February 15, 2006
Jobs I’m glad somebody else does: pig breeder

Information (expurgated by me) about a very specialized agricultural job skill, from Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson’s fascinating book Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, now available in paperback (p. 103):

I talked to a man who had one of the most successful records for breeding sows … Each boar had his own little perversion the man had to do to get the boar turned on so he could collect the semen. Some of them were just things like the boar wanted to have his dandruff scratched while they were collecting him. … The other things the man had to do were a lot more intimate. He might have to hold the boar’s *** in exactly the way that the boar liked, and he had to *** some of them in exactly the right way. There was one boar, he told me, who wanted to have his *** played with. “I have to stick my finger in his ***, he just really loves that,” he told me. …and remember, this is a business we’re talking about. The number of sows successfully bred by the boars translates directly into the profits a company can make.

Yeah, try getting anyone to develop that expertise that under state-run agriculture.

Posted by Lawrence H. White at 11:58 AM in Economics  ·  TrackBack (0)

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. -Adam Smith

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