Fetal Pig Shortage Hamstrings Biology Instructors

Phrases such as "bidding war," "invest now," and "panic over short supply" evoke images of brave new drugs. An apologetic "It's on back order" is a common refrain from L.L. Bean or Land's End. But these phrases are being applied to the fetal pig, a staple of the biology teaching laboratory as a model of vertebrate anatomy. The foot-long beasts, once considered mere slaughterhouse waste, now bring in more bacon than a nice pair of pork chops. Spiraling fetal pig prices have biology instructors seeking solutions, including dissection stand-ins. U.S. classes use an estimated half million fetal pigs a year. Fetal pigs ultimately come from slaughterhouses, which sell them to vendors that pass them on to the supply houses whose catalogs stuff biology instructors' mailboxes. "Fetal pigs vary in price from $13 to $23.74. We've had two price increases, on April 1 and November 1, and are paying 10 times what we did 18 months ago," says Nancy Valenzuela, a representative of Nebraska Scientific, in Omaha. Fetuses injected with colored plastics to delineate the arterial and venous systems cost more. Supply houses must now pay about $9 per fetal pig--about the same price as a 40-pound feeder pig. While suppliers scramble to corral as many fetal pigs as they can, they are alerting customers to prices gone hog wild, and even snorting about an impending disappearance of the popular product. Despite the relative ease of obtaining price quotes from suppliers, an aura of intrigue surrounds the fetal pig crisis when more probing questions are asked, suggesting that something not quite kosher is afoot. Supply company representatives refuse to speak on the record, pass the buck, and ominously refer to one nameless company that has hogged a dwindling market. The Scientist's inquiries to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Agricultural Research Service were met with surprised silences. But despite the X-Files-like atmosphere surrounding the fetal pig situation, a complex and bizarre sequence of causative events is emerging. According to Stephen Richter, operations manager for the production department at Nasco Inc., a biological supplier based in Fort Atkinson, Wis., those who supplied pig embryos and fetuses lived high on the hog from 1992 until 1996, when an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in China sent eastern pork-lovers in search of American hogs. "Farmers could sell every pig they could raise through 1996 and 1997, so they kept their pregnant sows. But in the past year, the hog industry in the Orient has started to bounce back, just as its currency started to inflate," he says. However, the resulting plunging pork prices had little to do with the impending fetus shortage, Richter adds. This is where the story gets complicated. Apparently a fetal pig wholesaler that had been in the business for decades and had accumulated a year's worth of product when the Chinese were eating all that pork, was bought out. The new owners, overwhelmed with the packed warehouses, stopped picking up new supplies from the slaughterhouses with whom the company had contracted for many years. The slaughterhouses did not like this, Richter says, and when a midwestern father-son start-up company new to the world of fetal pigs came along and offered a high price, the disgruntled slaughterhouses took them up on it. "The slaughterhouses were beginning to realize that they could get big bucks for fetal pigs," he adds. And so began a chain reaction that is now reverberating in dissection trays across the nation. The slaughterhouses liked receiving more than $3 a pound, compared to the 35 to 55 cents paid just two years ago, for what they once considered waste. (Historical note: this wasn't the first time fetal pigs received their rightful recognition as an indispensable learning aid. Many 40-plus biologists recall a Chicago-based company, circa 1980 or so, that sold preserved "Happy Pigs" that came packaged with baggies labeled "Happy Pig Spare Parts." Graduate students used the bags to pack their lunches.) Word spread. Other slaughterhouses raised their prices, "first in Iowa and Nebraska, then in Wisconsin and Illinois, with ripples to slaughterhouses in Tennessee and Texas. It became the Great Midwestern Pig Wars," recalls Richter. In parallel to the pig wars, the rise of factory farms may be contributing to the fetal pig shortage. When most farms were small and family-run, female pigs free to roam the barnyard sometimes got pregnant, which pleased the farmer because slaughterhouses used to pay by weight--it didn't matter whether the extra poundage was muscle or filled uterus. If upon butchering, a gilt (a female virgin in pig parlance) or sow (a more experienced she-pig) was found to be expecting, the uterus was removed and the contents sold to the middlemen that passed them on to biological supply firms. The doomed offspring were not deemed valuable as breeding stock. But pigs are now mostly raised in factory-like facilities that often stuff 1,000 animals into a building. "Today pigs are raised in computerized stalls, and food intake is monitored. The pigs are isolated because pregnancy would waste food energy. So, the real story is that there are very few fetal pigs hitting the market," says a supply company staff biologist who requested anonymity. "Most of the males are castrated very young, so there is little chance for hanky panky in the pigpen. Essentially none of the hogs sent to market would be pregnant," adds James Pickett, an organic chemist with General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., who grew up on a farm. Some slaughterhouses even scan females with ultrasound to spare the promiscuous ones from hamhood, because the slaughterhouse wouldn't be getting its money's worth of myosin. "It's a strange twist on Charlotte's Web," notes Ray Lewis, a biology teacher at Benicia High School in Benicia, Calif. Whatever happens in the volatile fetal pig market, the rubbery teaching tools will be sorely missed. "I use them for three smelly weeks in my biology-for-nonmajors class, and the thought of switching to rats is very scary. My students have a hard enough time seeing organs in the pig," reports Patricia Shields, course coordinator for introductory biology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Her students purchase their pigs at the bookstore, so the price hike will affect them directly. Adds Mary Gray, instructional coordinator in the department of biological sciences at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., "fetal pigs occupy a unique niche in biology. They are a convenient size, and the digestive tract is very similar to [that of] humans. Since I've spent considerable time developing a lab manual of the pig and computer tutorials, I'm holding my breath on this one." David Brown, a professor of biology at Point Loma Nazarene University, cites yet another advantage to dissecting fetal pigs. "We have considered other animals as alternatives but have found student sympathy and consequent acceptance of fetal pigs--'the poor pig fetuses at least have a use; they are not just thrown away as garbage'--to be much to our advantage. Few students have pet pigs. Cats, birds, dogs, fish, and others seem to have more animal rights problems." Although many instructors will answer "when pigs fly" to the question of when they will switch species used for dissection, this may be inevitable. Some of the major suppliers are locked into the current prices they pay to collecting vendors or slaughterhouse owners for a year. And so biological supply houses are gearing up to offer viable alternatives. Nasco, for example, is building its supplies of $6 to $8 nine-inch-plus rats, has developed a new handbook on rat dissection, and offers degreased minks that have had their scent glands removed. (Richter says it resembles the monster in the film Alien.) The USDA is aware of the "current economic crisis" in hog raising, if not of the trickle-down effects of the fetal pig shortage on biology education. On January 12, 1999, agriculture secretary Dan Glickman promised $50 million in direct cash payments to struggling hog producers. But it may be some time before that assistance materializes as more fetal pigs shipped to market. And with all of the players becoming more aware of the value of the prenatal porkers, improved supplies might not lead to a quick chop in prices. Ricki Lewis (rickilewis@nasw.org) is a textbook author and a contributing editor for The Scientist.

Fetal Pig Shortage Hamstrings Biology Instructors

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