Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Such connections between academic and commercial breeders were quite tight in the case of plant breeding, as we saw above when dealing with BRA potatoes and as historians of German plant breeding have already emphasized.[29] These relations were no less close for the case of animal breeding, owing to the specific challenges of transforming domesticated animals into experimental objects. The main problem was the limited number of animals available, which didn’t allow the use of as many specimens as were used in plant breeding. A plant-breeding experiment typically involved at least 20,000 individual specimens, a number that wasn’t possible with domesticated animals.[30] Although Mendelian genetics had played an important role in transforming plant breeding into a respectable academic discipline, a similar transformation seemed more problematic in the case of animal breeding. The interesting thing is how such a limitation encouraged Frölich and other academic breeders to work directly with commercial animal breeders and their associations. It was argued that only by making use of the large numbers of animals that commercial operations made available were academic animal breeders able to treat heredity scientifically.[31]

From 1905 to 1909, before assuming the control of the Halle Institute, Frölich had been responsible for both plant breeding and animal breeding on the Friedrichswert estate, a large commercial farm in Thuringia.[32] The name Friedrichswert was well known among Mitteldeutschland farmers as that of a seed company that had been releasing famous varieties of rye, wheat, root beats, and potatoes since the late 1880s. More interesting for present purposes, this was also the estate that established the Deutsche Edelschwein as one of the most successful swine breeds in Germany.[33] The Edelschwein was the outcome of crossing German landraces with a fast-developing English breed, the Large White, a trend followed by other breeders aiming at producing hogs for intensive operations.[34] In the 1880s the German Agricultural Society (Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft, abbreviated DLG) began to include in its annual contests generic classes such as “crossings with English Large Whites” (“Grosse weisse englische Schläge und Kreuzungen in dieser Form”). In the DLG’s 1903 show in Hannover, the Edelschwein brought from Friedrichswert were granted the status of a differentiated breed. By the end of the 1930s, Edelschwein accounted for 25 percent of the purebred swine registered in Germany.[35]

After becoming acquainted with the Edelschwein at Friedrichswert, Frölich would maintain a lifelong interest in swine breeding. In 1927, he summarized the two swine types available for German breeders this way: “1) the Edel type, precocious, short legged, short headed, round ribs, swelling form, fast development, and early fattening and fast growth; 2) the Landrace type, late maturing, tall form, long head, flat lower ribs, lean muscles, slower development but prolonged growth.”[36] What was at stake in breeding one type or the other was whether pigs were to keep their traditional role as security stock of the farm household, domestic machines for the transformation of leftovers into meat and fat, or if, alternatively, they were to be intensively produced to satisfy the growing demands of pork by urban consumers.[37] Since the end of the nineteenth century, the German market had been flooded with cheap American lard, and as a result there was a greater emphasis in breeding leaner, faster-developing animals (the Edel type) at the expense of fatter, slower-developing ones (the Landrace type). The growing presence of the Edelschwein meant replacing slow, traditional, fat hogs with fast-developing, modern, lean hogs.

But Frölich urged those eager to produce a German equivalent of the modern English breeds to take into account that significant properties might be neglected if only the demands of the market were considered. Fertility and milk output (a proxy for nursing capacity), for example, were important attributes not taken into account by the modernizers. Frölich also pointed out that, whereas the moderate English climate allowed pigs to graze in meadows or to be held in airy stables, in Germany pigs had to spend a lot of time in confined indoor spaces.[38] As a consequence, producing healthy and hardy pigs was much more important for German breeders than for English ones. Finally, there was the question of what to feed swine, which was made only more obvious by World War I. The expensive importing of feed that had sustained the fast growth of leaner hogs before World War I was a thing of the past.