There are some events so momentous that you always remember where you were when you heard about them. They’re usually historic, frequently shocking, often profound. Well, adjust your records accordingly, because we need to add one to the list: where were you when you first learned about spoilt pig syndrome?
For many of us, it will have been this week, when Lena Dunham was a guest on Amy Poehler’s podcast, Good Hang. They were discussing how some people – “not just women, but a lot of women” – always overdeliver and as a result become exhausted and resentful. Dunham then started talking about her pet pigs, acknowledging that it sounded like a detour from the subject, but assuring listeners that it wasn’t.
She remembered how, early on, she had realised that this was a different kind of pet, one that necessitated a specialist to teach her how to take care of it. She turned to Susan Magidson, “the pre-eminent pig trainer and rescue artist of our time”.
On Magidson’s weekly Monday night video class, called For Pig’s Sake, Dunham discovered that house pigs can develop a condition called SPS, which, you will have worked out, stands for spoilt pig syndrome. “Say you give your pig treats, but you don’t ever ask them to do a trick for those treats. Suddenly, you ask them to do anything, they’re like: ‘No, that’s not the deal that we were in,’ and then they start to become aggressive, they start to destroy things, they get an attitude,” Dunham explained to Poehler.
When Dunham had relayed this information to her brother, he had pointed out that she had behaved this way with every man she had dated. He added that the worst thing about SPS was that, “at the end of the day, you have a spoilt pig and it’s nobody’s fault but your own”. Touché.
Could spoilt pig syndrome be the meaning of life? Is the secret to contentment and equilibrium, to not becoming bitter and downtrodden, that we should go out of our way only for those who have earned it? Is the selfless mode that “not just women, but a lot of women” automatically adopt a load of – apologies in advance – hogwash?
When you’re enamoured of somebody, it’s easy to indulge them, to lavish them with their heart’s desires in an effort to make their existence as close to perfect as possible. You want them to be happy; if you can facilitate that, why wouldn’t you? You believe they should have all the treats in the world. And so you run yourself ragged going above and beyond, over and over, in every direction.
The problem comes when the other party, or parties, begins to expect it, stops being grateful and takes you for granted. When you put everyone else first, but the favour isn’t returned, you forever come last. Nobody likes feeling mugged off, by people or pigs.
The idea of generosity bestowed solely on the deserving can seem cold and mercenary, even unloving. But without balance in a relationship, you run the risk of turning into a martyr, or a seething grump, or a thrilling combination of both. Maybe it’s all about the trick-to-treat ratio: working out how much you can do for someone before they stop appreciating and start assuming.
There’s a theory that some humans have to be trained, like animals, to behave in an acceptable way. Perhaps you need to channel your inner Magidson and set firm boundaries, communicate expectations clearly and reward kindness, thoughtfulness and not peeing on the rug. Yes, adults should know better, but, as you may have noticed, many of them don’t.
It may appear to be a contradiction in terms, adding yet another chore to the endless to-do list for the more put-upon “not just women, but a lot of women” to accomplish. But if we can frame it as assertive, as the change we want to see, this has the potential to be great all round. It could mean the difference between being surrounded by spoilt pigs or total babes.
Polly Hudson is a freelance writer
