The problem of pain

Written to Coba Coba by Novalima

Our greatest challenge today...is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.
- Kirk Schneider, 1999, The Paradoxical Self, p. 7

This week was more about fallibility than conviction. We continue to have problems with the gilts savaging and cannibalizing their piglets in an incomprehensibly heartbreaking fashion. This behavior, which tears at the very core of our conviction, seems to fly in the face of Mark Twain's quote that 'nature knows no indecencies'.

The locals, i.e. the residents of Vargem Grande, are convinced that this is happening because our hogs are hungry, which hardly explains why only the mothers are cannibalizing their piglets, nor how the 'good' mothers are nursing their young outside the maternity houses, in plain view of the purportedly 'hungry' hogs, none of whom show more than a passing, good-neighborly interest in the new, smaller denizens of Hog Haven. For his part, Clair has decided that there are too many hogs in our pen, this in spite of the fact that said pen is approx. two hectares in size, considerably more space than the 51.75 m2 that a similar number of hogs would have access to in a confined feeding operation. In a confined feeding operation, each hog would reside in a grand total of 2.25 m2, including piglets. Also, if inexperience is the culprit, it is more than a little odd that things went haywire after the first two successful births, i.e. the Hannibelas (as in Lecter) had two perfect role models after which to pattern their maternal behavior. Furthermore, after gilt #3 savaged and cannibalized her five piglets, gilt #4 gave birth and was nursing her six piglets in the perfect image of motherhood before suddenly, without explanation, she, too, began to savage and cannibalize her young. Fortunately, we managed to save four of the six, which we placed with sow #1. Two of these four piglets are still alive. And as if to complete the maddening incongruity gilt #5 passed on the secure confines of a maternity house and broke the sequence of death by giving birth to five healthy piglets in the open air. In the same way that the well-known Christian scholar, C.S. Lewis, once called the “problem of pain,” atheism's most potent weapon against the Christian faith, the disconsolate truth of this phenomenon is that it defies any form of logic or attempt at explanation. At this point all we can do is either trust our conviction or accept its fallibility -and treasure the 17 healthy piglets that have survived thus far.

Finally, in a positive example of nature's enduring struggle, we were informed this week by the Polícia Militar Ambiental, who visited our fazenda in their continuing battle against poachers who illegally chop down between 5,000 and 10,000 acaí palm trees each week, that they had spotted a very rare, at least for our region, bird, the Lesser Seed-finch, most probably the Chestnut-bellied Seed-finch, or Curio in Portuguese, at Alfheim.