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China Science

China Is Breeding Giant Pigs the Size of Polar Bears (bloomberg.com) 119

Posted by BeauHD from the bigger-is-better dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In a farm deep in the southern region of China lives a very big pig that's as heavy as a polar bear. The 500 kilogram, or 1,102 pound, animal is part of a herd that's being bred to become giant swine. At slaughter, some of the pigs can sell for more than 10,000 yuan ($1,399), over three times higher than the average monthly disposable income in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi province where Pang Cong, the farm's owner, lives. While Pang's pigs may be an extreme example of the lengths farmers are going to fill China's swelling pork shortage problem, the idea that bigger is better has been spreading across the country, home to the world's most voracious consumers of the meat.

High pork prices in the northeastern province of Jilin is prompting farmers to raise pigs to reach an average weight of 175 kilograms to 200 kilograms, higher than the normal weight of 125 kilograms. They want to raise them "as big as possible,"said Zhao Hailin, a hog farmer in the region. The trend isn't limited to small farms either. Major protein producers in China, including Wens Foodstuffs Group Co, the country's top pig breeder, Cofco Meat Holdings Ltd. and Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group Co. say they are trying to increase the average weight of their pigs. Big farms are focusing on boosting the heft by at least 14%, said Lin Guofa, a senior analyst with consulting firm Bric Agriculture Group. The average weight of pigs at slaughter at some large-scale farms has climbed to as much as 140 kilograms, compared with about 110 kilograms normally, Lin said. That could boost profits by more than 30%, he said.
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China Is Breeding Giant Pigs the Size of Polar Bears More

China Is Breeding Giant Pigs the Size of Polar Bears

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  • Space Truckers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:04AM (#59283060)

    Next up, square hogs for easier transport.

    • Re:Space Truckers (Score:5, Funny)

      by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:14AM (#59283088)

      Square Hogs? Sounds like a motor cycle gang where all the riders wear thick rimmed glasses and dress shirts with chest pockets.

      • "Major protein producers in China..." Do they even understand the words they're writing? Last I checked these companies don't synthesize proteins, they commit moral atrocities. They should be called what they are: exploiters of sentient beings for financial gain. Easy solution to being a better person: stop paying for companies to pay people to rape, torture, and murder others.

    • Re:Space Truckers (Score:5, Funny)

      by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:20AM (#59283112)

      Next up, square hogs for easier transport.

      No, pigs with wings. I just ordered a whole flock of them from China, there are several individuals who'll find themselves honoring promises they never thought they'd have to keep. Oh, and if you thought birds shitting on your car was bad, just wait till my flock of free range flying cows arrives.

      • "And any fool knows a dog needs a home, a shelter from pigs on the wing."

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        It is well known that sufficient thrust is a better approach to making pigs fly than the use of inefficient wings . .

        • It is well known that sufficient thrust is a better approach to making pigs fly than the use of inefficient wings . .

          Yes, but I can't afford to feed the my pigs enough beans for their farts to generate the required levels of thrust.

    • Are they similar to spherical cows?

      • Are they similar to spherical cows?

        No, but when pigs this size make it across the Pacfic, you're going to start seeing spherical Americans.

  • you want okja? cuz this is how ya get okja!

  • Ob.Meme (Score:5, Funny)

    by David Off ( 101038 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:12AM (#59283082) Homepage

    I, for one, welcome our new polar bear sized porcine overlords

  • How does it taste- and is it protein or fat? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:13AM (#59283084)

    Two big questions:

    1) How does it taste, does size impact flavor... and related:
    2) How is protein to fat ratio impacted?

    Is it like fruit and berries where flavor is inversely related to size. (smaller the berry the sweeter and more flavorful the fruit)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fred911 ( 83970 )

      Who knows, but babies are very, very delicious [beef and swine].

    • It's the Chinese, you know damn well it's going to be terrible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      3) How come farmers in Nanning are doing so well?

      1/3rd of $1,400 is $466/month of disposable income, which compares well to many cities in the US where the lost of living is much higher. If they have that much left over after expenses every month they must be living well in China.

    • I also wonder if the larger size allows for a great build up of toxins or other unwanted environmental pollution in the animals.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Yes, probably, but it won't bother the CCP owned enterprises. The people only exist to support the Party.

    • How does it taste...

      Just like dog... what else??

    • I expect that the intramuscular fat content would not be too different. The backfat would be much thicker. However, that can be cut off and made into lard. The meat would be tougher than we are used to, and may have an off taste if they managed it by leaving the males intact and raising them as boars instead of barrows.

      FWIW, I'm not really sure that Bloomberg hasn't totally bought a load of horseshit here. Big pigs are not that hard to come by anywhere. It's simply a matter of letting them keep eating. T

  • Uh huh. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by doubledown00 ( 2767069 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:37AM (#59283164)
    And what carcinogenic chemicals are they feeding these pigs to achieve these impressive weights?
    • DHMO. Fucking loads of it!

    • You don't get cancer cause someone on the same bus as you ate cancerous pork.
      Swine flu on the other hand...

      They are feeding them antibiotics. [wikipedia.org]
      Which affect their gut flora [wikipedia.org] creating a gut-environment full of vitamin-B12-producing bacteria. [wikipedia.org]
      Oh... and also antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases. YAY!

      On a positive side, we may finally get rid of Gwyneth Paltrow that way. [youtube.com]

      • You don't get cancer cause someone on the same bus as you ate cancerous pork. Swine flu on the other hand...

        You seem to be under the belief that said cancerous pork meat won't somehow make it back to the U.S.
        Have you ever seen slaughter houses do meat sorting? They have a section for domestic consumption, a section for "industrial uses", and a section for "Export". Care to wager what kind of meat gets selected for the third category? Meat being a fungible commodity, there's no way to discern it once it's in our supply chain.

        Or to put it another way, China has been doing to us what we've been doing to the w

      • Oh look... Gwyneth Paltrow modded me down. Sucks to be her I guess. 24-karat gold dildos and all...

        You don't get cancer cause someone on the same bus as you ate cancerous pork.
        Swine flu on the other hand...

        They are feeding them antibiotics. [wikipedia.org]
        Which affect their gut flora [wikipedia.org] creating a gut-environment full of vitamin-B12-producing bacteria. [wikipedia.org]
        Oh... and also antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases. YAY!

        On a positive side, we may finally get rid of Gwyneth Paltrow that way. [youtube.com]

    • And what carcinogenic chemicals are they feeding these pigs to achieve these impressive weights?

      When did Slashdot fall low enough that people's first thought on an article about selective breading is carcinogens. What next, questioning what chemicals the government puts in water to cause rainbows from a garden hose? Here's a video that's right up your alley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • North Korean Technology (Score:4, Funny)

    by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:42AM (#59283182)

    I'm thinking that the Chinese used the same North Korean technology that created Kim Jong-un. That's about his size and weight.

    Now it would be creepy if the pigs also had his facial features, as well.

    Forget General Tso's chicken . . . welcome Supreme Leader Kim's pork!

    • I'm thinking that the Chinese used the same North Korean technology that created Kim Jong-un. That's about his size and weight.

      Now it would be creepy if the pigs also had his facial features, as well.

      Forget General Tso's chicken . . . welcome Supreme Leader Kim's pork!

      I dunno nothing will ever match Tso's chicken! His chicken must have been huge, people have been eating it for years.

  • Manual Handling (Score:5, Informative)

    by minorproblem ( 891991 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:43AM (#59283186)

    I've done butchery in my youth and most pork we eat in the west is reared for ~6 months, and reaches a weight of about 250-300lb. Once the carcass has been processed it is a good size for handling in your average butchers shop and has a good fat content for making your typical cuts and sausages.

    I can't imagine must bigger would be more efficient as you would need to rear the pigs for much longer. Probably have to be much more careful about disease as the animals get bigger and more prone to injury. Also how the hell do you handle such a massive animal? You would get so much bruising on the meat during slaughter!

    If they want to fix the pork shortage maybe implement better animal hygiene as the animal numbers could be recovered quickly afterwards.

    • Genetics absolutely affects how fast you can gain muscle and fat. I'm told battery chickens these days grow larger and to maturity faster than chickens from a just few decades ago, so I don't see why they couldn't do the same with pigs.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sinij ( 911942 )

        Genetics absolutely affects how fast you can gain muscle and fat. I'm told battery chickens these days grow larger and to maturity faster than chickens from a just few decades ago, so I don't see why they couldn't do the same with pigs.

        There are side-effects with chickens. There is spaghettin meat problem, there is woody breast... These are not isolated problems, but industry-wide issues. Locally we had an issue about a year ago where all cheap chicken was affected and about 10-20% of chicken breasts you buy would result in disgusting meals. There are now better screening methods, but the industry had to catch up each time.

    • 99% of pork is factory butchered and handled primarily by robots and human guided robotics, so this is not a concern.

      That said, the only reason we grow them to ~300 lbs is because that is a convenient size, 30+ years ago no one would all the potential meat by killing them that small. They don't seem to slow down their growth until at least double that. Presumably what they mean are pigs that grow faster.

    • My grandpa had a nearly 2000 pound hog. It was barely mobile and kept confined so it wouldn't squash it's piglets, but it wasn't for meat, it was his state fair winning pig (and well off the 2500+ pound world record). The meat pigs had a fairly large free range but would rarely get to over 300 pounds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I have been wondering the same thing. Maybe this is essentially a PR-stunt of the "We have the biggest pigs!" variant. If the target audience does not realize this may just be nonsense, it would work.

    • Beef steers run about 1400 pounds. Why would pigs of the same weight be a problem?

  • I, for one, welcome our new porcine overlords.

  • Have these idiots ever heard of Princess Mononoke and her problems with giant swine?

  • I would think the investment in a gargantuan pig, which by necessity has to be grown and fed for a longer period of time, would be at great risk of disease. China's problems there seem pretty significant already, and that's for the ordinary "raise 'em for 6 months and slaughter 'em" size. https://agnewsfeed.com/2019/04... [agnewsfeed.com]

  • I can't see it ending well for the farmers who have to look after them. Even a normal sized pig can be a handful never mind these, unless they're also been bred for docility.

  • I would love to know the body composition of these pigs. Are they mostly fat, or are they absurdly muscular like belgian blue cows on steroids?
    Can the pigs even stand up at that weight?
  • I for one welcome our new oinktastic overlords...
  • Average male polar bear weight is 420 - 500 kg (925 - 1,100 lb) https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
    They could have said, china is growing pigs as big as cows, but they had to go for some kind of exotic animal.

  • There was an awful movie made about this concept, Okja [wikipedia.org]

  • Have you ever seen the size of some of the feral pigs wandering around the US south? Not hard to imagine pigs of that size being raised on farms.
    • Here's one if you want to see a picture: http://www.bagofnothing.com/20... [bagofnothing.com]

      • That picture is horseshit because of the forced perspective though.

        Yeah, it was a big pig, but NOT as big as it looks.

        You can tell the pig is up front in the foreground because it's all blurry and the people are sitting a ways back to make the pig look bigger because they're all in focus.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • You'll need a .50 BMG to deal with these when they go feral.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Feral pigs have a super-swiny taste though. I can only compare it to eating a durian -- wonderful and horrible at the same time.

    • Have you ever seen the size of some of the feral pigs wandering around the US south?

      I've shopped at the Muskogee, OK Walmart a few more times than I care to admit so yeah; I'm something of an expert.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fred911 ( 83970 )

        ''I've shopped at the Muskogee, OK Walmart a few more times than I care to admit so yeah; I'm something of an expert.''

          You've misidentified the species. Mooseasaurous americanus is the most commonly observed species waddling the isles of Walmart.

    • The problem is how long you raise them. The older the animal at slaughter the tougher and gamey the meat. There is a reason we slaughter at 6 months in the west, you get the best balance between size and meat quality.

      The same applies to cows, we could keep them around a year or two, longer than the normal 6 months and they would put on quite a bit more meat but the meat will be tough and won't taste good. The older the animal the worse the quality of the meat.

      There are also other issues, if you keep them lo

  • The pork must flow.

  • Chickens have been bred to grow faster and larger but it came at the expense of flavor. Currently chicken taste is bland though chicken meat itself is cheap. In a sense you got what you paid for. I would be concerned that we have a similar situation going on here with pork. Creating lower cost yet flavorless bacon is most definitely not progress. I'd be more interested in creating bacon that tastes 30% better, though I'd be the first to admit that taste is subjective. Citations: https://nypost.com/201 [nypost.com]

  • ... tiny polar bears instead? Like can they breed polar bears the size of dogs? I'd pay money for that!

  • They want to win the Texas BBQ Championship.

  • Specifically, the movie Okja [youtube.com].

  • Didn't they already have a bear-sized pig for years?

  • "Conversion rate" is the amount of input (food) required to produce the desired output (a market-sized pig). Very roughly, it takes around 4 kilos of swine feed to yield 1 kilo of ready-for-slaughter pig.
    Bigger animals are generally less efficient-- they grow slower, and "waste" a bunch of energy growing the huge skeletons, organs, and lots of connective tissue to suport that weight-- parts which are much less profitable than the meat.

    tldr: Giant pigs are a stunt. If you want to efficiently increase me
    • That was my first thinking when I saw the subject.
      It is terrible, in addition they are having to use various medicines to increase the sizes of them. The reason they are doing it is that the prices of piglets and breed-able sows has increase so much that getting the extra weight on an existing pig is cheaper than slaughtering them at a lower weight.

  • because this is how you get man bear pig. The Chinese are predisposed to human genetic tinkering as well..

  • An 1100 lb hog wouldn't win a ribbon. But the really big ones don't survive for long because their hooves can't carry that much weight.

  • Anybody remember the Netflix movie?

    In the fictional movie, I think the giant pig was made in Korea. Still fairly close.

    Okja Official Trailer
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjCebKn4iic

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