[Klug-general] Of pigs and things

[Michael E. Rentell]

G'mornin' all,

If I hesitate to express the following am I already losing my moral 
courage?  Well let's do it anyway. I'll keep you aware of any reactions.

I am a retired soldier with 25 years service around the forgotten 
empire. When I begun learning the native language of a Muslim country 
our class was also given instruction in Muslim courtesies.

We were told, amongst other intersting things, by a locally engaged 
Muslim warrant officer that:

1. Pigs were unclean and to be shunned.

2. If you are wet and the dog is dry, you may not touch the dog. If you 
are dry and the dog is wet, you may not touch the dog.

3. If you are wet and the dog is wet, you may touch the dog, but with 
your left hand because that is the dirty hand.

4. If you are dry and the dog is dry, you may touch the dog, but with 
your left hand because that is the dirty hand.

And like many soldiers I accepted this as an odd foreign custom which I 
simply didn't understand. Some of my classmates said that it was typical 
  bonkers rubbish of those higgerant natives (actually I mistyped that 
as hoggerant but then corrected my Freudian slip).

Sometime later I learned that pigs have been used for millennia in many 
countries to - er clear up after people who live in unsanitary 
conditions with no access to proper loos. As a result of this they have 
evolved to be very good vectors for tapeworm.  The ancient Jewish law 
makers knew this and that is why pork isn't kosher. That habit and 
reason was carried over into Islam for the same sensible reasons. The 
brighter modern Islamic scholars are aware of this history but the flock 
is just told the rote learned maxim that pigs are unclean and should be 
shunned. That is the reason for 1 above.

For items 2 - 4 above simply replace the term wet with rabid and 
suddenly it makes sense.

The bit about the left hand can also be explained by a simple rule based 
on the problem caused by there being no loo paper on sale in the desert.

So all these daft religious rules do have some common-sense base but 
they have become entrenched and not fully understood.

What is the problem with pork when the government has also recognised 
the tapework vector problem and pig farmers are now regulated in what 
they may give their pigs to eat? Then there are the meat inspectors 
trained in spotting encapsulated tapeworm in pork meat. The problem 
doesn't exist any more in the better governed nations.

Same for rabies. When did you last hear of a rabid dog in Britain?

I like dogs and I like pigs - especially wild pigs and also ginger 
Tamworths. I like seeing them, I like stroking them occasionally and I 
like eating them.

I am of native Anglo-Saxon-Jute ancestry (mustn't forget the Jutes - 
Kent was a Jutish kingdom) whose stamming* ground (not stamping ground 
please and never stomping ground) is this land and where the ferocious 
wild boar's head was a tribal totem of a fairly successful warrior 
nation - or was that the earlier Cantti, whatever!

The developing habits of the people of this nation over 1500 years has 
produced a land so well governed that it seems half the world's 
dispossessed wish to come here and sample its delights. If they want to 
change what they encounter here, then one wonders if perhaps they will 
turn this happy place back into the miserable place they were felt they 
had to leave. After reading reports of such PC lunacy as we have today, 
I feel that is the eventual aim.

Mark Steyn, whose article in today's DT sparked this discussion, is 
apparently an American long resident in England - with a name like that 
I had thought he was an Afrikaner but apparently not. He does write 
interesting and often controversial stuff. Long may he do so.

Now, where's my tribal emblem flag. I feel like flying it today.

After that pedantic diatribe can anyone guess what cap badge I wore in 
the Army?

Mike Rentell in Folkestone

* From the German (Saxon) 'stam' - a tribe.