Swine served as essential garbage disposal in preindustrial cities.

Evidence

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. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 191

Pigs must have been as common a sight in the cities of times past as the automobile is today. Davies, writing of sixteenth and seventeenth century Madrid speaks of “the privileged pigs of St. Anthony [who] roved about everywhere grubbing for garbage” (1952:192-93). In the medieval European city, “pigs were left to roam the streets … ” (Rawling, 1968:68), and the “hogreeve” was an important official in Colonial Philadelphia (Miller, 1966: 125). Dogs, birds, and other animals also performed scavenger duty, but where these and the pigs were insufficient to their task, the result was an odd one: “Excavations at Ur [in Mesopotamia] reveal a continual rising of the street level due to the accumulation of refuse, so much so that many houses whose doorways were left below the street level had to be equipped with higher entrances” (Sjoberg, 1960:35). — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 192

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of street pigs as the city’s sanitation department is a light, vivid conversation piece.
• SHARE: For a waste-engineering or infrastructure-minded friend: municipal pig-husbandry (hogreeve office, St. Anthony’s privileged pigs of Madrid, Cincinnati’s mid-street deposit law) as a sanitation paradigm.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 191; Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 192