OPINION | I used to live next to a pig farm
17 Jan 2026 • 2:00 PM MYT
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Fa Abdul
FA ABDUL is a former columnist of Malaysiakini & Free Malaysia Today (FMT)
Photo credit: The Sun
In the late 1980s, my family bought a property in Bukit Jambul, Penang. Back then, it was a good place to grow up - quiet, green, and far enough from the city to feel calm without feeling isolated. We didn’t think much about the empty land opposite our apartment. Empty land, after all, feels harmless. It carries possibility, not consequence.
Some time later, that land was turned into a pig farm.
The smell didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in slowly, the way you don’t notice a problem until it has already settled into your life. At first, you wrinkle your nose and move on. Then you start closing windows without thinking. Then you realise certain hours of the day are worse, and you adjust your routines around it - laundry earlier, meals later, conversations indoors. That’s when you know something has been taken from you.
On breezy days, it was unbearable. The wind carried the stench straight into our home, unapologetic and inescapable. Smell does not respect property lines or zoning laws. It doesn’t care about permits, approvals, or the reasons behind a decision. It arrives, and you live with it. Daily.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the smell, but the helplessness. You learn very quickly how little control you have over the air you breathe. Home is supposed to be the one place where you rest your body and lower your guard. But when the smell rolls in, even your living room feels like borrowed space.
What unsettles me most is this: nearly forty years have passed since then, and yet people living next to pig farms today are still complaining about the same things - the smell, the waste, the way it seeps into daily life. For all the talk of modernisation and technology, the lived experience sounds hauntingly familiar.
That experience is why I struggle when this issue is reduced to slogans and moral posturing. Living near a pig farm is not an abstract debate about tolerance, economic necessity, or political compromise. It is a deeply physical reality. It sits in your nose, your throat, your appetite, your sleep. And once you’ve lived with it, you never forget it.
So when residents raise concerns and are quickly dismissed as reactionary, narrow-minded, or overly sensitive, I find it deeply unfair. This is not about what animal is being farmed. A poorly managed chicken farm, cattle feedlot, landfill or waste facility would have produced the same misery. The problem is not culture. It is planning. It is enforcement. It is the convenient habit of placing unpleasant industries as close as possible to people with the least power to object.
What makes it worse is how often authorities act surprised. As if odour, waste and environmental impact are unforeseeable side effects rather than well-documented outcomes. We have decades of examples, locally and globally, of what happens when regulation is weak or selectively applied. To pretend otherwise is either incompetence or a refusal to listen.
That time in Bukit Jambul also taught me something uncomfortable: suffering becomes invisible once it is normalised. Once a community has endured something long enough, their complaints start sounding like background noise. And once complaints become noise, ignoring them becomes policy.
I learned, too, that this is never really about the animal. It is about whose comfort matters, and whose discomfort is considered acceptable collateral damage. It is about how easily people are told to “understand” and “be patient” - conditions that decision-makers themselves would never tolerate outside their own homes.
Perhaps that is why this issue still unsettles me decades later. Because it reminds me how fragile the idea of home can be, and how quickly quality of life is treated as negotiable. Development is always framed as progress, but progress that demands people quietly endure daily indignity is just neglect dressed up in better language.
I don’t pretend to have neat or easy solutions. I only know this: if those making these decisions had to live where the wind carries the smell, the conversation would sound very different. And maybe then, we would stop treating these experiences as abstract debates, and start acknowledging them for what they are - real lives disrupted, day after day.
Some time later, that land was turned into a pig farm.
The smell didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in slowly, the way you don’t notice a problem until it has already settled into your life. At first, you wrinkle your nose and move on. Then you start closing windows without thinking. Then you realise certain hours of the day are worse, and you adjust your routines around it - laundry earlier, meals later, conversations indoors. That’s when you know something has been taken from you.
On breezy days, it was unbearable. The wind carried the stench straight into our home, unapologetic and inescapable. Smell does not respect property lines or zoning laws. It doesn’t care about permits, approvals, or the reasons behind a decision. It arrives, and you live with it. Daily.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the smell, but the helplessness. You learn very quickly how little control you have over the air you breathe. Home is supposed to be the one place where you rest your body and lower your guard. But when the smell rolls in, even your living room feels like borrowed space.
What unsettles me most is this: nearly forty years have passed since then, and yet people living next to pig farms today are still complaining about the same things - the smell, the waste, the way it seeps into daily life. For all the talk of modernisation and technology, the lived experience sounds hauntingly familiar.
That experience is why I struggle when this issue is reduced to slogans and moral posturing. Living near a pig farm is not an abstract debate about tolerance, economic necessity, or political compromise. It is a deeply physical reality. It sits in your nose, your throat, your appetite, your sleep. And once you’ve lived with it, you never forget it.
So when residents raise concerns and are quickly dismissed as reactionary, narrow-minded, or overly sensitive, I find it deeply unfair. This is not about what animal is being farmed. A poorly managed chicken farm, cattle feedlot, landfill or waste facility would have produced the same misery. The problem is not culture. It is planning. It is enforcement. It is the convenient habit of placing unpleasant industries as close as possible to people with the least power to object.
What makes it worse is how often authorities act surprised. As if odour, waste and environmental impact are unforeseeable side effects rather than well-documented outcomes. We have decades of examples, locally and globally, of what happens when regulation is weak or selectively applied. To pretend otherwise is either incompetence or a refusal to listen.
That time in Bukit Jambul also taught me something uncomfortable: suffering becomes invisible once it is normalised. Once a community has endured something long enough, their complaints start sounding like background noise. And once complaints become noise, ignoring them becomes policy.
I learned, too, that this is never really about the animal. It is about whose comfort matters, and whose discomfort is considered acceptable collateral damage. It is about how easily people are told to “understand” and “be patient” - conditions that decision-makers themselves would never tolerate outside their own homes.
Perhaps that is why this issue still unsettles me decades later. Because it reminds me how fragile the idea of home can be, and how quickly quality of life is treated as negotiable. Development is always framed as progress, but progress that demands people quietly endure daily indignity is just neglect dressed up in better language.
I don’t pretend to have neat or easy solutions. I only know this: if those making these decisions had to live where the wind carries the smell, the conversation would sound very different. And maybe then, we would stop treating these experiences as abstract debates, and start acknowledging them for what they are - real lives disrupted, day after day.
***
I agree 101% with Fatimah - the odour from a nearby pig farm is horrendous, at times more than horrendous
Never allow pig farms to be near housing estates or even just houses (not related to the pig farms)
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