Rural village Balinese share their bountiful island paradise with barnyard and farm animals raised and husbanded for food (meat, eggs, milk), other by-products, labor, and sacrificial culinary splendor. Pigs, in particular, provide meat for dietary variation and for special, ritual offering dishes for traditional ceremonies. The Balinese pig is a breed unto itself: “it belongs to a monstrous variety that surely exists nowhere else. An untamed descendant of the wild hog, it has an absurd sagging back and an enormous, fat, protruding stomach that drags on the ground like a drooping sack suspended loosely from its bony hips and shoulders.” Compound-coddled and fed, these gargantuan, pot-bellied Balinese pigs are plentiful and well-cared for in Hindu Bali—the women of the household fatten them up with a typical pig food diet of freshly prepared soups, rice hulls (purchased at the market) mixed with water, and sliced up sections of banana plant stem. Tougher stems (the trunk or stalk) from mature banana palms--too tough to be eaten by humans--are deployed as pig fodder on Bali. The starchy stem fattens the animals quickly. Factories that mill rice (remove the brown husk and the germ) are called slips. Light feathery bran and attached germ are by-products of the rice milling process. This material, called oot alus, is widely used to feed pigs on Bali. Coarser fragments of the bran, and the finer fragments of the husk (called oot pesak) are also produced in the course of milling rice. They may be used for feeding pigs by Balinese who cannot afford the better oot alus, but they are more often burned or simply discarded. Pigs in Bali are also wined and dined with commercial concentrate, sweet potatoes, taro (keladi) leaves, and sweet potato leaves. Villagers cut leaves that grow in their domestic gardens or sprout wild in the lanes, chop them up, and cook them for the pigs--mixed with leftover family food from the daily meals. Old men or women are often seen carrying huge baskets of such green leaves on their heads or on bicycles heading homeward along the roads.
Pigs are cheap to raise and provision and can grow up to be profitably sold at the market at full maturity and weight. Pigs (babi) are commonly kept by villagers in the “kandang” (household animal pen), in the lower, seaward-facing, “kelod” part of the family compound. The kitchen (paon), bathroom, rubbish pit, and pigsty are always located near this least auspicious section of the property. “Farthest of all from the holy (mountainward) area is the family pigsty--where there is always at least one occupant being fattened up for the next important feast.” (If Balinese next door neighbours are jealous of each other or quarreling, the jealous neighbor will seek revenge by positioning their pigstye right by their neighbor’s property wall to ensure a continual supply of noxious piggery odors.) Loosely tied to a leash when they are small—or left to frisk around freely in the yard (penned when they grow larger)—the fat pigs rummage alertly through the undergrowth and grass, squealing to be brought their evening dinner pails.
Other pigs are raised and ripened in small, family-run, commercial egg farm-piggeries clustered around the village of Utu near Jatiluweh’s verdant rice terraces (since chickens and pigs can eat the same food, they are convenient and economical to rear together). Groups of perky, pale pink pigs live in chicken-proximate, adjacent concrete enclosures—snouts full of grainy, milky, mashed yellow gruel, they are destined for the market rather than family consumption. Many local Balinese keep a family piggery as a small home business (to supplement their tourism-industry-related salaries). Piglets (a baby pig is “kucit” in Balinese) are considered prime suckling pigs at four months of age: by this time they typically weigh 50 kilograms and are sold to the market for Rp.400-500,000. Once sold, they will be slaughtered at home by the customer and turned into Bali’s most famous specialty, babi guling (spit-roasted suckling pig). Larger pigs are usually picked up by distributors and trucked to market at nine months of age—weighing 100 kilograms and earning the family Rp.1,000,000. By age five, pigs will weigh as much as 150-250 kilograms—these adults are usually kept behind and kept alive for breeding.
Free range pigs can also be encountered in Bali: baby piglets trot right across the rural Hawaiian-like backroads of Candi Dasa, vanishing quickly into the dense side vegetation. Wild pigs still inhabit the mountains and less populated areas, always at risk of being lethally kidnapped for food or sold off at the market as ceremonial sacrifices. Wild pigs eat sayur (vegetables), ubi (sweet potato), and grass: bearing less bodyfat than domestic pigs, their meat is tougher with a different (but still good) taste. A gigantic, intelligent, inquisitive, squirming pink mountain pig found itself tightly confined in a tubular, latticework, bamboo prison body cage—by a pile of brown coconuts—near the kitchen cooking area of Pura Dalem temple in Ubud during the Grand Ceremony in 2001. Originally purchased to participate in the Mapepada high procession of sacrificial animals, it was set free when it was discovered to be of the wrong sex (only male pigs are sacrificed!). Perplexed, ponderous pigs can periodically (and suddenly) change status from object of sacrifice to object of devotion on the island of the gods. The Balinese celebrate “Tumpek Kandang” as a day to ritually honor and thank domestic animals for their service to and cooperation with man. Animals all over Bali are given special foods, prayers are offered for their continued well-being, and they are sprinkled with rice and holy water. Cows and buffaloes enjoy a rest from their rice paddy labor, and no animals are allowed to be slaughtered on this day. Pigs are embellished with a white cloth wound around their stomachs. Swine, however, do not find spiritual favor in the fishing community. Before launching a newly built boat in the fishing village of Padang Bai, a holy man blesses the boat and makes sacrifices of chickens and ducks—but never pigs! Local fishermen believe that if they do, “the prahu will act like a pig; it will roll around in the water and capsize.”
