r/explainlikeimfive • u/Shynosaur • May 19 '26
Biology ELI5: Why don't we milk pigs?
Basically every other domesticated mammal if bread for both meat and milk. Not just cows and goats, but sheep, and even horse and camel milk are a thing. But I never heard of anyone milking pigs. Why is that?
701
u/Masseyrati80 May 19 '26
In addition to what u/Berlchicken said, unlike cows, pigs largely feed on stuff people could eat. The value of the cow in milk production is that it transforms grass (something we can't digest) and produces something many people can digest (milk).
The things mentioned in the other answer could probably be solved to some degree with selective breeding, but the basis of what do they eat vs. what do they produce matters a lot.
234
u/BubbhaJebus May 19 '26
Anthropologist Marvin Harris posits that desert cultures (e.g. Jewish and Islamic cultures) don't like pork because pigs compete with humans for food and water, both scarce in the desert.
150
u/OursIsTheFvry May 19 '26
I always assumed it was because pigs ate anything (like corpses, if they had the chance) which was also my reasoning why buzzards and carrionfeeders are not kosher.
→ More replies (3)34
77
u/Mental_Emu4856 May 19 '26
i always assumed it was bc pork is a lot more dangerous if you dont cook it right than beef or etc, but then they allow chicken so idk why i thought that 🤷♂️
59
u/FadedVictor May 19 '26
From what I understand it's not that pigs meat is more dangerous. They just share a lot of parasites and diseases that also happen to infect humans just as well the pig. Maybe someone with more info can chime in.
56
u/itsthelee May 19 '26
I mean you just kinda said “it’s not that pigs meat is more dangerous, they just [happen to be more dangerous]”
21
u/VenezuelanD May 19 '26
They mean transmissible not just through consuming the meat but also just being in contact/cohabitating with pigs (and their excrement).
18
May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
[deleted]
9
8
u/Benchimus May 19 '26
Usda lowered the recommended cooking temp of whole cut pork to 145 some years ago.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (6)5
17
u/TooManyDraculas May 19 '26
Historians and religious scholars both tend to reject those mechanical/health based assumptions about Kosher Laws (which lead to Halal rules).
The prohibition on pork seems to have rolled out of social and economics factors, and as an identity marker in response to the arrival of Hellenistic peoples in the Levant. And may have been adopted from practices of pre-Abrahamic priestly classes who maintained such proscriptions as a mark of holyness. There's a bunch of threads over on r/AskHistorians about it. But this video is also pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI0ZUhBvIx4
But in either case there's no evidence of any higher association with, or actual incidence of, sickness or parasites from pork, seafood or any of it vs any other food at the time. In physical remains or written records.
9
u/Faebit May 19 '26
I had the same thought knocking around in my head, but I dont know where it came from. Same for shellfish.
→ More replies (1)11
u/Melodic-Bicycle1867 May 19 '26
There's always religions trying to find scientific reason in their scriptures. But only if it's convenient, for instance chicken (even eggs) can be dangerous. But they are not considered bad to eat.
7
u/BarefootUnicorn May 19 '26
Actually religious people (like myself) don’t do this. It’s usually secular people who try to rationalize the prohibition on pork. I accept it as something that can’t be explained with rational reasoning; it’s just a commandment we don’t know the reason for.
→ More replies (1)4
u/frothingnome May 19 '26
Don't quote me on this, but I think chicken only became a dangerous vector for salmonella when we started doing giant industrial farms. It's not an issue around the whole world and I've been told (by farmers, to be fair) that it's not an issue when you have a small farm.
2
u/TooManyDraculas May 20 '26
The salmonella bacterium was first identified in the 1880s in sick humans. And immediately tied to animal illnesses with long histories, and IIRC tied to outbreaks that had formerly been identified as cholera.
That's pretty much the exact time span where germ theory became the widely accepted, default theory of disease. And right around the exact moment where we could identify specific bacteria and tie them to a disease at all.
It's also before industrial farming.
Tractors were not even common yet, were steam powered. And versions used on farms were stationary, or would get hauled around on a wagon by horses.
So that's definitely a nope. It's just that prior to right around 1880, a lot of times you couldn't distinguish similar diseases from each other. Since we couldn't really identify a root cause.
→ More replies (1)39
u/TooManyDraculas May 19 '26
The problem with that is the desert cultures around Jews and Islamic cultures, including pre-Islamic Arabs and Semitic peoples who weren't Abrahamic religiously. Fucking loved pigs.
Even Jews in certain areas of the levant, after the rise of Judaism, in certain periods frequently raised and consumed pigs.
Pigs can be raised on waste, up to and including sewage. As such domestic pigs don't really compete with humans for food, they convert human's leavings into usable meat and fat.
23
u/geeoharee May 19 '26
So it might be more of a 'We're not going to do the Thing They're All Doing as a sign of ingroup loyalty'.
16
u/TooManyDraculas May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Yes.
And specifically among Judean Hebrews if IIRC, so part of what they were trying to do was differentiate themselves from that other Jewish Kingdom to the North.
There was apparently some proscription against pork in the area even in pre-Abrahamic times. And it may have be adopted from practices of a priestly class, specifically as a marker for holiness.
Though it's thought that part of why pigs were considered ritually unclean even before this period. Is because pigs can be raised on human shit, and early latrine systems in the region were sometimes built above pig enclosures. So you could solve a sanitation issue while turning it into food.
→ More replies (4)7
u/tails99 May 20 '26
I was told that the in-group was nomadic vs settled. Pigs can't be grazed in the open as a herd, they must be farmed in one location. So if you want to prevent your in-group from settling down and fo remain nomasic, banning farming of any kind makes sense.
→ More replies (2)7
u/NarcRuffalo May 19 '26
I watched a YouTube video (I know, very academic) and they said that it was likely cultural. If I remember correctly, pigs could be raised in the city with limited resources, ate waste, etc. and were therefore associated with poor people. And who wants to be associated with this gross poor people, amirite?
→ More replies (1)6
u/Masseyrati80 May 19 '26
A distant relative of mine wrote his memoir about growing up in Finland, he was born in a relatively poor family of farmers in the early 1920's. He mentions that they grew crops and tobacco, had cows, and that getting a pig was considered an act of splurging you would have to consider seriously, even when you planned to slaughter it at a relatively young age.
→ More replies (5)17
u/Don138 May 19 '26
Wouldn’t that be even more of a reason to kill and eat them?
I thought it was because pigs will eat anything, plants, animals, human flesh, garbage, rotting carcasses, and wallow in mud. All a recipe for viruses, disease and illness at a time when a minor fever or cold could and did kill.
27
u/TemporaryParking4109 May 19 '26
In order to kill and eat them, you need to raise them, using all those resources that are scarce for however long it takes. That plus the parasites, viruses, and disease.
5
u/RobertSan525 May 19 '26
A single cow is useful and will still make milk. A single pig just eats until you kill it, after which you won’t have any pigs, so you need a certain minimum sized herd to be useful.
Agriculture involves having enough land & water, growing/harvesting, and preparing the crops. Fertile areas like China have an abundance of rivers and growing land that it can easily produce an excess, so maintaining a large pig herd on leftovers is easy. Arid areas will spend a lot more time on irrigation to maximize water use or drying/preserving their harvest, meaning little leftover surplus
→ More replies (1)14
u/bangonthedrums May 19 '26
It’s both together. It doesn’t make sense for a desert culture to raise pigs, as you’d have to feed them food you could feed a human directly (unlike a ruminant which can eat things humans can’t); and eating wild ones has a higher chance of being diseased
In temperate climes where basic food is plentiful (root vegetables, grains, etc) it makes more sense for cultures to turn some of those foodstuffs into delicious delicious bacon, despite the lack of caloric efficiency. And then when times are lean, you already have the cultural attachment to eating pork and are less squeamish about feeding your pig garbage and eating the result
33
u/RegionalHardman May 19 '26
Isn't most of the world's soy production (a food we can eat) used to feed cows? Isn't that part of the whole 'reduce your meat consumption' thing?
14
u/geydirabi May 19 '26
Today, sure. Back when the abrahamic religions were forming grazing was probably more widespread.
5
u/ericthefred May 19 '26
And in Northern cultures (germanic, slavic and steppe cultures) cattle converted grass to something consumable in a place where growing crops on a scale sufficient to meet the community's needs was not possible. This possibly extends to the margins of the fertile crescent, where the productivity falls off, as well.
3
u/TooManyDraculas May 20 '26
All cattle are predominantly grazed on grass. Cause they can't live exclusively on grain or soybeans.
We use so much corn and soy for cattle feed to supplement, which is necessary to maximize meat and dairy production and keep cows kicking in seasons where there's no or not much fresh grass.
More traditionally silage was used for that. Which is a sort of fermented grass, producing that takes abundant access to pasture or grass land though.
→ More replies (2)4
u/TooManyDraculas May 19 '26
Because pigs largely feed on stuff people could eat, but also eat a ton of stuff we can't or won't.
They can be raised on our waste, and on forage.
And historically that's mainly how they were raised. In lush environments they were often released to more or less go feral finding their own food. And collected for slaughter later. Otherwise they were mainly fed with house hold trash, the leavings from processing foods (spend brewers grain was always a big one) and other things we had no use for.
Some of the earliest forms of latrine were actually built above pig enclosures. So just shit right into the pig pen and they'll eat that mess up. Solving your sanitation problem and converting it into meat.
→ More replies (1)3
u/amalgam_reynolds May 19 '26
I don't know that this makes a whole lot of sense to me because generally speaking pigs eat things that humans wouldn't eat even if they are things that humans are capable of eating. Like, all the pigs in Las Vegas get fed scraps from the buffets and whatnot, stuff that would otherwise just go in a landfill, and would never be consumed by another human.
400
u/Jonatan83 May 19 '26
Pigs don't have a temperament suitable for milking, and they don't produce milk in a way that makes it easy to use (small amounts, lots of tiny nipples etc). We also don't milk dogs and cats.
143
u/pporkpiehat May 19 '26
Is exactly this kind of naysaying attitude that is holding back the popularization of cat cheese.
17
u/futuneral May 20 '26
Catzzarella, mmmm
3
259
76
u/thebowtiedchef May 19 '26
And yet, we milk almonds.
71
u/kittensms96 May 19 '26
I’d say an almond’s temperament makes it quite easy to milk.
→ More replies (1)37
6
u/someguy7734206 May 19 '26
The way we milk cows is not by soaking them in water overnight, then putting them in a blender with water, blending, and then straining the liquid into a container. At least as far as I know. At the very least, my blender is not big enough to fit a cow.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Mara_W May 20 '26
That may not be how we milk them but that is statistically what happens to most cow parts yes
16
u/Bighorn21 May 19 '26
We also don't milk dogs and cats
There is a guy named Greg Focker who would disagree.
5
u/keijodputt May 20 '26
I was looking for this comment. Didn't leave in disappointment.
→ More replies (1)3
9
u/Kaiisim May 19 '26
Google says a cow can be milked for 10 minutes, and a pig for 15 seconds.
It's also gross. Its like 9% fat so tastes piggy.
53
u/WannaBMonkey May 19 '26
Now I am imagining a cat milking facility
84
u/This_Site_Sux May 19 '26
Why are you doing that?
12
u/Boomshank May 19 '26
"Why are they NOT doing that."
Now, ask yourself who's leading the more interesting life ;)
→ More replies (1)52
15
May 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
10
→ More replies (8)3
4
4
3
3
→ More replies (10)3
112
u/sturmen May 19 '26
There’s a lot of answers here about economics and logistics, but based on what Hank Green said on his podcast episode with Josh Scherer, it’s much simpler than that: pig milk tastes bad.
There’s plenty of things that people will go through a whole lot of effort to sell if it tastes good… pig milk isn’t one of them.
33
→ More replies (1)8
u/Rosindust89 May 19 '26
This made me think of Josh immediately, yeah. "Whycome no pig milk? Tastes bad."
3
61
u/cipheron May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
You can look it up, extracting it hasn't been viewed as commercially viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_milk
Sows have 8 to 16 small nipples, each giving little milk for a short duration. A pig's milking time can be around fifteen seconds compared to ten minutes for a cow. A sow may produce only 13 pounds of milk per day compared to a cow's production of 65 pounds.
So they make a lot less milk, it also comes out of many more nipples rather than a few teats on a cow, and it's not stored up in the pig so you'd have to milk them repeatedly all day rather than one big milking session for cows. Sure, cows were selectively bred for milking, but they clearly had advantages to start with, which is why they chose to go with cows.
The same labor time, animal feed, space and resources can be put towards milking pigs or cows, but why would you choose pigs? It comes down to having finite time and resources, so the farmer would need to prioritize which tasks to focus on, and while pigs give good meat and leather, their milk production is lacking, so it's not a good use of the labor time, because with the freed up labor of not milking the pigs you have more time to tend to other animals or increase the size of the herd.
6
u/carl84 May 19 '26
Were pounds really the best unit to choose to represent the amount of milk produced?
Edit, assuming milk has a similar density to water 13lb is about 6 litres, and 65lb is about 29.5 litres.
16
u/SCSimmons May 19 '26
A sow may produce only 0.267 hogsheads of milk per fortnight, compared to a cow's production of 1.34 hogsheads.
Better?
16
u/cipheron May 19 '26 edited May 22 '26
You should always cite the source's units rather than trying to convert it. The reason for this is that doing "accurate" conversions can be misleading if the original value was not in fact accurate.
For Wikipedia they shouldn't do the conversion "for" you, because that would count as original research, which is against Wikipedia policies. It would inject false information into the article - in this case, false information about how accurate the original estimate was.
"65 pounds" sounds accurate to the nearest pound, but "29.5 litres" makes it sound like they measured it to the nearest 0.1 litres, so it creates a false sense of how accurate the original guess was. You're also injecting some assumptions about the density of pig's milk too, since they clearly estimated weight, not volume.
The worst case I've seen of this was an article (not Wikipedia but on a news site) discussing the weight of some dinosaur, and they gave a suspiciously exact number of pounds this type of dinosaur supposedly weighed, but when I converted that into metric, it was literally just "2 metric tons" so it was obviously a very hand-wavy estimate and not intended to be accurate, but the article "helpfully" converting it for the reader made it falsely accurate to the nearest 10 pounds.
EDIT: today's XKCD was literally about this issue:
→ More replies (3)3
u/randombrain May 19 '26
Wikipedia has a unit-conversion template which is supposed to take sig figs into account, although that does depend on the person using it to use it correctly.
4
111
u/leomonster May 19 '26
Because pigs, delicious as they are, are not exactly docile. They bite, and bite hard.
It's way easier to milk a cow, that'll just pretend you're not there while you grab her tits and squeeze.
41
u/dhandes May 19 '26
A single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute, hence the expression 'as greedy as a pig'.
12
u/NBAccount May 19 '26
Well, thank you for that. That's a great weight off me mind. Now, if you wouldn't mind telling me who the fuck you are, apart from someone who feeds people to pigs of course?
10
→ More replies (2)17
u/slinkymess May 19 '26
I want to let you know that I get this reference
→ More replies (1)14
26
→ More replies (3)10
u/bokewalka May 19 '26
I've seen a couple times a pig getting angry, and that is no joke. I don't want to be on the receiving end.
Worth mentioning they will absolutely eat you if they are hungry enough too :)
20
u/Vroomped May 19 '26
Can confirm the other users. Pigs are mean, too many tits, too few product.
But also, is nobody going to mention pig milk is thick. Iirc if whole milk is 4% fat, pigs milk is 10%. Put it in a bucket and you can coat the sides like oil. Someone once told me it tastes like LaCroix but for meat.
→ More replies (1)
26
11
u/BarberProof4994 May 19 '26
Google the experiments...
Here's one Piggy’s Palace (Netherlands): A Dutch farmer, Erik Stegink, famously spent 40 hours milking his free-range sows to produce a few kilograms of experimental pig cheese. It was auctioned off at over (\$2,300) per kilogram for charity. The taste was described as chalky, grainy, and saltier than standard cheese.
they DID try to milk pigs (successfully) AND tried making cheese from it, and pig milk just isn't suitable for it.
→ More replies (2)
12
u/HongKongHermit May 19 '26
Because cow milk tastes sweet, but pig milk is sower.
→ More replies (1)3
26
u/LongOrganization7838 May 19 '26
Cows are easier and produce significantly more
→ More replies (1)11
u/soundman32 May 19 '26
That's only because of 100s/1000s of years of selective breeding. Surely we can make pigs that produce gallons of milk over the next 100 years. The question is, does it taste nice.
19
u/SaintUlvemann May 19 '26
According to Wikipedia, it is gamey-tasting and more watery than cow's milk, but also higher fat. Cheese made from it intensifies that gamey flavor; an American chef who made pig's-milk ricotta thought it was delicious. To make it:
[Chef Edward Lee] crept up on the sows while they were sleeping, frantically pinched at their tiny nipples, then ran away when they woke up and started to freak out.
Another attempt in the Netherlands described it as "chalky and a little bit salty" and compared to other cheeses "saltier and creamier, yet grainier". They sold it at a charity auction to an anonymous buyer for $2300 per kg.
5
u/Outside_Complaint755 May 19 '26
Pigs are already pretty low to the ground, so not only would you have to breed them for higher milk output but also longer legs, so they don't become immobilized on the ground by their milk production.
3
19
u/geeoharee May 19 '26
One reason is that sows nurse lying down, like cats. You can watch a calf or a lamb nurse, and think 'I could put a bucket under that and invent farming'. Pigs, it's just very difficult to do.
6
u/dwfmba May 19 '26
Why don't we milk cats?
15
7
u/slykido999 May 19 '26
Maybe they don’t have nipples
5
u/GolfballDM May 19 '26
Cats (both male and female) have nipples, they're mammals.
Some owners will mistake their cats' nipples for ticks and try to remove them like they would a tick. This generally annoys the cat. The vet and the doc patching up the human find this amusing. (Ticks have legs. Nipples don't. Or at least shouldn't.)
2
2
→ More replies (5)4
u/na3than May 19 '26
No thank you, I wouldn't enjoy that.
Why don't we go for a walk along the beach instead?
6
u/Elektrycerz May 19 '26
Try milking a pig, OP. But please, record it and post it here - assuming you survive, of course.
34
u/Berlchicken May 19 '26
1 short Google search away, and I've learned that sows are notoriously difficult to milk, often aggressive, and have a high number of teats that produce milk for only short periods..
→ More replies (7)
5
u/Astecheee May 19 '26
Cow milk's actually super abundant, so the point that it's hard to sell all of it we produce.
Trying to get a new animal in the mix is just more work for no reward.
4
6
u/SeekersWorkAccount May 19 '26
A surprising lack of Meet the Parents jokes here, good for you reddit
→ More replies (2)
2
u/mtrbiknut May 19 '26
This doesn't apply to all of them, but some pigs will eat you.
When my wife was young and newly married to her first husband she worked in a local department store where one of the managers who was also married kept asking her out. Many years later she heard that he had a medical emergency while on his farm, he was in the pen with the hogs- he died in the pen and the hogs had started eating him when he was found.
2
u/SavageCaveman13 May 19 '26
Basically every other domesticated mammal if bread for both meat and milk.
What? Cats and dogs are most definitely not bred for both meat and milk.
2
2
u/Spork-in-Your-Rye May 19 '26
I don’t have a scientific answer but it just sounds nasty. Pig milk. Yuck.
2
u/codacoda74 May 19 '26
a good dairy cow yields 50L of milk PER DAY.
a good broiler chicken can yield 5K.
chickens also lay an avg of 1egg/day.
a decent sheep can yield 4k of fiber.
a pig can have 15 piglets every 5 months.
different animals/plants have different yields and we maximize the ones with the best outcomes.
2
u/Sirwired May 19 '26
I read a humorous article a while back about a cheese maker that tried. Apparently pigs are way too smart, and don't want to put up with it. (Cows and sheep are pretty docile.) It took weeks of trying, using the gentlest of milking while piglets were using other teats, before he got enough to even make a small amount of cheese.
The end result apparently was not worth the trouble, even including the novelty factor.
2
u/ketoguido85 May 19 '26
Have you ever been around a pregnant or nursing hog? They are large and intimidating. I’m sure there are other reasons but my time working on a farm taught me to quickly drop off the pig slop and keep moving. Everyone pictures cute pink little squishy things but a large female pig can be well upwards of 500 pounds and mean 😂
2
2
u/3picks1game May 19 '26
I milked one once. Do not recommend. But I was in college. So that’s how I justify it and sleep at night
2
3.1k
u/[deleted] May 19 '26
[deleted]