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The other white meat.

"I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, 'as greedy as a pig'."
Brick Top, Snatch.

A somewhat common staple in criminal and horror fiction. In a terrifying twist on the Gluttonous Pig trope, serial killers or mobsters use a secret pig farm to dispose of their victims' bodies.

It's most likely Truth in Television. Pigs are omnivores rather than herbivores, meaning that they do indeed eat meat if they are able to come by it. Fact of the matter is, pigs can eat almost anything they can chew. No matter how special and worthy of respect we consider the corpses of us humans, it's the same as any other carcass to a pig, meaning that they will chow down on it.

A pig's body is also quite up to the task of digesting almost every part of the human body. They can not only chew and digest human flesh, they can also readily digest human bone without excreting a noticeable trace of it. Of course, they can't quite chew the skulls and longer bones that humans have, but if our killer has enough determination, they can just break said bones into smaller, more chewable pieces. They also can't digest human hair and teeth, but it should be a simple matter to shave your victims' heads and pull out their teeth before chow time, right? And that's assuming you're paranoid enough to think anyone's going to start shifting through excrement piles for evidence.

Not only is this trope plausible, it's also downright horrific because it not only involves an invocation of humanity's Primal Fear of being eaten, but also the chilling factor of role reversal. Outside the pigpen, you eat pig (if you don't have dietary or religious restrictions that include pork, or dislike the taste). Inside our killer's pigpen, however, pigs eat you. Also, there's the possibility that someone will eat the pigs that have been eating humans, which isn't the same as I'm a Humanitarian, but still squicky in its own way. Also, this trope can also be applied when some Fat Bastard gets eaten by pigs, in some kind of Laser-Guided Karma.

Subtrope of Disposing of a Body, Eat the Evidence, and Fed to the Beast. It's also a Darker and Edgier subtrope of Gluttonous Pig. See also This Bear Was Framed, when the killer tries to make the murder look like an animal attack. Related to Food Eats You, when the idea of being consumed by food is even more literal.

For bonus irony, human flesh is sometimes called "Long Pork" due to its alleged similarity to pig meat. So be doubly careful if someone offers to serve you Long Pork Pies.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 
    Anime & Manga 
  • In 91 Days, Don Orco disposes of a chef who serves him poorly-cooked lasagna by having him fed to pigs.
  • Mentioned in the first chapter of Chainsaw Man: The yakuza keeping Denji as a debt slave tell him "Run away and your pig slop!" Though a later chapters shows they'd actually throw their debtors to zombies.
  • In the Hansel and Gretel arc of Black Lagoon it is mentioned that the corpses of the children killed during the snuff films were fed to pigs.

    Comic Books 
  • The Button Man had a similar setup, albeit with chickens rather than pigs (it also involved a wood-chipper).
  • Tombstone shows off his mutated "ghetto" hogs, which he feeds people who have crossed him to, in Deadpool: Suicide Kings.
  • One issue of Nightwing has him and Batman being captured by mobsters and thrown into a pit with pigs. Batman tells him to stall for time, and try to get some of the goons in there with them. Nightwing tells the mobster than he's the only one who knows where his son is. The mobster tells his guys to get Nightwing out, but after they climb down, they're electrocuted by one of Batman's gadgets, using the mud as a conduit.
  • In the Secret Wars tie-in 1872 The Kingpin throws Steve Rogers' body to the pigs after shooting him. The panel before that shows Steve actually survived the bullet and thus was likely Eaten Alive. The Kingpin stays to watch, enjoying the hogs' work.
  • In Mark Millar's Wolverine run, the Gorgon and the Hand lured Wolverine into their territory by kidnapping the son of one of his old acquaintances. After things come to blows and the Gorgon gains the upper hand, he reveals that the boy is long dead, fed to the Hand's pigs.

    Fan Works 
  • In Shadowchasers: Conspiracy, mobster Vincenzo Belsito (who is a devil swine, a type of lycanthrope derived from wild boar stock) explains to Bonnie how this type of body disposal used to go down. (His intent, of course, is to hint that he'll eat her once he's through with her; she's an assassin who had earlier killed a friend of his. She isn't being much nicer, insulting him with fat jokes while taunting him.)

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Daddys Deadly Darlin features a serial killer who feeds his victims to pigs.
  • In Hannibal, this is Mason Verger's idea of a Karmic Death for Hannibal Lecter, playing into the role reversal aspect; Hannibal kills and eats people he considers rude to demonstrate that they're no better than pigs in his eyes. Mason specially breeds a bunch of pigs for this purpose, training them to associate screaming with meal time and stuffing clothes full of fruits and meats to get them used to it. It then goes very, very badly for Verger when he tries to actually implement it.
    Hannibal Lecter: (to Verger's Beleaguered Assistant) Hey, Cordell! Why don't you push him in? You can always say it was me.
  • After Auntie Entity's takeover of Bartertown in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Master is tortured by being lowered into the pigpen of his methane plant. However the goal is merely to break his spirit rather than kill him, and Auntie objects and orders him hauled out again when she sees what her minions are doing.
  • The Night of a Thousand Cats presents a variant of this trope - instead of using pigs, Hugo disposes of his victims by grinding them into mulch and then feeding them piece by piece to the titular felines.
  • Pigs and Battleships: A gang of Yakuza also run a pig farm. After the gang leader kills a guy named Harukoma, they take him to the pig farm for burial. Ohachi didn't feel like burying Harukoma so he fed his corpse to the pigs. The rest of the gang doesn't find this out until they're eating a pig and one of them discovers a human tooth.
  • In Rambo IV the villain doesn't like how one of the male hostages is looking at him and orders for him to be put in with the pigs. Later when the rescuers arrive they see his body tied to a pole having already died from blood loss after the pigs chewed off his feet and lower legs.
  • Robin Hood: The Rebellion: Seen raping a woman, the Sheriff threatens to feed her eyes to pigs if she should fail to please him.
  • Played ridiculously straight in the Hamlet retelling Royal Deceit, where half a dozen scrawny little pigs completely dispose of a large viking, bones and all, in about an hour.
  • Brick Top from Snatch. keeps a group of perpetually starved pigs on hand to eat, and thus dispose of, the bodies of people he kills.
  • The eponymous character in Sugar Hill (1974) dispatches a gangster by feeding him to pigs that haven't been fed in a week.
  • In The Wax Mask, the female protagonist is captured by the mad wax artist's jealous assistant, who takes her to a pigsty and ties her up. He then cuts her and leaves her there so that the pig'll eat her. Luckily, she is rescued by her boyfriend.

    Literature 
  • Joe Spork, the protagonist of Nick Harkaway's novel Angelmaker, is the White Sheep son of Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, an infamous London Gangster. Early in the novel, Joe muses about his father's victims and the likelihood of there being makeshift graves and pig farms that his father had a hand in.
  • Ambrose Bierce's Civil War story "The Coup de GrĂące" has a Union soldier try to perform a Mercy Kill on a wounded fellow soldier who had been partially eaten by a roving group of feral hogs. Such attacks were apparently Truth in Television.
  • Featherless Buzzards concludes with Don Santos eaten alive by the pig he was feeding. Rather karmic, as he fed his grandchildrens' dog to said pig earlier.
  • One of the participants in the Deadly Game in Friday The 13th The Jason Strain is a serial killer who apparently disposed of her victims by feeding them to her hogs.
  • Amleth in Gesta Danorum kills his uncle's spying courtier that tries to eavesdrop on Amleth's conversation with his mother, then cuts the body to pieces, boils it, and throws it into a sewer for pigs to eat.
  • In Hannibal this is Mason Verger's idea of an Ironic Hell for Hannibal Lecter, and he specially breeds a bunch of pigs for this purpose, training them to associate screaming with meal time and stuffing clothes full of fruits and meats to get them used to it. It then goes very, very badly for Verger when he tries to actually implement it. In the book, the description of breeding the pigs, training them and eating a few hapless humans who had fallen into the pigsty makes for a lot of Gorn, yet any Real Life criminal could have skipped it; normal pigs, domestic or wild, could and would have eaten anyone if hungry enough and coming into a large herd to overpower the human. Given Verger's other egotistical traits it's likely he went through the trouble as a sign of his obsession with Hannibal. Unlike in the film, in the novel Verger doesn't die by the pigs — his death at the hands of his sister Margot is actually worse.
  • In a variant, vengeful criminal Joey Castle from Infernal threatens to not only execute the Muslim terrorists who'd killed his brother, but to cut off their private parts and feed them to pigs. In this case, this trope's purpose isn't evidence-disposal but defilement.
  • W.E.B. Griffin has this as a fate for a stupid character who really should have known better. In The Investigators, a dirty cop stole a bunch of money from drug dealers that he was arresting, and raped one of the dealers' girlfriends. Unfortunately, the girl was the grand-daughter of the local Mafia boss, who didn't take it well. The cop was later arrested and jailed, but mysteriously disappeared from jail and whose remains were found later tied to a stump in a swamp where feral hogs were prevalent.
  • One of the stories included in More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is about a butcher who used human meat Sweeney Todd-style in his sausages, eventually being caught. When the neighbors found out, it was unknown afterward if he was fed to his own hogs or if he was killed in the sausage grinder that he used to grind human meat.
  • "Pig Blood Blues" by Clive Barker has a new guard at a juvenile facility learn that a missing prisoner has managed to transfer his soul into a giant pig in order to avoid death. Because he knows too much, he ends up getting thrown in with the pigs... while alive.
    This is the state of the beast. To eat and be eaten.
  • The Running Grave: Daiyu Wace is believed to have drowned while swimming on the beach, her body swept away to sea and lost forever, but this was her real fate. She was murdered on Chapman Farm and fed to the pigs.
  • In John Ross' Unintended Consequences, Henry Bowman successfully defends himself from an ATF raid attempting to plant drugs, counterfeit money and terrorism plans in his gun dealership. At the time, he thought they were a biker gang - but afterwards he decides if The Government wants to declare war on him, he'd just have to retaliate. Starting by disposing of the bodies in a pig farm (minus their indigestible hair and teeth).
  • A non-criminal example from The Wardstone Chronicles. This happens accidentally to Mother Malkin at the end of the first book. She shouldn't have attempted to flee through the pigpen while she was shrunk and the pigs were agitated. This is foreshadowed when the book brings up earlier that children are not allowed near the pigs when they're too small, as they could easily be trampled and devoured by the hungry hogs.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Bones:
    • A body was found in a pig trough, and evidence pointed to a man who'd "allegedly" disposed of a body the same way before. He isn't the killer. The real killer dumped the body at his house, knowing he'd get rid of it.
    • Brennan’s own mother was killed with a stun device used in pig slaughter and then when she died months later, she was disposed of this way.
  • This is how John Riley's body is disposed of in Copper.
  • Used in the Criminal Minds two-part season four finale "To Hell..."/"...And Back" by a mentally-challenged pig farmer who was manipulated into killing people by his Evil Genius Cripple brother.
  • An episode of CSI showed how a killer used pigs to get rid of the remains of a woman he killed.
  • Mr. Wu's pigs in Deadwood are used to eat dead bodies.
  • How the killer disposes of the bodies in the Father Brown episode "The Shadow of the Scaffold". This is discovered when a finger bone with a ring on it is discovered in the stomach of a pig being prepared for tripe.
  • In Gentleman Jack, Thomas Sowden kills his alcoholic and abusive father Sam when his irresponsibility puts their lease at risk, and feeds his body to their pigs. When his mother guesses what happened, she doesn't have any problem with it.
  • In It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, when the gang participates in a Family Feud-style game show, Frank gives the answer "Pigs" to the question "Animals that We Eat but Doesn't Eat Us". Despite being accepted as a correct answer, he later asks to undo his answers upon remembering that he has seen "many pigs eat many men".
  • In Kaamelott, King LĂ©odagan once condemns a pig thief to being cut in little pieces and fed to pigs. The intent is to make executions a bit less monotonous, along with 43 others condemned to be burned at the stake.
  • Millennium (1996). The Judge is a pig farmer who uses ex-convicts to inflict Karmic Death on people he believes have escaped justice. He invites Frank Black to join his cause, but when he refuses the Judge hits the police with a lawsuit to make them back off. Unfortunately for the Judge his ex-convict killer regards this as hypocrisy, hamstrings the Judge and throws him to his own pigs to be eaten alive. The killer also regards this as a Karmic Death, saying: "You're either a man or a pig."
  • In the second season of Trapped (2015), Gisli and Halla fed the body of their abusive father to the family pigs after Gisli killed him.
  • The X-Files episode "Our Town" uses the chicken variation. A small town which is famous for its chicken plant, Chaco Chicken, is secretly home to a cult that practices cannibalism as part of a rejuvenation ritual, with disastrous consequences as it has infected many of the townsfolk with Mad Cow Disease. The ending implies that Chaco, the founder of the plant, was fed to the chickens after he was murdered.

    Podcasts 
  • This is one of the ways a serial killer in the Sick Sad World episode "Missing And Murdered" disposed of his victims’ corpses.
  • The Magnus Archives has a somewhat more grim take, as a farmer finds that a very large, very unsettling pig has taken up space in his pen. First it eats the other pigs. Then it almost lures his sleepwalking brother into the pen, with the brother singing a song about "long pig" all the while. Then a circus sets up on the farmer's fields, and a clown goes missing...

    Tabletop Games 
  • In the Grim Hollow setting, one of the many unique monsters is the Ogre Swine, a pig that has mutated after consuming human flesh. Unless kept by a powerful master, such as an Ogre of the Vale, usually only one pig in the pen will transform, whereupon it'll eat the other pigs and then escape to go hunting for new victims. Ogre swine are freakishly huge, with enlarged, sharpened teeth, disturbingly hand-like trotters on their forelimbs, and the ability to laugh and cry with disturbingly human-like voices.

    Video Games 
  • Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs: Not only did Oswald Mandus feed disobedient orphans to his pigs, but the Engineer has his cannibalistic pigmen unleashed on the entire East End of London.
  • Fear & Hunger: Termina: Dying against basic villagers will result in you being thrown into a pigpen, only able to crawl around before the pigs inevitably chow down.
  • There's a Critical Choice in Let's Build a Zoo where a crime boss asks if you can dispose of a dead body by feeding it to your animals. Accepting it gives you evil points.
  • Manhunt: Piggsy, a sadistic psycho-killer in a mask made from a pig's head, believes that he's a pig, and feeds off corpses that the Cerberus provide for him.
  • Mother Russia Bleeds starts with the protagonists escaping a laboratory where they were used as test subjects for an experimental street drug, and part of their getaway takes them through a sewer system full of the corpses of former test subjects and plenty of pigs feeding on their bodies.
  • One ghost in Murdered: Soul Suspect is a Serial Killer who ran a butcher's shop and kept a collection of pigs that he'd feed his victims to. When Ronan finds him, he's dedicated his unlife to stalking a woman who's son he killed and who ended up getting him arrested and executed, and is now waiting for her to die so he can confront her and remind her about the pork he sold her before she reported him.
  • The pigs in Red Dead Redemption 2 will chew through any corpse that gets in their vicinity. This is a handy way for you to dispose of bodies, and there is scenario where you help a prostitute by doing this on a dead patron.
  • In Rimworld, you are able to feed human corpses to pigs in your colony (or any non-herbivorous animals). They have a habit of biting off limbs and heads from corpses.

    Visual Novels 
  • On one path in Critical Point, you can see a flashback of the hero suffering Cold-Blooded Torture in which he had his right arm hacked off piece by piece, starting with the fingers. Each piece was tossed to a nearby pig after being cut off.
  • Lucky Dog 1 reveals that one of Ragtliffe's more disturbing methods of disposing of bodies (as part of the Cleanup Crew) is feeding them to the pigs on his farm. When Gian starts imagining this, he promptly gets squicked.

    Web Comics 
  • After Mordecai Heller takes the hatchet joke literally in Lackadaisy, Nico and Serafine Savoy offer to dump the body with some nearby pig farmers. Mordecai thinks it's another joke.
    • After Rocky burns down the pig farm in question for an entirely unrelated reason the farmers go to Mordecai's boss claiming that he owes them for using their pigs to dispose of bodies, he gives them some tommy guns.
  • Unsounded: Sette makes a joke about body disposal, saying "In Sharteshane pork eats you."

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time: Spoofed in "Apple Thief". When Finn, Jake, and Tree Trunks are captured by thieves, they're threatened to be fed to the pig — who, like many animal characters on the show, is fully sapient. After all four escape, he even hooks up with, and eventually gets married to, Tree Trunks.
  • In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Critters", this trope is combined with Fed to the Beast. Rustic villain Farmer Brown tells his daughter to get rid of Bullock this way, while he's still alive. The pig-pen only has one pig in it, but it's a genetically mutated monster (likely bred to be carnivorous rather than omnivorous), much like the rest of Brown's livestock. (Fortunately for Bullock, Batman shows up in time.)
  • In Disenchantment, Sorcerio has a trapdoor in his laboratory that leads to a pen filled with hungry pigs, in case he needs to remove evidence of any failed experiments. As we see with an old nobleman named Lord Lingonberry, after a botched Elixir of Life potion kills him instead of restoring his youth.
  • In Harley Quinn (2019), Queen of Fables can summon various imaginary characters from her fairy tale book. Her choice of murder scene cleanup is The Three Little Pigs who'd chow down on the corpses.

    Real Life 

 
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Video Example(s):

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As Greedy as a Pig

Brick Top arrives to Sol's pawnshop to see him and his friends trying to get rid of Frankie Four-Fingers' body, giving him the best solution to make it disappears

How well does it match the trope?

4.67 (15 votes)

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Main / FedToPigs

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