Probably because it could. Especially here in Samoa.
In America, there's a lot of talk about free-range chickens and humane treatment of animals. In Samoa, there's no such thing as putting your pigs or chickens in a fence. Cows are usually fenced in, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Like many Samoan families, my family has many chickens an pigs roaming around. I have actually become so used to the sounds they make that when I am on the phone with someone back in America and they hear a chicken crow, I don't even notice. Chickens freely come in and out of my house. It sounds like it could be messy, but the reality is that they eat the bugs and we shoo them out before they can poop on anything.
Pigs don't really come into my house, which I'm okay with. I never really thought pigs were super loud animals, but then again, I'd never really lived around them. At my house, a couple of our pigs had some piglets. They are so cute and adorable, but they sure do make a lot of noise, especially in the middle of the night. The other time that pigs are nice and loud are when it's feeding time. We open up and scrape the inside of the coconuts to feed to the pigs and they just snort away with excitement when it is time to eat.
So if pigs and chickens can just roam free, you might wonder how each family knows which pigs and chickens are theirs. After all, they are still food and you don't want to be taking someone else's. Each family has a way to mark their animals. Usually by cutting an ear or the tail. The real trick is to catch them in order to mark them.
Cows, on the other hand, don't tend to roam free. The main reason? Probably because they would cause too many traffic jams. While my family doesn't have cows, my family I lived with during training did. They kept them in a fenced in area. The fence was not always the most secure though. I remember one Saturday night, after bingo, we had to go wrangle in our cows who had gotten loose. Keep in mind this was at about midnight. It took some time to get them in, but we managed.
Fences are not really something people have between them and neighbors here, so why put pigs and chickens in fences?
