The Sampler's Motivation (Spoiler)

it is my view that his motivation in killing the baby pigs in the river is to keep the cycle going. the sampler appears to be a good character, who we initially see help victims by removing the worms and putting them into pigs (whose lives he is then able to observe via the pigs). this is not malicious, no.

he was the most interesting character to me. (i keep writing this in responses on this board, i feel like a broken record in saying it) and so my thinking about the film was focused a lot on him.

he had many pigs at the farm from which he was sampling, observing the lives of those he had transplanted worms from. kris was not the first. everything we see was routine for him. he knew how to lure her to him, he knew how to get the worm out and into the pig, and so on. he knew where to dump the piglets to decay into the ground where orchids grew so the orchid gatherers would come across them. he dumped them in the same spot as he always did (maybe it wasn't always piglets; maybe it was an adult pig, but in this case the piglets were born and they caused the two adults to act out.)

in any case, he knew where to dump them so that the orchid finders would come across the orchids. so that they would pot them up and sell them in their stores. so that the thief would buy them. so that the thief would implant the organism/worm into a new victim. so that he could lure that victim to him, put the worm into another pig, and have another person to observe. (this is the cycle of the organism).

i do not believe that he knew of the thief or what he was doing to these people per se, but he knew something was being done to them. they were coming to him in terrible condition and their lives were wrecked. he had files on all of them; he observed all of them. he could see the problems kris was now having observing her through her pig. he would see other people struggle with these things as well. yet he still did his part to keep the cycle going so new people would come with worms for him to remove, to put into his pig, so that he could observe them and sample them.

his murder at the end of the film seems a tradgedy; in fact, it kind of isn't. the cycle is broken with his death. he won't be there to dump the pigs in the river, to decay into the land, to grow back into the orchids, to give them the blue color signifying the presence of the organism. the thief will no longer have a supply of the organism to control victims minds ... unless he finds a new way to have a steady supply.

Glad to see someone else who sees the sampler's death as a tragedy, and not as some kind of warped justice...I just hope Carruth intended it to be that way.

the only thing we know is the sampler observes the pigs, they are intentionally separate from other pigs.
He is preserving the other pigs in my opinion by sacrificing the other pigs.
Its like selective breeding.
He kills the pigs to preserver the larger group who were unaffected.

I think others have made a strong argument that he understands that somehow killing the piglets perpetuates the cycle. There is evidence that he at least has perfunctory understanding of the organism's life cycle. I disagree, however, that it's an essentially benign act and that he's truly in it to benefit others.

I think it's implied that the sampler is, if anything, somewhat amoral or misguided to some degree. That's not to say he's malicious, but take a moment to appraise his motivations. He's obviously somewhat addicted to the voyeuristic lifestyle of experiencing the lives of others through the pigs. Yes he provides a service by transferring the parasite, but he does this to increase his collection of voyeuristic windows, not to benefit the infected individuals. And by viewing their lives, he surely understands that infection through the thief has incredibly negative implications for the lives the individuals that he samples. By perpetuating the cycle, he's exposing more people to traumatic social and financial ruin for his own purposes. I think you can make an argument that he's somehow studying the human condition or searching for some kind of universal truth in experience, and there are scenes that suggest he has genuine empathy for the sampled. On the other hand, he knows that he facilitates their misery and clearly lives to exist through others.

And just to jump back to the killing of the piglets, I also initially wondered if his motivation (before the full lifecycle of the parasite is revealed) was a mercy killing. Whenever two victims of the thief find each other and their pigs breed, there will always be a profound emptiness and longing in the lives of the human counterparts who feel they have offspring but actually can't have children due to whatever effect the work had on Kris's reproductive organs. Of course there's also no evidence that two victims of the thief have fallen in love before, but there's strong circumstantial evidence that many piglets have been sent upriver before.

Or, it could be that his normal method of regenerating the parasite's life-cycle is to wait for a pig/person to die (I assume one necessitates the other), and then drop the carcass in the river. It may very well be the case that this is the first time two of the sampled have fallen in love, their pigs reproduced, and he needed to dispose of piglets. This would explain his visible consternation and remorse over the situation. It's also notable that this potentially unique turn of events is what eventually triggered the collapse of the system and the Sampler's downfall.

I think that ultimately, the point of the film is to exam the inscrutable forces of life, including love, memory, biological destiny, and so on, and the parasite and Sampler are just a lens for viewing these things through an abstract situation. In that sense, he's neither good nor bad. He's like the parasite itself, simply fulfilling his function in a larger and impenetrable web of existence. That's wishy-washy as hell, but I'm not sure how to articulate it more thoroughly without seeing the film again.

Because there was no psychic connection between him and the baby pigs. Every pig in the pen had previously been infected by a host's parasite, so he could feel a psychic connection with those pigs.

The baby pigs were new - didn't have a host parasite and he couldn't read their psychic connection. And possibly what he could read (if anything) was too disturbing to him.

So, if he is at heart a gentle, helpful soul, why kill the pigs?