There has also been some concern that "A Day No Pigs Would Die" would have a negative influence on adolescent male readers, conditioning boys to view "violence and killing as a part of their initiation into the adult world". "A Day No Pigs Would Die" has been seen as a particularly vicious example of the young adult novel stereotype that boys become men only after committing an act of violence against an animal or another part of the natural world. Rob, after helping his father slaughter Pinky, is told that he now knows what it is to be a man, enforcing the idea that boys must pass into the "cult of the kill" in order to mature.