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Short abstract:

Based on a vast zootechnical literature, as well as on interviews with pig farmers, this paper sets out to document the development of pig farm buildings in France, from 1850 to the present day, in order to provide a detailed, progressive and nuanced history of pig confinement and immobility.

Long abstract:

Since the mid-nineteenth century, pigs have been seen as animal-machines whose performance, i.e. their ability to transform food into meat, should be improved. The subject of an exponential number of agronomic and veterinary treatises, the pig is considered to be one of the most interesting domestic animals to change, from a zootechnical point of view, particularly in terms of the number of physiological factors that humans can influence. Three of these factors have become of vital importance since 1850: pig genetics, rational pig feeding and the buildings in which pigs grow and fatten. The aim of this paper is to document the development of pig farm buildings over the long term, from 1850 to the present day, in France. While it is often repeated that this evolution is simply the story of the ever-increasing confinement of pigs, I would like to present an account that challenges this linear history of pig immobility, and to show the details of this history, by linking it to specific scientific and social contexts, contexts largely traversed by concerns about feed, genetics and antibiotics, and by a plurality of actors (veterinarians, farmers, cooperatives, etc.). The sources for this paper will be a vast zootechnical literature of agronomic and veterinary treatises published in the nineteenth century, scientific articles published throughout the twentieth century by French research institutions devoted to the pig, and interviews conducted with farmers who worked between 1960 and 2000.