Thomas Fleischman’s Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall is a remarkable first book that places the history of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) in the context of the global rise of industrial agriculture. It shows how the GDR adopted forms of agricultural production in the late 1960s that did not differ in substance from those practiced in the capitalist West. Fleischman tells the history of the former GDR through the pig, Sus scrofa, in three iterations: the industrial pig, the wild boar, and the garden pig. The industrial pig was the most influential. It turned the socialist state into a capitalist player in global markets, caused an environmental crisis that morphed into a political one, and changed the landscape forever.