A week before their dissection, a student stayed after class to ask where the fetal pigs came from. Automatically (and with some nonverbal indications of dismissiveness and/or exhaustion, which may or may not have had to do with this particular situation), the teacher said that opt-out forms were available (though rarely used, implying some unknown but probably significant social cost) and required only an explanatory essay and a parent’s signature. No, said the student, I want to know where the pigs come from. She seemed genuinely curious. The teacher said, simply, that they were paid for out of the biology department budget. The principal would know more.

So, the student went to see the principal. This was a Catholic school. The principal was not a priest, but the office was in a deconsecrated church, which meant it smelled a little like incense and cigarettes and old packs of playing cards. I’m sorry, but I really don’t know, the principal told the student. The books on the shelves all seemed to have either “leadership” or “fundraising” in the title. The student asked if the name of the company was available, since she’d like to trace the supply chain or something. The principal waved his hand and said, look, lots of schools do it this way. If you need an opt-out form, let me know.

Obviously, this was unsatisfying, the simple questions and the avoidant answers, and so, after the principal, the student went to the internet. The internet was much more useful. Or maybe it was just that the answer was exactly what you’d expect. The fetal pigs came from biology supply companies, who got them from meat processing plants, who removed them from slaughtered sows (or gilts, technically, which are female pigs who have not yet birthed a litter). This piqued the student’s interest. You mean, there are pregnant sows being turned into bacon? Yes, was the answer. Yes, there are. It was hard to find good data on how common an occurrence this was. A study in the EU said around 0.5 percent of slaughtered sows were in the last third of pregnancy (in other words, bearing piglets around the age of useful dissection). There are 128 million pigs slaughtered in the US every year. Hundreds of thousands of fetal pigs end up dissected annually by high schoolers like the student in this story. The math, roughly speaking, added up. Remember, also, that an average litter, in the pig world, involves eight to twelve offspring. In other words, 1 in 200 slaughtered female pigs probably has 8 to 12 baby pigs inside her, and that’s a lot of opportunity for science. And also money.

Do the people doing the killing know the pig is pregnant? The student wondered. Unfortunately, this was impossible to verify (“probably not?” seemed like a reasonable guess). Clearly, they found out eventually. The student did discover that there were ongoing efforts in place to reduce the number of pregnant animals killed every year. She counted that as acknowledgement that this whole pig situation was kind of supremely weird. Weirder still was that the fetal pigs used in dissection could be thought of as the “lucky” ones, since other fetal pigs ended up used as fertilizer (although actually, thought the student, maybe fertilizer was the best and most organic outcome) or just got thrown away altogether. As in, tossed into a dumpster behind the plant and then hauled away according to the specifics of whatever intense disposal arrangements govern such places. The student wanted to ask her teacher (and principal and classmates and local parish priest) if “aborted” pig was a more accurate term than “fetal” pig, but this seemed likely to stir some shit. The student was not into stirring shit anymore. Stirring shit usually meant a lot of people getting defensive and pissed off and finding some reason not to listen to you. The student had experienced this before, with the cafeteria protests (the “Meatless Monday” campaign) and the quarter-cow, football-fundraiser, raffle giveaway (which might have explained the teacher’s initial, borderline rude, response), but she’d vowed to do things differently this time around. In this case, she couldn’t release the pigs a la the frogs in an inspirational child type movie because the pigs were already dead (and some, though probably not many at this particular school, would argue that they’d never even really been technically “alive”), and so doing things differently meant making an effort to ask neutral (at least at first) questions in ways that forced the admission of some seriously uncomfortable truths. Question number one: How much did the biology department spend on these pigs? Uncomfortably true response: A fetal pig dissection kit retails for around forty dollars, but bulk and educator discounts, as well as the strategic reuse of certain tools, can bring that number down significantly. Question number two: What data demonstrates that the benefits of dissection outweigh the obvious drawbacks for the student dissectors (and the pigs)? Uncomfortable response: I have no idea (because most people aren’t going to bother to justify a long-running educational practice, preferring instead to rely on an assumption of effectiveness, though, if anyone did bother to look, they’d find at least one academic article, from Society and Animals, arguing that “Most [students, in a sample of 17] felt that dissection was a positive experience, but a substantial minority viewed it primarily in negative terms”). The questions would then escalate. Perhaps someone would make the unappealing and brutally utilitarian (if technically accurate) argument that the harm was already done, and we might as well learn something. Might as well cut the fuckers up. Then, the teacher would get frustrated. The other students would rebel. This was supposed to be the plan.

What actually happened was the fetal pigs were passed around, sitting (or lying or perched, all but Hawaiian-style apple-stuffed) on Styrofoam trays. The teacher began to announce directions. Wait, said the student, but she could only manage to ask that thing about the difference between fetal and aborted in a sort of nervous word-salad response. It was met with awkward discomfort. It wasn’t at all like she’d rehearsed. The teacher said her options, having chosen not to submit the opt-out form offered equally to all (but signed and submitted by none), were to quietly follow directions or leave and accept the grade penalty, which was, obviously, sure to be dire. The residual smell of formaldehyde was more noticeable in the ensuing silence. Thank you, said the teacher. Now, let’s start with the heart, and the student noticed for the first time that the animal in front of her looked slick like a hippo, and also like a dog mixed with a rat. The other students began cutting. Our protagonist picked up her tray, pig and all, and walked away. Outside the building. She carried it for two miles in the spring sun. Cars did not honk. Some of the drivers, she thought, looked at her strangely. When she got to her house, a faded white split-level with a “beware of dog” placard (that she wished said “beware of God”) but no other sign of canine presence, she buried the pig in the backyard, near the pollinator weed garden she’d begged her parents to set up. She used a garden shovel. It was late March, so the ground was only recently thawed. She got blisters on her hands. While she waited for her parents to return (and the school must have contacted them by now), she did lawn angels on top of the makeshift grave. The mud was thick around her. She felt it coming into her ears. She thought, if it got deep enough, she could make it stay there forever. Breaking the hearing chain. Gaps between hammer and anvil. The world’s vibrations becoming answers she could finally ignore.