The Annointed Fig

India allows cows to roam free.  Ancient Egyptians buried dishes, crocodiles, and wives to ease the passing of a head of house.  And Jews and Muslims have tasty imaginative diets.  The problem for a dedicated pork cutlets aficionado like myself, these diets very much do NOT include anything originating in a pig pen.

And this isn't even the year of the pig!

Which, in a weird way, works out well for the Afghan pigs.  Or rather, an Afghan pig.  All of one, in the entire country — whiling away the days in the Kabul zoo, so, the good Afghan children have a snouted face to put to a dirty name.

Of course, the kids currently stopping by the zoo will not be in luck.  “For now the pig is under quarantine, we built it a room because of swine influenza,” Aziz Gul Saqib, director of Kabul Zoo, told Reuters. “We’ve done this because people are worried about getting the flu.”

Considering that in Egypt, all 300,000 of its pigs had been slaughtered — with no evidence of either of them being sick or a shred of danger to people from eating the diseased meat (which a lot of us might have, in fact, done, considering the swine flu has been circulating in the pig populations for quite a few years without doing much to the pigs that normal human flu doesn’t to us) — the Afghan pig has struck gold.

It is very easy to blame something — or someone, whom we inherently don’t trust for something they have no cause in bringing about.  Just as the Muslims are blaming the healthy pigs, the Russians are blaming Americans for the spread of the disease.  The Moscow talking heads are quoting local medical minds and unequivocally pointing to the use of pesticides in Vietnam war as the reason for the spread of the disease from animal to human host and, considering the recent Canadian case, back.

Based on the fact that Asia is the only continent so far largely spared the effects of the mysterious flu, which seems to actually land adult, generally healthy subjects in the hospital before the very young and infirm, this sort of assumption seems iffy — and quite on par with certain Mexican authorities pointing to US as the origin of the virus.

But, I suppose, blaming the neighbor — or the neighbor’s pig — is so much easier than looking for a solution.  Or, for that matter, learning to accept what you cannot change and moving on.

Which, I guess, is a very human condition.  Let’s see if the advent of the dread genetic engineering can cure us of that…  j/k

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