The winter after we arrived here, just over twelve years ago, we walked across the fields to the next hamlet where we knew another farmer who lived in a modest, shabby 1970s bungalow with the old farmhouse abandoned alongside; on previous occasions we’d had a guided tour of the ancient tractor stock and the impressive woodpile. It was a day or so after New Year; it’s good manners to make an effort to wish those around you ‘Bonne Année’, one of those small undertakings which belies the isolation of those who live most of their lives alone with their families; it’s a reinforcement of community which, in turn, means security and knowledge and variety. And so we intended to do the rounds of our neighbours and show that, even though we were odd English interlopers, we had at least some grasp of basic courtesies. We were met outside the garage by Sylvain, the teenage son. He was on edge; he did not greet us with the usual smile but looked up and down the deserted lane behind us, as though we might be trailing a gang of thugs in our wake. Something secret seemed to be happening. Something disreputable. He hesitated, and then anxiously ushered us into the workrooms under the house. ‘Quiet,’ he said, ‘come quickly,’ and he hurried us through a gap in the doors and closed them firmly behind us. Only when we were safely concealed in the basement did he stop and turn to shake our hands in greeting, and smile: Bonne Année.
The itinerant pig-killer had been, a man of brutal but inexpensive methods, who was just clearing away his tools. There were trestle tables covered with bits and pieces of flesh; there was a lot of blood, on the floors, on the tables, on hands and faces; there were buckets filled with a great deal more blood, and entrails; dogs were scavenging from one pile of meat to another. We watched for a while as the butchering progressed. Someone was grinding meat; someone else was doing something slippery with innards. I don’t remember much detail. In the windowless basement, the light was dim and soupy, but that’s not the reason my memory is hazy. It was a struggle to take all this in, the unexpected sight and sounds of dead animal in the winter cold, and the tense, exhausted excitement of the family. What I recall is a sense of the raw, hard, confused nature of what was going on, and shock at the knowledge that these neighbours had a pig at all – we had met them many times herding cattle from one pasture to another; their yard was filled with chickens, and often we came away with a bag of eggs; but I had no idea they kept a pig. This was an animal that had been locked in a small stone pen under an old barn by day and night, a pen without windows, without light, without air, stifling hot in summer, freezing in winter; it had been alone. It had been fattened without fuss and dispatched in secret. For the year or so of its pitiful life, it had been almost entirely invisible; more, it had been as though it did not really exist. I came away with a hearty but flabby roasting joint, and a feeling of having been witness to something shameful.
No one else we knew kept pigs. Even here, in the hidden pockets of La France Profonde, it was no longer a normal thing to do. Apparently, more hamlets and villages in France bear names referring to pigs and pig-keeping than to any other single activity – from the obvious La Porcherie (pig farm) to the more obscure Suin, derived from the root for swine – and yet this commonplace of country living is now not at all common. I couldn’t have picked up the desire to keep pigs by wandering around the neighbourhood watching hearty old sows snuffle idyllically in gardens. Chickens scuffle in the lanes everywhere, ducks too, geese and noisy guineafowl; goats come and go around the houses, there are a few sheep – but no pigs. Animals that not very long ago would have been ubiquitous here have now disappeared. Keeping pigs would be a choice, not a habit.
We juggled the idea of our own pigs for a long time, back and forth between us, nothing much more than a ‘what-if’. We came back to it time and again over months, even years, enjoying the whim. It didn’t seem like it would ever really happen. But the more we talked about the possibility of pigs, the more it nudged its way to the front of our thinking, edging inexorably from a what-if to a must-have. Ed did some research, thorough and cautious. He began to drip-feed the information we needed to know: there was this piece of land we could borrow from neighbours; two pieces, in fact, the small enclosed old orchard for when the pigs were small and a larger field with sloping woodland for when they were older; pigs were ideally suited to forage among the oaks and could mostly fend for themselves; we would have to buy two pigs, because a pig needs company and should not be kept on its own. We looked at what pig-keeping might mean on a practical daily basis. There was, as always, the problem of money: Ed’s journalism only paid essential bills; my novels only haphazardly brought in cash for extras; we were already scraping by, using up our savings to make ends meet. An investment in livestock would mean substantial costs – food, fencing and equipment, not to mention the price of the animals themselves – which would stretch us even further. But there were good things, too, about our situation: we both worked from home, so we could easily accommodate the routines of care and feeding, and we hoped not to have to go anywhere much for the next year or two, so we could guarantee being around to enjoy the pigs and, perhaps more importantly, the meat that followed.
And so, before we’d even really noticed, we had plans. I don’t recall a particular moment of decision, just a momentum of wishing so that somehow it was agreed: we would have pigs. Two pigs. Our pigs. Even now, when I think of this, I feel a jump of excitement at the prospect, but in a sensible, responsible way we spent several more weeks discussing all the possible implications and making sure we had it all straight.
One other thing we discussed only briefly, because it seemed self-evident: our pigs would not be pets. They would be raised for meat. This was the whole point of it. Besides, we did not have the capacity to keep, or the money to feed, fully grown, adult pigs for any length of time – so we would have to kill them after we’d had them for around a year. This would give us two good-sized carcasses: enough to pack the freezer and to offset some of the expense. It would be good meat; we would know exactly its provenance and would be able to guarantee its quality.
That was the deal. Pigs as an investment. Without the final promise of bacon and loin steaks, chops, sausages and pâtés, the experiment was simply not possible. ‘There is no savings bank for a labourer like a pig,’1 observed the agricultural writer Samuel Sidney in 1860: a piglet bought for a sovereign in early summer, fed on household waste and fattened up on grains or fallen acorns and nuts in time for Christmas would not only provide a sumptuous feast but also ‘hams [which] he can sell to buy another pig, and the rest will remain for his own consumption, without seeming to have cost anything.’ The pig-killing, then, was a moment of reckoning, when the long months of nurture were turned to profit and the natural balance of the world properly poised. We were entering into the pig-keeping business with hard noses and clear heads; like nineteenth-century labourers, we needed a return on the expenses of rearing and husbandry.
That was agreed, then: we would kill them. It seemed simple enough. A straightforward calculation of investment and return; pigs as an old-fashioned ‘savings bank’. We didn’t know then, of course, what was to come. How could we? The pigs hadn’t even arrived. There was no way of knowing what it might actually be like to raise a pig or how endearing they might be or how attached to them we might become. That was impossible to know. So we just went along with the basic tried-and-tested smallholding script: animals in, animals grown, animals slaughtered. That was how it would be, we thought. That was what we agreed, from the beginning.
Our pigs would be black. The Gascon Noir, or Noir de Bigorre, is an ancient, hardy breed of pig which can live outside all year round. It looks something like a wild boar, with thick, wiry black hair and a pointed face, but with long loped ears and a much bigger, heavier frame. These pigs have been part of family and farming life in the central Pyrenees and the surrounding regions since the Roman period: the nineteenth-century French veterinarian and zoologist, André Sanson, traced the Noir de Bigorre to a handful of original breeds that he considered ‘pure’
, emerging from prehistoric Africa where it was domesticated by Iberian explorers, subsequently becoming widespread in Spain and southern France.
But it’s a pig that takes a long time to mature, and so it’s particularly unsuited to intensive farming methods. Many modern pigs are battery farmed: they are bred to grow quickly and can reach a slaughter weight of 100kg in 24 weeks; often, they are killed sooner – at four or five months – because smaller carcasses are easier for abattoirs to handle. The meat is lean, pale, bland, cheap: popular with shoppers. In France, the recovery from the Second World War was linked to a push towards industrialization and more and more intensive farming practices. No one wanted a pig which took two years to ‘grow’, and which produced dark meat and dense layers of rich fat. The Noir de Bigorre was out of fashion, an anachronism, too expensive to rear and too distinctive for the modern marketplace. Numbers fell so far in the post-war decades that by the 1980s there were only two males and a handful of females remaining, hidden away in small farms scattered around the Upper Pyrenees. A rescue programme was launched to save the breed.
A few miles away from our house, we had bought meat from a farmer called Benoît who had turned over acres and acres of oak woodland to a herd of Gascon Noir pigs; several herds, really, numbering up to 120 animals at a time. We’d seen the pigs at a distance, running into the trees at the sound of our car, and we’d been up close in the enclosures where the sows farrowed and fed their piglets. These were plain, stocky, beautiful animals, nothing frivolous about them, not quite tame, no longer wild, still manipulated by humans, anciently natural, as much a part of the dry, limestone landscape as the prehistoric dolmens and medieval chapels that punctuate the edges of forest paths. These were easy pigs to keep, genuinely and habitually free range – and now famed for the quality of their meat. In an age increasingly valuing slow food – a ‘foodie’ age of farmers’ markets and organic produce and strong flavours – the very characteristics which had once threatened the existence of these animals were, ironically, their strongest assets.
We arranged with Benoît to sell us two weaners, piglets of around twelve weeks of age. I suppose it had crossed my mind that we might choose the ones we wanted, picking them from a litter like puppies. Let’s have that one, the cute one; let’s have the one with the floppy ears; no, that one. But then, then they would be pets, wouldn’t they? And anyway, the idea clearly never occurred to Benoît who, in a businesslike manner, simply took the order and asked whether we wanted him to put rings through their noses, to prevent them from digging the ground. No, we said, no rings, and that was that.
In the days before the weaners are delivered I become obsessed by pigs. I’ve never touched a pig; I’ve only got vague memories of indeterminate piles of pink flesh in the barn at a children’s farm; I’ve never been up close. I have no idea what to expect. What are they like? What do they ‘do’? Do they smell?
I read as much as I can. The first thing I discover is that pigs are bright, capable, seriously intelligent. I have a vague sense that I knew this already, but it was information I’d never paid any attention to, and now I do. I look at studies. I marvel. Pigs, it turns out, are at least as clever and sociable as dogs, with a similar inclination to human company. This is good; I like dogs. I read about an experiment carried out at Cambridge University in 2009 which took four pairs of pigs and put mirrors in their pens with them for five hours.2 They could explore the mirrors in any way they wanted: at first they were cautious, but soon they were happy to press their noses close and watch their reflections; one pig charged at its reflection and broke the mirror; others looked behind, to try to work out what was going on. Each pig was then placed in a pen with an angled mirror and a partition, behind which were treats. (Apparently, pigs are partial to M&Ms; this, too, is a new discovery.) Seven of the eight pigs immediately understood what was happening with the reflections, looked behind the partition and found the food. A control group of pigs that had never seen a mirror before were suitably baffled and mistook the reflection for reality, rooting around behind the mirror in a fruitless attempt to track down the snacks. According to those who ran the experiment, this proves pigs have a high degree of ‘assessment awareness’, which is the ability to use memories and observations to assess a situation and act on it.
It’s not yet clear whether pigs can actually recognize themselves in mirrors, a feat which would rank them alongside apes, dolphins and elephants in terms of intelligence, but they can certainly not be dismissed as dullard farmyard stock. Even though my research is hurried by the fact that there are pigs on the way, any day, I manage to unearth plenty of other cases which seem to prove the brilliance of pig cognition: apparently, pigs are among the quickest of any animals to learn new routines and are capable of jumping hoops, bowing, spinning, rolling out rugs, herding sheep and playing video games with joysticks, should you wish them to. They also have long memories.
Physically, too, there are interesting things about pigs. The pig genome and the human genome are closely related, large sections of both having been maintained in an unaltered state since the ancestors of hogs and humans diverged around 100 million years ago. Pig hearts are very like human hearts, metabolizing drugs in a similar way; pig teeth and human teeth are alike; pigs share a human propensity for laziness and so weight-gain and the diseases of sloth. Apparently, given the chance, they like to lie around, drinking, even smoking and watching TV. I wonder about the efficacy of the shelter we’ve built: no bar, no ashtray, no satellite feed.
Reading pig studies is fine. It gives me a sense of ‘the pig’ in a general way, allowing me to grasp facts and contexts. But it doesn’t really seem to have much to do with my pigs, the pigs. Unexpectedly, it’s shopping that makes it all immediate and authentic and certain; it’s the discovery of a strange and uncharted array of goods and equipment that seems to say, yes, you’ll soon be the owner of animals, livestock; you’ll no longer be the person you were but a different person, one who knows what it is to keep a pig.
We live on the edge of an area known as the Rouergue, an ancient Occitan province bounded to the north by the mountainous Auvergne and to the south by the fruitful Languedoc, a region that was wealthy and powerful during the Middle Ages when wealth and power were largely determined by land and its produce. We briefly discovered the region on holiday but returned in less of a rush a few years later and chose this as a place to stay for good because we were drawn by its warmth and ordinariness, its food and history, and by the expanses of forest and field worked in a small personal way from one-man farms clustered in sparse hamlets. We didn’t know a great deal more than the guidebooks told us but it was immediately evident that families and land here remained interdependent; you can’t help being aware of the annual calendar of rural tasks: hedge-cutting, pollarding, ploughing, sowing, haymaking, harvest. But what has also become clear, as we’ve stayed longer, is how this is a place poised, teetering between one time and another, an old bundle of habits and a new one, a known, steady life and a fragile future. The depopulation of the post-war years has been halted, at least temporarily, by the influx of migrants like us – the British and the Dutch, principally – and the tenacious hold of a few young families, but even in the decade or so that we’ve lived here, our village has begun to loosen its grip on the land, farming giving way to short-term jobs of one kind or another with uncertain contracts: portering at the hospital, driving lorries, handing out publicity for the local radio station, care work. Gifted teenagers move away to university and rarely return; those who fail to pass the precious Baccalauréat struggle to find work of any kind and drift away anyway, barely hopeful. Very few local people here aspire to work from home in the way we do – what they really want is secure government posts with good pensions – and agricultural labour is seen for what it is: brutal and unrewarding. Small farms have been parcelled up and divided over and over again, from generation to generation, until they’re tiny, the fields dotted around the neighbourhood, the scraps of forest unpro
fitable, the land barely providing a living for a single man, let alone a family.
This is a poor community, its fabric wearing thin, a place of widows. The obituary notices in the local press commonly announce the deaths of old women well over the age of ninety but men routinely die much earlier, and in the decades of widowhood, the picturesque rambling farms of leaking barns and tumbling walls are held together by the toil of women like Solange. Occasionally, they meet for an afternoon of gossip in someone’s front room or, in hot weather, deep in the shade of the farmyard, but on most days they are alone, working their way through tough tedious chores, tending their gardens and bemoaning rising costs. It’s not a life many young women, or men, aspire to these days. It can’t go on. Solange has already rented out most of her land to another local farmer who’s attempting to piece together enough fields to put together a sustainable business with several herds of cattle, but he’s approaching late middle age himself, and when I look across the flowery meadows to Solange’s farmhouse I wonder how this landscape will change, what will become of the old buildings and the old ways, how soon what I see now will become just another sediment of history here, buried and forgotten, hardly visible.
But for now, despite this growing sense of the precarious, our nearest town remains thoroughly and anciently agricultural. There is still a vibrant weekly produce market and a monthly cattle fair; it’s easy enough to browse for what the pigs might need in one of the series of out-of-town suppliers that line the main road. But it’s baffling. There’s a whole new language to be learned which helps define the different stages of animal growth, the technicalities of feeding and watering, dietary nuances and medical needs. What’s more, this stuff is really expensive. We have to spend a serious amount of time picking through the detail to find out what is absolutely necessary and what might be considered optional, or even a frippery. It comes as a surprise to learn that local farmers can be tempted into buying all kinds of apparently unnecessary equipment, from decorated feeding trays to state-of-the-art vehicles, until I remember that the toy shop further along the road, wedged between the supermarket and the timber yard, has aisles and aisles dedicated to toy tractors of all models and colours, harvesters, trailers and livestock pens: children here are taught from an early age that objects of desire are to be found around the farm.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 2