But what would the PETA people say about that?!

Seriously, though, what was the rationale of the 5 families who chose slavery for their children over the piggy? Love to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation.

Amazing what one can do with a little cultural sensitivity mixed with ingenuity. Thank you for sharing this.

A pig doesn't graze on grass or eat hay. They eat essentially what people eat (or could, theoretically), so it takes a lot of food to fatten a pig which is food a human could be eating. Goats will eat inedible weeds, along with grass and hay, and stuff like corn husks, etc. Plus a goat can give milk. Pigs give nothing until they're slaughtered. A goat is a better choice than a pig.

Ms. Price.

We know what they would say: Sell the girls to US, so when they grow up we can take naked pictures of them to put in our adverstisements about how eating pork makes girls fat.

Let's all laugh at PETA. Like it's so very funny that one might actually consider the value of an animal's life with respect to a human's. We are SO. VERY. SPECIAL. For christ's sake, the pig DIES.

Ever consider education? Teaching them to value their daughters? Frankly, I'd sell the male kids. They probably eat more.

Yes indeed. Let us all laugh at PETA. I cannot but feel after reading amysarah's letter that it would be well deserved. So you'd rather sell the boys than the pigs? I'd like to see what hierarchy of values that choice is based on... Call me old-fashioned, but yes, I think if we have to choose, we are better than pigs and should be saved first.

Education as a choice? Sure that would be better. But I suppose you haven't got much experience with Nepal, or such situations. As someone who spent over a year among South American Indians, I can tell you -- it's not easy to set up an education project that would really work and have the effects you want, especially when the main reasons are economical. Even assuming that you'd have all the necessary money, and also the personnel (a teacher per village at least), and a way of training them in pedagogy, curriculum, etc., this would take so long that most of the 3,000 saved girls would have become slaves by the time this new education system would start having some chance of influencing even one single family.

Education is better? Sure, in the long run, and if you have the resources. Before that? And in fact, concomittantly with it, while education sinks in and starts having results? Please kill the pigs, if that saves girls. And boys.

Oh those crazy PETA people. Kind of like calling feminists "the NOW crowd" or human rights activists "those ACLU types." Such labeling is usually done by people who scoff at ideas like feminism or human rights or compassion for animals. People like that side with the bullies. Their poster boy is Rush Limbaugh.

If I had to choose a flag to march under, it would be Farm Sanctuary, a place that takes in abused and neglected farm animals, i.e., any animal rescued from a factory farm. At Farm Sanctuary you can meet pigs and see for yourself what intelligent and sensitive creatures they are.

I'm sorry that people in Nepal are suffering, and I'm sorry to see that they're substituting the enslavement of children with the enslavement of animals. Neither is justified, though the people doing the enslaving always come up with good excuses; the worse treated the slave, the more creative the excuse.

"pork was a prized meat in Nepal and...many families were selling their daughters because they couldn't feed the rest of their families."

How long before vegans accuse them busy-body wimmin of sending muliple Babes to slaughter?

And how much money did the boys fetch at market?

Any little male humans rescued from lives in monotonous monasteries?

Tibet, like Switzerland and Sweden, has a violent past. We forget that today. There were many internal and external wars. And-- hold on-- boys were often abused, too!

A note to feminists who think only girls are oppressed:

"Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. 14 The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers."

http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

Sooo...what are feminists (who supposedly care about everyone equally) doing to help boys in Nepal, Tibet, America...or anywhere?

Right.

It's like their calling female circumcision (which is illegal and rare in America) "mutilation" while male circumcision is both routine and mocked. Fembots seem to say, "Hey, babies can't feel scalpels and a blinded person doesn't miss sight. So don't say removing the most sensitive skin on male bodies is harmful! Now, don't you dare even THINK of hitting that puppy on the nose with your newspaper!"

The fact that males in other cultures are sexually mutilated at differing ages using all sorts of unsanitary shells, sharpened stones, bamboo, etc. fazes feminists not a jot. When they talk of trauma they mean the pain endured by female CEOs suffers from paper cuts.

Ah, the many double-standardards followed by the "fairer" sex.

Ignoring MMM's post (which, as always, has some good points, but tends to drawn them in aggressive words and feelings), I'd still say that your feelings don't solve the problem. Maybe you're sorry for the children and also for the pigs, and so am I. But the question is: do you have a better solution? An education program is not going to work, and I don't see any big movement of Farm Sanctuary activists travelling to Nepal with money to both save enslaved girls and create sanctuaries for farm animals.

Solutions are about what can be done now. Olga Murray's solution of replacing children with pigs solved the problem now, at a fairly low cost.

Don't get me wrong. I had a pet pig for a while when I was a child, and I know they are quite intelligent animals (very similar to humans in their internal organs by the way). Yet,

if the choice is between pigs and children -- and can you realistically say it wasn't? -- then I'd still say kill the pig. And I don't see how you could choose otherwise.