Premodern cities employed pigs as official street cleaners under regulation.
Evidence
No pump, no cistern, no drain of any kind, no dustman’s cart, or any other visible means of getting rid of the rubbish which vanishes with such celerity in London that one has no time to think of its existence; but which accumulated so rapidly at Cincinnati that I sent for my landlord to know in what manner refuse of all kinds was to be disposed of. … “Your help will just have to fix them all into the middle of the street, but you must mind, old woman, that it is the middle. I expect you don’t know as we have got a law that forbids throwing such things at the sides of the streets; they must just all be cast right into the middle, and the pigs soon takes them off.” … In truth, the pigs are constantly seen doing Herculean service in this way through every quarter of the city; and though it is not very agreeable to live surrounded by herds of these unsavoury animals, it is well they are so numerous, and so active in their capacity of scavengers, for without them the streets would soon be choked up with all sorts of substances in every stage of decomposition. (Trollope, 1960:38-39) Pigs must have been as common a sight in the cities of times past as the automobile is today. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 188
Categorization
- SEED: The regulated ‘middle of the street’ waste law plus municipal pigs is a striking piece of infrastructural history—angle on how preindustrial cities solved sanitation through codified animal labor rather than pipes.
- CANDY: Cincinnati legally required residents to dump rubbish in the exact middle of the street where pigs ate it—great elevator astonishment.