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Food

You Don't Want to Watch This Guy Pull Your Pork

Curious about how artificial insemination works on farms, I spoke to to a guy who gives handjobs to pigs and then sells their sperm off to be slipped into sows.

Sperm is big business in the meat industry. Unfortunately, the animal on your plate is not the romantic product of the love between two animals, nor is it an example of survival of the fittest: Sperm capture is a job. I spoke with a pig farmer who earns his bread from the seed of pigs.

During an ordinary lunch break in my livestock studies, I was handed a flyer advertising a monthly contest based on a study of cows. That particular month, you could either win a laptop or "bull semen 34XB7." I did not win, but my interest in this world was piqued.

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The following year, I did an internship at a sow farm near Den Bosch, an area in the Netherlands densely populated with pig farms. It took a while to find a pig farmer who was crazy enough to take on a vegetarian intern to work on an industrial farm. Finally, I succeeded and came upon a most charming family who even bought me veggie burgers. (I really liked that.)

The plan was for me to work during the day, and also live on the farm full time. During the first interview, I set limits: "I'm not going to rip off the balls of baby pigs, burn tails, or send slow-growing piglets to heaven with a brick." The farmer agreed. "As long as you do not try to have heated discussions in the stall, and if you do everything else, then it's fine," he told me. We reached a deal: I could come and stay, and participate in the barn.

In the morning, after breakfast, I was usually in the barn by eight o'clock. The first thing I did was to make sure the air refresher was on, because with 300 sows in one place, you could not breathe through the ammonia. Then I made my rounds of cleaning up poo, placentas, and dead piglets before feeding the sows their soy-rich breakfast.

One day, the woman of the farm told me, "Today, we are going to artificially inseminate. I will explain how once, so you'll have to do it by yourself the rest of the afternoon, because I'm having a meeting. The sperm is in the mailbox." I soon found myself picking up tubes containing a whole lot of pig sperm.

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The radio was on, but the sows were quiet. They stood in iron boxes, their asses facing me: The insemination could begin.

I picked up the first tube of sperm and started slapping the sows on their asses. This makes them think that a boar is about to mount them, so they brace themselves with their pig vagina wide open. I poked a tube in as deep as it would go (it's not easy because the sow's vagina is crinkled). The pig's vagina created a kind of vacuum, and slowly sucked the tube empty. I then had to hang up the tube to a string. The cord, however, was a foot or two above me, so after a sow or six, it became a rather unpleasant experience.

You know when you're washing windows, and drops of water drip down your forearms and onto your shirt? This was the same, but imagine it with pig semen.

Since the internship at the farm, I've wondered where all of this animal semen comes from. To further delve into the world of animal jizz, I called Paul. Porcine semen equals food on the table for this 43-year-old pig breeder from Brabant. Paul made me feel welcome because he finds it important that people know where their food comes from.

Paul lives with his family and boars on a large piece of land in the province of North Brabant. If you go to the right of his driveway, you'll enter a beautiful old farmhouse, and if you take a left, you'll encounter a large stable for the boars. Paul's breeding center is an "AI station" (AI standing for "artificial insemination") or a "hatch of genetics," as he calls it.

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Paul's farm

After his agricultural training, Paul started a similar business, and after the large outbreak of "varkenspest"—a.k.a. Classical swine fever—in 1997, Paul started his own AI station. Together with his wife Jacqueline, who takes care of the administration and four employees, he has run his hatch of genetics for 15 years. Paul received me in the conference room at his office, where I saw refrigerators, stainless steel tables, and equipment. We drank coffee and soon had an agricultural click.

MUNCHIES: Hi, Paul. Tell me how pig breeding came to be in its current form. Why can't pigs just naturally make love? Paul: That's actually quite simple. Artificial insemination was created to counteract the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases between boars and sows. If you let a few boars walk around a large sow farm, that should do the job, but if there's one with a venereal disease, it can contaminate all of the other pigs.

Are STDs a big problem for pigs? Think, for example, of "pig chlamydia." For this reason, there now is a different breeding method designed for each species—horses, chickens, rabbits. It makes it much more efficient, plus we can choose boars with better qualities, resulting in healthier offspring and better bacon and meat. An average boar in our company produces sperm for 10,000 offspring a year for our clients, who mainly are located in the southern part of the Netherlands. There are also other contagious, non-sexual diseases that can be spread to female pigs on the farm.

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Recently, I saw a movie about new techniques to excite sows in order to give birth to more piglets. How do you get the boars excited? We use artificial sows with the smell of other boars. When the boars smell that, they get worked up. It's the same in nature. That's about it.

How exactly does the process of sperm capture work? We have artificial sows and pull off the sperm ourselves. Compare the artificial sow to a sofa. We put a felt layer around it with a leather case so that it's nice and comfortable.

But does the artificial sow have a … hole? No, no. It's just a strong iron frame, because the tusks of a boar can pull the whole things apart. So we tie it up with ropes. And then when the boar starts to get hard … our employees are then ready on a small stool next to the boar with latex gloves. Once the boar is done, they come in our hands. (Paul makes a fist with his hand with a hole between the index finger and thumb for demonstration.)

Look, the penis of a boar is like a corkscrew. It's screwed into the palm, and then he discharges the sperm. It takes a boar about 4 to 5 minutes, for an average amount of 200 to 300 milliliters of sperm per session.

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These are the boars. They're jerked off once a week by Paul's staff.

Then the employee has a bag full of sperm. And then? No, not a bag. We catch it in milkshake cups, because we like to work with disposable materials in order to avoid cross-contamination. In the laboratory, we check the freshly caught ejaculate under a microscope to measure the sperm movement, the number of sperm cells, and the quality of the sperm. We always work with fresh semen. It must be used within four to five days by our clients, or the sperm dies. So there's hurry to get it to the customers. You can not freeze it, as is the case in cattle. The computer calculates how many doses we can make it into. Suppose we have an ejaculate of 250 grams, which goes into a verdunningsbad with about five liters of demineralised water and chemicals to keep the sperm alive. And then we make that into doses of 80 cubic centimeters each, and it's used by our customers for one insemination per sow.

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This is the pig semen, caught by hand and diluted to 80 cc.

I can imagine that—if you forget the few weird people that are into bestiality—nobody is really looking for a job of jerking off animals. Why not catch the sperm mechanically? Machine techniques are now starting to be developed, but what we see is that the average employee in the shed can drain sperm from five boars per hour. There are now milking machines designed to do the same thing, so you don't need your hands anymore, but they still use some kind of artificial vagina. Although you'll be able to do ten boars per hour with a machine, you still need two workers to coax the boars will go into the machine, etc. Such a "milking machine" is a staggering investment, and with our method, we get the same output as you would with an expensive machine. The scale is simply not financially attractive. Perhaps in the future, the price of such a machine will go down.

I inseminated lots of sows during my internship a few years ago. I remember that the sperm is delivered in a cooler. Is cold semen not a little uncomfortable for sow? We have couriers with coolers in the car where the sperm remains at 17 degrees. That temperature is needed so that the sperm unwind. If the semen is diluted at 30 degrees, it loses a little staying power. If we preserved the sperm at this temperature, after a half day, the sperm would be mostly dead. The sperm is heated in the uterus of the sow, making it active again, and then conception can take place.

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This is Paul's visiting room. It can also be rented for family outings, parties or meetings with a view of the boars getting jerked off in the barn.

From seed to meat, now you know a little more about where the pulled pork on your plate started off from.