ANNE PARKER, a tourism official in New York's Finger Lakes region, on the area's growing hog industry.
In Illinois, for example, water quality problems have caused real concern about that state's regulation of the rapidly growing hog industry.
Local people feared that the pig farms would stink, while bringing an unwanted increase in truck traffic, he said, delivering feed for the thousands of pigs or hauling away manure or grown hogs for slaughter.
Murphy tells his farmers exactly how to grow his hogs;when and what to feed them;producing a standardized hog that commands premium prices from big slaughterhouses like Smithfield Foods.
Joni Ernst, an ultra-conservative state senator who carries a gun in her purse and boasts about castrating hogs growing up on a farm, has picked up on the comments.
"What we're good at is growing food and hogs and cattle," Mr. Bush said to a crowd that included flush-faced children, a Miss Iowa State Fair in a tiara and the farmers the White House needs to win in the 2004 election.
She jumped in polling after spreading her folksy appeal with an attention-grabbing television ad in which she talked about growing up castrating hogs, promising to make Washington, D.C., "squeal".
As farmers bred faster-growing hogs with ultralarge, ultralean muscles that could compete as "the other white meat," they were inadvertently selecting for the syndrome, said Dr. Jodi Sterle, a swine specialist at Texas A&M University.
Standout pieces seem to be his Levi's biker jacket, his Kentucky bowtie which should have looked terrible but didn't, probably because he went the whole hog, growing a moustache and buying a one-off feathered jacket by Dior Homme which is currently hanging in a glass box in a Hard Rock Cafe, exactly where it should be.
But hunters and hikers alike are liable to come face to face with a nasty surprise: a growing number of feral hogs, the destructive descendants of domesticated animals, are stalking America.During its short and brutal life, a feral hog may grow to become a monster of several hundred pounds, covered with bristly hair and fronted with a set of fierce, killing tusks.
