even noticed they were being chased until he was right up on top of them, or that Owen’s fangs were out but his lidocaine wasn’t. Roscoe, though: he would notice everything.

“What if he outruns you, or hides where you can’t find him before first light?”

“Then he’s free. Out of the blood business, and out of my hair. Maybe he’ll meet up with a sounder of ferals and they’ll make him their king.”

That just sounded mean. Roscoe barely had tusks. Unusually pointy tusks, but too short to reach anything.

Can you see where this is going? Owen sets out on a hunt to put down his antisocial pig. He can’t hear, can’t smell, slows himself down with weights. Whereas Roscoe has no handicaps, and has spent all day wondering what’s going on. Then he sees Owen coming for him, fangs out, and Roscoe’s not having it.

What happens next? Let’s say Owen catches up with Roscoe. Once Owen’s got him in a clinch, maybe he pulls some blood, then maybe Roscoe manages to open a vein on Owen, gets a taste of Owen’s blood, and decides to go for more. As I see it, once your face is that close to a pig’s neck, that pig’s face is pretty close to your neck. One move in the wrong direction and that pointy little tusk is in Owen’s jugular, and pretty soon after that, Owen’s dead and Roscoe’s one of us. But he’s a pig.

We know Owen died in the woods where he said he’d be hunting. Locals are now forming hunting parties to find and kill bears and feral pigs, and two of those searchers have turned up dead. Bodies bled dry, bite marks from a pig, in the woods just beyond Owen’s farm. You think those bite marks might show some crazy long canines? Can you think of any other possibility than that Roscoe turned himself with Owen’s blood? If you’re with me so far, what does the next year look like to you? How about the next five years?

I expect Roscoe is siring as many litters as he can find sows in heat, and that half of each litter will be born bloodsuckers. They’ve already found a couple of dead boars, also bled dry, so Roscoe probably won’t have any competition for sows. Now I’m wondering how many of Roscoe’s special piglets a coyote would have to eat before that coyote has turned itself. How long do you think these now-faster, stronger, craftier, thirstier animals will keep to the woods? How do you even talk to all those good guys with guns who think they’re just out in the woods hunting feral pigs?

We can do some things the local hunters can’t, especially at night. For one thing, Cabela’s doesn’t stock silver bullets or silver-tipped wooden stakes. We flee the scene when that shit comes out; we don’t go looking for it, but now it’s different. For another, early winter is peak mating season. Once those feral litters drop in the spring, I just don’t see containment as an option. And Christ knows what happens once other species get sucked into this.

Look, I hope I’m wrong about all this, but it does feel like we’re in a situation here. One of us did this, and we’re the ones uniquely qualified to get down there and deal with it before it spins out even wider. And the best we can do probably won’t even work, but we have to do it anyway. If we can’t get a handle on this, nobody can.

Please follow the news sites out of Roanoke to see how it’s going. One problem: if we manage to bring down Roscoe, they’ll think it’s over. But the worst will kick in later next year, as the piglets from next spring begin to mature. Anyway, I’m heading down to Virginia. Took a while to round up someone to look after the babies. If I haven’t posted anything in a couple of days, you should probably assume the worst.

MRGreenJeans1 Last active: 5 days ago.