By the first century AD, Plutarch was experimenting with a philosophical pig who enters into long conversations with Odysseus: he tells the lively story of a sailor, Gryllus, who is transformed into a pig by the sorceress Circe. Gryllus finds that he prefers life as a pig and makes a strong case for being raised above humans because of his new capacity for virtue, bravery and pleasure: he finds he delights now in simple things, rather than the poisonous pursuit of wealth and fame. Pigs, suggests Plutarch, know what’s what; they are honest, worthy, dependable.
And so it goes on. For all the stories of filthy pigs and coarse, swinish behaviour, there are others of the pig as bright and capable. In a medieval manuscript from fifteenth-century France, a row of fearless pigs is shown leading soldiers into battle against a herd of odd, squat monsters which, from their tusks and trunks, appear to be elephants. The fortified town of Carcassonne, under Saracen rule, is said by legend to have been saved from a devastating five-year siege by Charlemagne’s forces when a fattened pig was thrown from the highest tower, bursting on the troops gathered below in such a shower of grain that they were fooled into thinking the residents were still well stocked with provisions, and so went away, leaving the starving town to recover and sing the praises of its noble pig-martyr. In the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin remarked, ‘I have observed great sagacity in swine,’4 while artist George Morland painted flattering portraits of prize pigs, raising them to celebrity status and asserting their beauty. Accounts by farmers and naturalists dwelt on marvellous stories of pigs which could open gates, shake apples from the best trees in the orchard, act as hunting ‘dogs’ by pointing out game, and even ‘tell the hour of the day by the bare inspection of the watch’.
By the twentieth century, pigs had become increasingly viewed as quick-witted and warm-natured: in the 1910s and 1920s there was a sudden fashion for postcards and greetings cards using pictures of bouncy, smiling pigs to convey good luck and kind wishes. A few years later, the huge bulk of a Berkshire sow, the ‘Empress of Blandings’, attracted the obsessive affection of P. G. Wodehouse and her owner, Lord Emsworth; while it was the intelligent pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm which led the rebellious farmyard. After the Second World War, Winston Churchill – whose face and rotund form, you have to admit, had certain porcine qualities – apparently praised the pig for its honesty and openness, its tendency to ‘look you in the eye’ as an equal.
Amidst this historical mishmash of pig stories, I become interested in one in particular; or rather, one that becomes several, and in multiplying becomes legendary. It’s an eighteenth-century story of spectacle and gullibility, of get-rich-quick schemes and fashionable foolishness, but also, ultimately, of sadness, even tragedy. I become interested in it, first, because it’s about a black pig, exactly like my pigs, and briefly I imagine myself back in the days of wigs and licentiousness and philosophy, in a vaguely rural, slightly lawless world, a cross between Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Samuel Johnson’s Scotland. But after that initial moment of imaginary displacement, the story still fascinates me. I read more; I find pictures and handbills, cartoons of black pigs in the British Library. The eighteenth century squeezes into the nineteenth, and still there is a black pig making a mark. I realize that this story is not so much about a single pig but about humans and pigs, how we get on together, what we see in each other. And so it’s about me and my pigs. It might give me clues about what to expect from these weaners and, more import-antly, from myself. It might help me understand how I feel about my pigs.
The story begins, the first time, with a man called Samuel Bisset.
Bisset is born into a modest household in Perth, Scotland, in 1721. He’s the youngest of three brothers. Reports I find in early Scottish newspapers suggest that he began his working life as a journeyman shoemaker, but he’s clearly ambitious and restless and when the chance comes to marry a wealthy young woman, he grabs at it and her, and moves to London to set up in business as a broker. I find nothing about Mrs Bisset. I don’t know where she comes from, or how she’s acquired her wealth. And it’s not clear at all what happens to her after the wedding. Having provided a hefty dowry, she disappears from record, which is perhaps convenient for Samuel, or perhaps a great sadness. All I know for certain is that by early middle age, Samuel is alone again and his eye is caught by a report of a ‘thinking horse’ which has been performing to marvellous acclaim at a country fair. With tricks and flourishes, this astonishing animal astounds spectators with its cleverness and guile. Following in the footsteps of other performing horses from as early as the 1580s, it can play dead or urinate on command; it can distinguish between colours or between virgins and harlots; it can bow to distinguished guests and count the money they throw into the ring. Overcome with enthusiasm, Bisset runs to the markets of eighteenth-century London and buys a horse of his own, plus a dog and two monkeys, and he begins a new life as an animal trainer.
Bisset has a knack with animals. His methods are a secret but his enthusiasm and dedication are clear for all to see, and within months one of his monkeys is dancing merrily on a tightrope while the other has learned to play the barrel organ. The monkeys do well. They perform diligently and attract some attention. But there are performing monkeys all over London, all over the land in fact, all doing much the same routine. This is dull, hackneyed: Bisset knows he has to do better. What is it the voguish populace craves? What brings out the crowds? What is new and exciting? This is the 1750s. These are the years of famous castrato celebrity singers, of extravagant musical spectacles and rousing scores. Handel’s operas are being performed across Europe, Rameau’s opera-ballets are in fashion in France. And so the ambitious Samuel Bisset goes in search of opera stars and returns home with three kittens, heritage unknown.
In the fifteenth century,5 the French Abbot of Baigne, ‘a man of great wit’, entertained Louis XI by setting up a velvet pavilion and filling it with pigs, ‘a great number of hogs of several ages’, from piglets to ageing sows. The animals performed together to produce ‘a concert of swine voices’ which the Abbott conducted with the help of an ingenious instrument ‘which pricked the hogs’ as he pressed the keys. He apparently made them ‘cry in such order and consonance, as highly delighted the king and all his company’, winning himself some fame and much favour in royal circles. But Bisset doesn’t think of pigs; not yet. And it is his kittens which form a choir instead, learning to play the dulcimer, banging small drums and accompanying the music with ‘squalling […] in different keys or notes’.6 Bisset is quietly hopeful about the kittens’ future, and his own. He hires a room near the Haymarket, at the centre of stylish London society, and he announces the first public performance of his Cats’ Opera.
Scottish newspapers proudly announce the success of their countryman, ‘The Sensation of London’. The Cats’ Opera adds several more nights to the run and still tickets sell out. The gentry, the dilettanti and the curious flock to see what Bisset has achieved, and by the end of the week he has £1,000 in his pocket, a fortune. He’s the talk of the town, the man of the moment. Buoyed by his triumph, and anxious to expand his repertoire, Bisset turns his attention to other animals: he teaches a hare to beat military drum marches with its hind legs; he exhibits linnets and sparrows and canaries that can spell people’s names; he trains six turkey cocks to step out the perfect country dance and he finds a turtle that can fetch and carry like a dog. But London audiences are fickle and demanding, and these new acts don’t tempt them. Bisset finds he cannot repeat the glory days of the Cats’ Opera. His name fades; eyes turn to other attractions – a mermaid on display on the Strand, giants and midgets, a cockfight, the fountain of mirrors in the pleasure gardens. Exasperated, disappointed, he turns his back on the capital and crosses to Ireland to join his brothers, who have emigrated to set up home in Belfast. He’s determined to give up the anxieties of performance and concern himself no longer with the caprices of the fashionable crowd. He buys a quiet public house where he can settle as landlord and
for almost thirty years he leads a different life – but he can’t quite throw off his old ways, and when trade is slow he tries a series of experiments on a goldfish ‘which’, notes The Lady’s Magazine, ‘he did not despair of making perfectly tractable’.
And so we come to the pig. Bisset is set a challenge: a pig, someone tells him one evening in idle bar-room conversation, is too stubborn to be trained. You can do nothing with a pig. But Bisset is a man who still believes in his natural talent as an animal handler; he has faith in himself; he can do what no one else has ever done, he is sure. Even in his advancing middle age, even after so many years of retirement and resignation, he’s determined to prove that he can tame any animal to his will: at the next opportunity he takes a trip to Dublin market and he invests three shillings in a young black male pig.
For six months, Bisset battles with his pig. He repeats exactly the methods which have led to such success with dogs and monkeys, turtles and hares. He devotes hours to training and practice; he is at turns firm and at turns kind. At the end of half a year, Bisset’s black pig is sturdy and lean and energetic, but untamed. It will, when it wants to, respond to a command to lie down under Bisset’s stool, and remain there while he works at the bar, but it will perform no further; it does not seem to want to do tricks. Bisset admits to being despairing. He’s tried everything he knows and still the pig resists. But he cannot quite bring himself to give the animal away or have it butchered for bacon, and he begins to work on new methods. They are just as secret as the first, but perhaps more unconventional. A neighbour who watches his efforts reports later to the poet Robert Southey that he never once sees Bisset beat his pupil ‘but that, if he did not perform his lessons well,7 he used to threaten to take off his red waistcoat – for the pig was proud of his dress’.
After a further sixteen months of sartorial bargaining with his pig, Bisset has proved the doubters wrong and emerges as the proud owner of ‘the most tractable and docile’ of creatures,8 ‘as pliant and good natured as a spaniel’. There is no evidence that this is the same pig as the stubborn one which refused to learn its tricks. There is nothing to prove that Bisset has not been dining on ham while training up a new pig, more amenable and compliant. But the pig looks the same, it’s black and the right age, and the papers claim that it’s absolutely the same. I’m happy to believe that Bisset has triumphed. Why spoil a good story? All my research suggests that his guile and effort have overcome the pig’s reluctance and created a performer. And the local crowds believe it, too. Word spreads: suddenly customers flock to the dingy rooms of this ordinary Belfast boozer; people tell tales of a marvellous magical hog; fairs and celebrations press for an appearance by Bisset’s black pig.
Naturally, Bisset is jubilant. In a flurry of excitement he sells his inn and takes to the road again, this time with his pig for company. He is over sixty years old: this is an act of faith in himself and his animal, and a final chance to recapture something of those glorious few days at the Haymarket three decades earlier. He believes he has the best act of his life; he anticipates great things for his pig. And so he heads to Dublin, putting on a show for two nights at Ranelagh, just outside the city, and then, with the permission of the chief magistrate, moving to a more central venue in Dame Street, a busy thoroughfare packed with theatres, playhouses and assembly rooms. The black pig performs. Without any apparent prompting, it spells the names of those watching; it adds up sums and tells the time, correct to the second. It kneels to those of status in the room, and accurately distinguishes the married from the unmarried. Most astoundingly, the pig displays the capacity to read minds: when a member of the audience is asked to think of a word, Bisset’s pig miraculously divines the word and spells it.
This is August 1783. It’s a summer that oscillates between heatwaves and extreme cold. The American Revolution has recently ended. Europe is suffering famine and deadly acid rain caused by the eruption of the massive volcano Laki, in Iceland. An unexplained and alarming ‘great meteor’ is seen flashing through the clear skies over Britain. A few doors further along Dame Street in Dublin, the celebrated Sarah Siddons performs the lead role in The Grecian Daughter, a tragedy. And yet here is a stout black pig who could be said to be hogging the limelight; here is a black pig, just like mine, about to take the world by storm.
So then, patience. Determination. Observation. I don’t want to train a pig, and I certainly don’t want to put my weaners on the stage, but I’m interested in what Bisset’s story seems to suggest: that his pig has a character, a personality, and that he manages to establish what we would define, in human terms, as a ‘relationship’. He works to understand his pig, and in return, his pig does what it can to please him. They have what you might call a friendship.
‘Each pig you come across has an individual character of its own;9 even members of the same family or litter have their own individual characteristics,’ noticed Robert Morrison, a farm manager, in 1926. ‘They will get to recognize the tone of your voice and know their name.’ Although he was writing about practical matters of breeding and husbandry, Morrison was so impressed by the relationships people struck up with their pigs, by the ‘feeling of faith, trust, and good fellowship between man and beast’, that he felt compelled to mention this, too; he noticed how the pigs came to rely so much upon this fellowship that a pig left alone would ‘pine for sympathy and company’.
Pigs, then, by all accounts, are ‘individual characters’, each one unique and different. Pigs need company and sympathy to flourish. Bisset’s story shows that it’s possible to strike up such a close understanding with your pig that it will respond to your every move, to the slightest hint and signal. At the moment, as I stand in the enclosure with Big Pig and Little Pig, this kind of rapport seems unlikely. They like me being there – they certainly relish the companionship – but they’re boisterous and blunt, responding to shoves and bulging buckets rather than anything more subtle. And for my part, I can hardly tell my weaners apart. What I see are two black pigs, a jostle of hair and snout, that’s all.
But it is fun to think of getting to know them. There’s delight in anticipating some kind of ‘fellowship between [wo]man and beast’ of the kind that impressed Robert Morrison. I’m pleased when they rush to the fence to welcome me, closing in on me so that I can’t find room to step over the wire; I’m amused by them. Isn’t that, after all, why Ed and I liked the idea of keeping pigs in the first place, rather than sheep, say, or rabbits – because they would respond to us on a personal level, with intelligence and character?
Whenever I can, I go down to the orchard and I watch Big Pig and Little Pig. I like them already, a lot. They’re bright and entertaining. They’re very young still, so there’s something of the sameness of the litter about them, but I can already see how Bisset might have become so attached to his particular pig that he dedicated years of his life to understanding, coaxing and training it, and years more to an exuberant adventure alongside it. But of course there’s a doubt in all this, a question. Since pigs are clearly so likeable and characterful, so companionable, so bonded to their human friends – what does this mean for me, when in just under a year I fully intend to kill the two I have here? Do I realize what I’ve taken on? Is there a moment, even now, watching these little weaners scrummage through the ivy on the wall, their tails swishing, when I think about what it might be like to kill them, and whether I’ll be able to do it? What if we just let them go on being pigs instead – would it really matter if we didn’t finally bring them to slaughter? I feel myself catch my breath, look away. I don’t think I’m ready to test my resolve.
Big Pig and Little Pig are settling in. They test the electric fence, which shocks them just enough to elicit a squeal. I only see each of them receive a single shock; they learn quickly and seem to decide that what lies beyond the fence will have to stay out of reach for now.
They are comfortable in their shelter and, with extreme care, they’ve moved the straw around to their own liking. Whenever
I take a new bagful to refresh the bed they spend a great deal of time nosing it into place, working it into the corners of the shelter and creating mini windbreaks against the draughts. I realize that they’re better at such housekeeping than I am, and after a few days, instead of interfering, I get into the habit of leaving the straw in a pile just outside the shelter. When I return later, every scrap is gathered up and tucked away. The shape of two small pigs is still worn into the bed, but the new straw has been piled up around the dents: day by day they create a deeper, softer nest for themselves, shaped to their form as perfectly as any memory-foam mattress. They are scrupulously clean, and keep their bedding clean, too: they make sure to excrete as far away as they can, designating an agreed toilet area in one corner of the enclosure, close to the wall.
They find a favourite scratching post. At first this is one of the slender tree trunks to one side of the shelter, but for some reason this becomes unpopular, and after a few days they prefer rubbing up against one of the table legs. They rub a lot. They are already strong, solid. Their haunches and shoulders, which is where they mostly rub, are impressively firm to the touch and the musculature well defined. The table begins to wobble. It’s already an old table, discarded from its use in the garden; there’s a creaking in the plastic joints. I remember the way Benoît had smiled at our shelter contraption; it had never occurred to me that such small pigs could be so powerful.
As well as neighbours and well-wishers, Big Pig and Little Pig meet our dog, Mo. Mo has been part of the preparations; he’s been there while we’ve been clearing the land and building the shelter; he’s used to running in and out of the enclosure and hopping over the fences. But this time he comes with us and finds two pigs. They’re not as large as he is but they’re stronger, probably, and in partnership. He sees them from the open door, pauses, stunned at this new discovery, and then bolts away into the lane. The pigs, too, scatter. They rush to the far end of the pen and hold out there together, side by side, glaring. We can hear Mo shuffling in the long grass on the other side of the track; Big Pig and Little Pig mumble. A stand-off.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 4