It's not hard to see the symbolism: Old Meats is 'an abattoir at the dead center of campus.' Earl Butz is 'the secret hog at the center of the university,' the very embodiment of Moo U., an anonymous cow-town school in the middle of the country voraciously consuming dollars and resources. This is the one section of Smiley's gentle satire that bites deep.

Earl Butz escapes the building, but dies of a heart attack after frantically racing across the campus. Jones disappears while on a trip to Kyrgyzstan to study wild boars and Old Meats is demolished to make way for a McDonald's. It doesn't spoil anything to mention that Earl Butz doesn't make it to the end of his natural life Dr. Jones, having noticed that since few hogs live long enough to die of natural causes, is determined to allow Earl Butz 'to eat at will for all of his natural life span' in an effort to find out 'something about hog.' Bob has been sworn to secrecy he can't even tell his father about Earl Butz, who is at the center of an experiment by Dr. The human Earl Butz was known for advising farmers to 'Get big or get out,' and that slogan is taped to the wall in the hog's quarters.Ī sophomore work-study student named Bob Carlson cares for the hog, whose existence is known to only a few and whose only purpose is to eat and grow as large as possible. The pig's name is Earl Butz - after the secretary of agriculture who served under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and is best remembered for the racist joke that ended his career. In Jane Smiley's 1995 novel,'Moo,' there is an 18-month old snowy-white, 700-pound Landrace boar - 'as big as a Volkswagen Beetle but much faster' - residing in an abandoned building, Old Meats, in the middle of the campus of a state university somewhere in the Midwest, a land-grant institution known colloquially as 'Moo U.' In English departments the most serious competition is for the role of straight man.

Moo by jane smiley summary