<i>The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.</i><p>-- George Orwell, _Animal Farm_<p>When pigs are surveilled to the degree as human livestock, they will have truly transformed into us and us into them.
Does it have to be the face? Just wondering if they could've used another combination of body parts with sufficient variation and use those as the "fingerprint" instead. Rather than "the bristles, the snout, the eyes and ears" specifically.<p>Or are faces evolved to be unique in (social?)animals and nothing else is as easy to tell apart?
Just look at the barn. Pigs are smart creatures. How can a creature be happy in that barn? I had some of the best pork ever in Kauai where pigs roam pastures. Isn’t that a better solution?
Most smaller producers already recognize their livestock as well as family resemblance. If African swine fever does in fact produce a fever, wouldn't that be a better screening method? Like in an airport. Pigs are highly intelligent, and "tech" enabling them to increase or decrease barn temperature (up and down snout-pressed buttons) has shown to save money on heating bills.
> You're in private mode.<p>> Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode.<p>It is the first time I see such a nag screen. Is there any firefox Add-on that could allow me a "stealth private mode"?<p>Meanwhile, I just disabled Javascript on this page, which works well enough (except for the images, it seems).
"You can’t take a single picture of a pig,” said Mr. He, who is trying to add to his database of more than 200,000 pig images. -Multiply by 400 million pigs, then imagine the emissions from these data centers!
Straight from yesterday’s Joe Rogan podcast!<p>So this is the next step. First human-pig chimera hybrids. Now their population is so big that they need to develop facial recognition.
This sounds like one of the (few?) classes of problems that blockchain can solve best.<p>Get every pig tagged and on the blockchain. Then a quick scan tells you where it came from, where it's been, and who else it encountered along the way.