PIG – ROALD DAHL

Ok, I am the worst at seeing hidden meanings in stuff, so my interpretation of the story may be pretty
simplistic...

Kid grows up extremely sheltered from the whole world. All he ever eats is his own and his aunt's
cooking. She teaches him that it is wrong to kill animals for food, and since he loves them as friends,
he agrees with that. He is never exposed to meat, anywhere.

He is very naive, and when he comes to NY and tastes meat, I think he can not quite make the
connection between the meat itself and its source, so he wants to see it with his own eyes. The guys in
the restaurant were probably just having some fun at his expense by talking about the mysterious
provenance of the meat, not really knowing that some of it might have been people. I mean, you never
heard of mystery meat? Or the stupid jokes about chicken from a Chinese restaurant maybe being cat
or who knows what? They didn't care what happened or where it came from as long as it tasted good.
Like today with animal flesh.

So he goes there and waits with the other people. I thought it was obvious that they were all there to
take a tour of the facilities. Not my choice of a touristy thing to do, but to each their own. So he goes
there and he ends up being butchered with the pigs.

Why would the slaughterhouse take people too? Cheap, easy meat! Why not?
Meat is meat, anyway you slice it. There are plenty of true stories about people being turned into pies
and sausages, and I am not just talking about Sweeney Todd.

The waiter not wanting to get closer? I just thought it was healthy NY style self preservation instinct.
You don't want to get too close to a weirdo going nuts over what was most likely a really badly
cooked meat dish...

To me the meaning of it is pretty much at face value...a sad story about a young man plagued by
tragedy since infancy, who ends up getting butchered.

As a child, he agreed that he shouldn't eat his friends, the animals. Then he tasted meat and it was so
good that he forgot that he shouldn't eat his friends. The horror he experienced at the end, I think,
teaches him--and us--that no matter how much we may enjoy the taste of meat (or our traditions, or
those people we share Thanksgiving with), that pleasure does not come close to balancing out the pain
and suffering that it causes the animals.

"The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on
the murder of men." Leonardo da Vinci

I'm still wondering why the people were at the factory and not talking or anything.