What began as an innocuous university course on pig farming has become Malaysia’s latest viral trend, with hundreds playfully tagging friends as babi – a word that, in Malay, is as much insult as it is animal.
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It all began when Universiti Putra Malaysia’s Sarawak campus, located in Malaysian Borneo, promoted a one-day course aimed at educating participants about pig rearing. The course advertisement, featuring a cute piglet, quickly ricocheted across Malaysian social media, drawing both laughter and pointed cultural commentary.
In Malay, babi is a loaded term, often used to disparage those deemed rude or arrogant. Its sting is sharpened by religious sensitivities: for Malaysia’s predominantly Malay-Muslim population, pigs are considered haram, or forbidden, under Islamic law.
Yet pork remains a staple for the country’s sizeable ethnic Chinese community and non-Muslim groups, making the animal somewhat divisive.
A social media post for the course, shared by the university last week, garnered more than 6,400 likes and over 400 comments, as users gleefully tagged their friends.
“Today I learned that I need to attend a course before I can start rearing you,” one user name Amairee quipped.
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The presence of a Malay agricultural expert among the three course trainers in the advertisement did not go unnoticed by commenters, some of whom responded with equal measures of humour and irony.