Pimping for Pigs

Pimping for Pigs

Most 25-year-old guys are dreaming about girls. Sang Narith spends most of his life pondering the sex life of pigs. Narith is a Ba Chrout - the Cambodian name for the man who accompanies a boar while he services a female pig.

For between $30 to $50 dollars a month, Narith is his boars' nurse, their companion, their sexual therapist and their confidant. He currently looks after five mature males and guides them on their amorous adventures around the Kien Svay district just outside Phnom Penh.

"We call them by their names, like Spotty, and Half-caste (he's half Thai and half Khmer), Blackie, Whitey and Three Color," he says. "All of them have different personalities but everyone in the area loves them because they are very good at their job."

It's the sort of job that is probably more fun for Spotty and company to perform than for Narith to lend a hand with all day.

"Pigs urinate a lot before they mate. And sometimes they soil the pen. If the female decides she doesn't like my boys, she may bite him and run away, so we have to control her and then stand behind and hold his legs to help him," he says, delicately leaving out the other help he must provide - making sure the male finds his mark, manually if necessary.

A successful mating takes up to 15 minutes, which can be heavy and tiring work if the female is unwilling or coy. Although it is unusual in Cambodia, an imported boar can weigh nearly half a ton, which is, Narith admits, a lot to support by his hind legs and guide through his motions at the same time.

But Ba Chrout look after their animals as carefully as a racehorse trainer nurtures a champion stallion. They are watched carefully to make sure they do not over-tax themselves with work, and they enjoy special diets to give them stamina. Unlike Narith, who is living a life many might look upon as their worst nightmare, the boars live a fantasy many human men would be happy to be reincarnated into.

Narith says the smell, the foot-deep dung, the fountains of piggy urine and the heavy labor soon become second nature, although "what do you do for a living?" is not a chat up line he looks forward to from females of his own species. To make things even tougher for him in the marriage stakes, he sleeps within meters of his charges, making sure the 4-5,000 dollar animals have everything they need, 24-hours a day.

"I am a professional of pig sex. I live with pigs, and I know what to do to make sure piglets come out of these meetings with my men pigs," Narith says proudly. Ba Chhrout, which translates as "Father Pig", is a job held in some esteem in Cambodia, perhaps because of how unpleasant the actual nuts and bolts of it can be and the level of skill required. There is, Narith says, a certain knack to navigating a pig's penis in the right direction.

But nowadays the job is easier than it used to be. In the old days, Ba Chhrout took their charges on foot on a metal chain around the villages shouting out what they had to offer and waiting for owners of females with a hankering to settle down and have a family to hail them from their doorways. Today, most boars enjoy a ride in a cage on the back of a moto with their handler to make their rendezvous - "to save their energy", Narith explains.

"If the female is not far away, one mating is $7.50, but if we have to go far, we charge $12.50," Narith explains. "Usually there is another mating two weeks later to make sure the female gets pregnant."

It is a thriving business as pork consumption in the country continues to rise and bird flu and other porcine health scares resulting in a limited flow of meat from neighboring countries such as Vietnam.

Narith does not own his boars - despite his affection for them he is just an employee. His boss has another eight boars at the farm maturing in readiness to take on a life of mating for money. But it is not a job which has an age limit. Even old men can continue careers as Ba Chrout.

"It's not a job everyone wants to do. There is a lot of dirt and some danger if the female gets angry and takes a dislike to the male, but I grew up with pigs so I don't mind it at all," he says. "I understand the man pigs very well. We are friends. Their job is just like a human husband really - they are always trying to make the girl happy and give her children, and I am there to help them to do that."