How Sus Domestica Came to Wall Street

Archeological research shows that domesticated pigs first appeared in the Tigris basin at least 9,000 and possibly 15,000 years ago. During the dry season, when other types of food were scarce, our Middle Eastern ancestors slaughtered great numbers of pigs. At some point they began using pigs for healing rituals, or to placate the Mesopotamian demon Lamashtu, or as a sacrifice to the Egyptian god Horus.

Later on the Hebrews stopped eating pork, but nobody really knows why. Verses in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah forbade it. The poor animal is considered so “unclean” that a Jew making a religious pilgrimage shouldn’t touch it, lest it contaminate him. It is permitted, however, to use a porcine heart valve to replace a defective human one. Pigskin shoes are also okay—apparently the tanning process removes the impurities. Mohammad, who initially considered himself the last Jewish prophet, adopted this prohibition, and it is repeated four times in the Koran.

I don’t know why Christians started to eat pork again. I suspect that the various pagan peoples they wanted to convert were reluctant to change their diet. After all, most of us do resist giving up favorite foods, even when the doctor warns us that we are (as the saying goes) digging our graves with our spoons. Maybe the early church thought it would be easier to save souls if they didn’t try to police people’s stomachs as well.

Although the Spaniards first introduced pigs to the Americas, the later-arriving Dutch and English colonists no doubt brought their own herds. Free-roaming pigs wandered New York, rampaging through grain fields, until the human residents built a wall along the northern edge of lower Manhattan to keep them out. The street that followed this wall was named…Wall Street.

Well into the 19^th Century, our porcine companions continued to roam the rest of the island. Pedestrians might encounter sows and boars devouring garbage up and down the streets and alleyways. They didn’t join a union or demand a pension plan; the only drawback was that they left a certain amount of their own excrement behind. Eventually, however, this four-legged sanitation department was banished from the city.

But like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, they stood up and achieved bipedalism. And there have been pigs on Wall Street ever since.