Creole pig

The Creole Pig was a breed of pig indigenous to the Caribbean nation of Haiti. Creole pigs were well adapted to the rugged terrain and sparse vegetation of Haiti. The pig’s resilience allowed Haitian peasants to raise these pigs with little resources. The peasants characterized their pigs as never getting sick. Creole Pigs served as a type of savings account for the Haitian peasant. They were sold or slaughtered to pay for marriages, medical emergencies, schooling, seeds for crops, or a voodoo ceremony. The resillience and boisterous nature of the pigs, as well as their incorporation into voodoo folklore and the oral history of the Haitian revolution, made them a symbol for the independence and personality of the Haitian people. Download high resolution version (450x602, 28 KB)Livestock keeping in urban areas File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Download high resolution version (450x602, 28 KB)Livestock keeping in urban areas File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... The term Creole is used with different meanings in different contexts, which can generate confusion. ... A large sequined voodoo banner by the artist George Valris The term Voodoo (Vodun in Benin; also Vodou or other phonetically equivalent spellings in Haiti; Vudu in the Dominican Republic) is applied to the branches of a West African ancestor-based theist-animist religious tradition. ... The Haitian Revolution was the first successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere and established Haiti as a free, black republic, the first of its kind. ...

Creole pigs, although well adapted to local conditions (feed, management) and popular with the Haitian population, were almost all killed off in the 1970s and 1980s ostensibly in order to prevent the spread of African swine fever, which had spread from Spain to the Dominican Republic and then to Haiti via the Artibonite River. According to the United States, by 1982 African swine fever had infected almost one-third of Haiti's Creole pig population. Concerned about the spread of the disease into the US, the US put political pressure on the Haitian government to slaughter all the pigs in their country. This reasoning was subsequently questioned by the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as well as numerous academic reports, including a report published in a 1990 edition of "Stretch", available here. The eradication of the Creole pig had gone further to impoverish the already struggling peasants. It forced many children to quit school. Small farmers were forced to mortgage their land. Many Haitians cut down trees for cash income from charcoal. This contributed to the desertification of the Haitian landscape, already begun by overpopulation. This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. ... // Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 60s and 70s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... Categories: Caribbean geography stubs | Departments of Haiti ... Charcoal is the blackish residue consisting of impure carbon obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents of animal and vegetable substances. ... Ship stranded by the retreat of the Aral Sea Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi arid and dry sub-humid areas into desert, resulting from various factors including climatic variations and human activities. ...

In the Haitian peasant community, the government's eradication and repopulation program was highly criticized. The peasants protested that they were not fairly compensated for their pigs and that the breed of pigs imported from the United States to replace the hardy Creole pigs was unsuitable for the Haitian environment and economy.

The new breed of pigs imported from the US, common to large farms in the American Midwest, was characterized as “better” than the Creole pig. Unfortunately, they required clean drinking water which is unavailable to 80% of the Haitian population, imported feed (costing $90 a year when the per capita income was about $130), vaccination, and special roofed pigpens. There is controversy over whether the importation of these pigs was encouraged by US agribusiness, as the raising of these pigs was so heavily dependent on imported products. Haitian peasants quickly named the pigs "prince à quatre pieds," (four-footed princes). The repopulation program was a complete failure. The per capita income for a group of people may be defined as their total personal income, divided by the number of people. ... A pigpen is a fence used to keep a pig in a farm, see sty Pigpen is the name of a character in Charles M. Schulzs comic strip Peanuts. ... In agriculture, agribusiness is a generic term that refers to the various businesses involved in the food production chain, including farming, seed, agrichemicals, farm machinery, wholesaling, processing, distribution, and retail sales. ...