Through the Eyes of a Pig

What do people see when they look at this photo? Obviously, most would recognize a close and warm bond between a mother pig and her piglet, and that is exactly what I recognized when I first looked at the picture, but then I took a much closer look into the picture. Disregarding the feel-good caption below the photo, I saw fear and sorrow in the piglet's eye. The piglet has a very personified facial expression in which it looks as if it will burst into tears.

One may ask, "What is the piglet so afraid of?" Take a look at where the piglet is sitting- a feeding trough. This darkly foreshadows the feeble and miserable piglet's horrendous fate as a part of someone's meal and the gruesome slaughter it will have to face beforehand. The mother has a quite peculiar facial expression. She knows from previous experiences exactly what her piglet fears and knows that her young one has every right to be worried, yet still attempts to assuage and comfort it. This piglet will be one of the many piglets people had severed from the mother's care then killed. Imagine how heartbroken and hopeless one would be if every single one of their children were brutally murdered. That is the level of pain this mother pig constantly feels and she will always feel that very agony until she cannot produce anymore young (at that point, she would be slaughtered) or until she dies.

Some peoples do not have compassion for animals because they like to think that animals cannot feel as humans feel, but whether someone looks at this photo and sees a mother loving her child or sees a piglet and its mother in fear, he or she will clearly detect an emotion that some people will never know of.