Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France

by Jacqueline Yallop

  For a few intense, blustery days, there’s a howling low-level wind, le Vent d’Autan, a southerly wind, fickle and ferocious. Up high the skies are still, the clouds hardly moving, but down below trees are buffeted, sometimes cracking, the hay fields swell like stormy seas, tiles and plant pots smash; Mo, the hens and the pigs all head for shelter. Sweeping up from the Mediterranean, trapped between the high land of the Pyrenees and the Massif Central, le Vent d’Autan is gusty and warm and said to send you mad. Milk turns sour: when this wind’s blowing, my neighbours say, never carry any fertilized hen’s eggs or they, too, will turn bad; don’t open a wine barrel or bottle or the wine will surely go rancid. Above all, surtout, don’t kill your pig.

  Le Vent d’Autan dries the soil quickly and we finish digging the garden and putting in the young plants. Peas and broad beans, sowed from seed, are already sending up tall tendrils, and waiting to be staked. Now we add tomatoes and courgettes, squash, cucumbers, aubergines, chillies and peppers, chard. There’s a special Sunday market at a village not far away, a once-a-year extravaganza of herbs and flowers and plants. We join the other shoppers with their boxes and baskets, making our way to the hidden square, set back from the river and the road, where the stalls are set up higgledy-piggledy, the castle ruins stately above and swifts screeching between the eaves. For this one day, the austere, rather shabby village becomes a place of scent and colour, bustle and anticipation: geraniums and petunias and bougainvillea spilling pinks and reds on to the street; mint and sage and lavender brushing against bags and legs and dogs; rows and rows of tomato plants promising summer salads. It’s a place where you hear a lot of English spoken – British expats are not easily separated from their flowery borders – but every French family in the neighbourhood has a vegetable garden, a potager, even if it’s small, and it’s these families who buy with the most determination and energy and knowledge, discussing cabbage varieties at length, comparing prices, selecting plain, robust plants that will ensure good harvests.

  In the exuberant, flowery excitement of it all, Ed and I throw ourselves into this market that is so much about good things yet to come – plants that will grow tall, vegetables that will flourish, a rich harvest. We don’t quite know what will happen at the end of the summer but we do know we might have to face up to the terrible prospect of leaving Big Pig and Little Pig too soon. Or, worse still, killing them early. If we can’t find a way to make ends meet, we’ll be forced to go back to the UK, where we can more easily find work. And, of course, we can’t take the pigs with us – nor even the meat. This would seem such a sad conclusion to such a joyful experience that we hardly talk about it, but it’s in the back of our minds, nonetheless, a bothersome thought with a nasty sting, like a biting fly on a soft pig underbelly.

  We’re still making calls to hotels, as many calls as we can. In fact, we’re beginning to get to know some of the staff quite well. But the income isn’t enough to live on – or to pay for pig grain. In Micawber fashion, we keep thinking something might turn up, a happy solution to all our troubles, but we’re also well aware that poor Mr Micawber ended up stuck in debtors’ prison. Something will have to be done. Sooner or later, we’ll have to make a decision: to stay or to leave; to keep faith with the pigs or to give up on them.

  This market, though, is a joyful, hopeful occasion. We don’t think too much about the future; for this morning, we don’t worry about our time with Little Pig and Big Pig being cut short. In the spirit of optimism we buy more than we can comfortably carry. We sit in the sun outside the cafe, surrounded by our food larder in miniature – One more chilli plant, do you think? Just one more of those lovely orange tomatoes? – and our minds drift to the glutted days of summer, of ripening fruit and fattening pigs.

  The market is well timed. Le Vent d’Autan stops as suddenly as it began and in an explosive, choreographed burst of life everything becomes full and vigorous and noisy: the lawn is shin-high, the terraces are pocked with weeds, the hedges fill out. In the pond, the irises flash yellow and frogs blob on the surface of the water, croaking lazily. Crickets sing; the hoopoes arrive with their cartoon strut and infuriating hoo-hoo-hoo repetitions. The hens set to laying with gusto. Nature is flourishing.

  But Little Pig is sick. At this time of year, when it’s fully light by six, the pigs have already been rummaging for hours when we come to do the morning checks: water, food, fence, shelter. Usually they’re deep in the woods when we arrive; we go to the top of the slope and call them and are treated to the sight of two hulky puffing animals slipping and sliding their way up the bank. Little Pig is last, always. He’s fatter, his legs are shorter, he doesn’t like the climb. But today when Ed goes to the enclosure as usual, Little Pig is still tucked down in the straw and Big Pig is loitering a yard or two from the shelter, uneasy. I’m in the garden, picking rhubarb; I’ve been watching buzzards wheeling on the warm currents above the field opposite, five or six of them, rolling and diving, mewling; out of the corner of my eye I see Mo, galloping along the lane, a flash of white, and just as I go to call him I see Ed following some way behind, his head down. I’m surprised to see them so soon and I go to meet them at the fence: ‘It might be fine,’ Ed says, breathless, ‘by the time we get back there, he’ll probably be on his feet. I just want you to come and look and give a second opinion.’

  But there’s no mistake. Little Pig is lazy; he likes his comforts, but this morning he won’t get up for anything, not for food or attention, not even when Big Pig has a trough of grain to himself. There’s nothing obviously wrong with him: he’s not injured, as far as we can see; there’s no wound or bleeding or diarrhoea or vomiting; he’s not coughing. But there’s a dullness about him – a lethargy – that rings alarm bells, and he seems to be breathing hard. Our considered med-ical assessment is that he’s ‘not right’.

  We wait. We perch on the wall between the field and Jean-Claude’s garden and we watch. There’s no real need to worry, surely, and Big Pig, at least, seems happier now we’ve taken over the vigil. He potters off into the shade of the woods before the day gets hot. But Little Pig doesn’t move. Now and again, too frequently, we go back to the shelter: I kneel in the straw and run my hand over his floppy stomach, up his flank, through the long hair on his shoulders and neck; I rub his nose. ‘Come on, then. Shall we get up? Come on, h’up.’ He grunts quietly in reply, sometimes, but is too still; he hardly lifts his head. The evening before, both pigs had been fine. We’d taken them a tub of leftovers from the kitchen – carrot peelings, a lettuce stalk – and they’d grubbed through it with glee, but now … What on earth could have brought on such a change so quickly? Is it a touch of stomach ache from something he’s eaten? Something congenital and fatal? Le Vent d’Autan?

  We think of pig breeds as recognizable and distinct. One breed has to look like this; another breed is like that. Tamworths: long of body and snout, ginger. The American Landrace: the palest of pinks, sleek, nondescript, a ‘factory’ pig. The Middle White: rotund, snub-nosed, pert-eared. But it wasn’t until quite recently that these characteristic features became set in place: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cottagers and farmers bred their sows with whatever type of boar a neighbour or friend happened to have, and the name – Berkshire, for example – tended to refer more to the locality in which the animals were kept than to any agreed characteristics. Paintings and lithographs show a range of colours, shapes and sizes: ‘no two pigs are the same,’6 marvelled a traveller to Kent in 1793; a few years later a Derbyshire farmer noted that the local animals were ‘a complete mixture of colour and types in this county as elsewhere’. Even when we went to see the litters of weaners at the farm where Big Pig and Little Pig were bred, there was the occasional odd one out among the herds of black pigs: one or two with pale spots; one with a white belt; one almost entirely, classically pig-pink.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century what mattered most was size. By 1843, pigs at the Royal Show were being divided simply into two types: small a
nd large. And it was the large ones that got all the attention. In a print of 1809 you can see a proud gentleman farmer, in top hat and a tailcoat, dwarfed by a black-and-white monster of a pig, apparently weighing in at 12cwt (609kg); the contest at the Royal Show in Chester in 1858 was won by a boar of 1,148lb (521kg). Huge old pigs, however, were good for nothing other than freakish display. You could not breed with them, nor was the meat decent, and by the end of the century the influence of the gigantic show pig was waning: ‘it is painful to see prostrate masses of fat grunting and sweating under a weary life in the heat,’7 complained a judge at the Derby fair of 1881, ‘the time has come to put a check on the unlimited exhibition of animals that plainly cannot be in a fit state for breeding.’

  Big Pig and Little Pig will be about a year old when we kill them. According to our graph, they’re already around half their finished weight and should reach close to 180kg by the end of the year, which is about as big as any modern meat pig tends to get. Abattoirs don’t like dealing with huge carcasses, and after a certain point it’s fat, rather than flesh, that’s being ‘grown’. In the twentieth century, it was this distinction between lard and meat which became the battleground for pig breeders, and which finally led to genetic narrowing as older breeds died out in the face of competition from new hybrids. In an influential series of essays in 1821, published under the title Cottage Economy, the farmer and campaigner William Cobbett suggested that ‘lean bacon is the most wasteful thing a family can use.8 In short it is uneatable, except by drunkards, who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite.’ He urged his readers to let their pigs run to lard: ‘make him quite fat by all means. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted.’ But tastes changed. People began to prefer lean meat, and British breeders raced to catch up with European farmers who had not succumbed to the English obsession with lard: by 1924, Britain was importing 8 million cwt of bacon each year, half of which came from Denmark. The new emphasis was on breeding sleek pigs that matured quickly and had a good proportion of muscle to fat. This ideal drives the market so thoroughly these days that commercial pig farms rely on only one or two breeds, and work continually to raise the percentage of meat in their pigs. The US pig industry, for example, produces well over 20 billion pounds of pork a year. Carcasses are graded and priced from US1 (the best) to US4 (the poorest), depending on the expected amount of four lean cuts – ham, loin, shoulder and arm – each one produces. The system was introduced in the 1930s, but since then breeders have reduced the breeding herd by half to refine the gene pool and increase the amount of lean meat, aiming for a pale, uniform, easily packaged product. They’ve been so successful, so rapidly that the scale has had to be completely recalibrated twice: in 1968, and again in 1985.

  My pigs will put on a good solid layer of fat. The meat will be properly red, dark, almost as dark as a young beef. French butchery cuts vary from traditional British ones – some of the tastiest, such as levure and araignée, don’t make their way into British shops at all – but it’s easy enough to see that Big Pig and Little Pig will give us a range of tasty options, whichever national practice we follow: already it’s clear that Little Pig has a floppy, fatty belly; Big Pig has muscly, dense shoulders. Old breeds, now rare breeds, are like this – each animal is likely to have a particular strength. It’s one of the reasons we value them. But there are others, too: often old breeds are healthier, because they’ve not been subjected to such intensive breeding and selection programmes. Outdoor, free-range pigs are also healthier, on the whole: in packed barns animals easily transmit coughs and diarrhoea, they bite and scratch each other in fights, or chew off each other’s tails, because they’re bored. But Little Pig is proving the rule by exception. I’d like to think a few hours in the sunshine and a bit of coaxing will get him well again; I’d like to believe that this stout, hardy pig will be strong enough to recover naturally from whatever it is that’s ailing him. But as the day goes on, such an outcome seems less and less likely. We’re going to have to do something. We’re going to have to intervene.

  For pigs raised in intensive conditions,9 antibiotics are routinely mixed with food and drinking water so that whole herds can be treated. This blanket approach notoriously increases the risk of resistant infections: experts estimate that twice as many drugs are prescribed to healthy animals than to sick humans. It was only in 2006 that the EU outlawed the use of antibiotics simply as a means of enhancing growth; in the USA, South America and Asia, pigs are still treated with antimicrobial drugs to help them fatten more quickly, and worldwide over 63,000 tonnes of antibiotics are annually fed to cows, chickens and pigs. Treating one pig, one sick pig, is unlikely to add anything to these kinds of figures, but still we’re wary. What if we’re overreacting? What if unnecessary treatment taints the meat? What on earth might pig medicine cost?

  Transporting Little Pig to a vet is beyond our logistical capabil-ities. Our small, old domestic car is already thoroughly trashed from carrying sacks of grain which, without fail, spill over the back seats and into footwells, from ferrying dirty tools and buckets and from driving in pig-poo wellies. Nonetheless, trying to find a way to squeeze an adult pig into the boot is a step too far. So we look up a few useful words of French and head off to the surgery in town with nothing more than a faltering description of what might be wrong: what’s the French for ‘he’s just not right’?

  We know the vet from taking Mo along on occasion. He’s patient and thorough and familiar with many of the local farms. He listens to our garbled and amateur explanation of Little Pig’s state and then, predictably, proposes antibiotics. ‘Two doses,’ he says. ‘One now and one in twenty-four hours. You’ll have to inject them.’ It’s not as expensive as we’d feared, and he takes us calmly through the proced-ure, explaining how and where to inject. This is an intramuscular injection: we don’t have to find a vein or be too exact. It doesn’t sound difficult.

  But what seemed simple in the vet’s clean blue room becomes immediately fraught and problematic outside, in a ragged dusty shelter, in the face of a burly, squirmy lump of pig. Put it just behind the base of the ear, the vet said, where the flesh starts to thicken; keep the needle at an angle of 45° and let the liquid come through steadily, without rushing. Facile, easy. Except Little Pig knows something’s up; he knows that it’s unusual for the two of us to be crawling through the straw alongside him; he’s distrustful, curious. He flops on to his side, away from us. Under the low roof of the shelter, it’s awkward stretching across his prone body to reach the correct spot above his shoulder for the injection, and as Ed pulls back the black hair to try to reveal bare skin in the right place, Little Pig pulls away. We start again. There’s a moment when Little Pig is still, just after Ed clears the patch of skin, and I need to be ready, rapid and sure with the needle. Here we go: reach across, bare skin … But the needle is long and quite fragile; Little Pig’s hide is tough. I’m anxious to inject at the angle the vet advised, but I’m aware that I also have to be quick; I hesitate, then hurry. I’ve only managed to get the very tip of the needle in place, not enough, and Little Pig is on the move again, turning, floundering. The needle breaks.

  It could be some kind of parlour game, like pinning the tail on the donkey. It could be fun, laughable. Uproarious, even. But it just feels distressing. I rock back on my haunches. We have to start again.

  Other people must also struggle to inject their animals, because the needles come in packs of two. We fit up the injection carefully again and creep back through the straw. Ed does the thing with the hair; the needle goes in. Not quite a perfect 45° perhaps, but no one has a protractor to check. I press the plunger. Ed rubs Little Pig’s ear. In just a few seconds, the dose is delivered. Little Pig shuffles, but gives no indication of having noticed that a medical procedure has been carried out. You see, just like the vet said: easy.

  Now we have to wait. The vet didn’t have much idea of what might be wrong. It could be many things: it could be a lung infection, i
ntestinal torsion, heart disease. Any of these could be fatal. Or it could be a virus, a cold. Nothing to worry about. The antibiotics might do some good; they might not.

  We plunge into morbid Internet pages: pigs dying, everywhere, from all manner of unaccountable maladies and horrible twists of fate. Farm pigs choking, pet pigs constipated to death, free-range pigs slipping away from calcium deficiency. Who’d have thought there were so many ways for a pig to die? We stop googling. We have to accept there’s nothing we can actually do. We have to just wait while Little Pig rests, and the antibiotics take effect. We’ll go back later and just see what’s happened.

  While we wait we dig and then repot some late tomato seedlings. The rabbits have attacked the first lot of plants we dug in so carefully. During the day, they sit on the lawn, cute and fluffy, grazing quietly among the chickens; as soon as dusk falls, they scamper over to discover what tasty treats have been grown for them in the vegetable patch and they lay waste to our efforts. So we’re in need of reinforcements, and by the middle of the afternoon there’s a satisfying row of little pots on the table-tennis table: round and square; green, white, purple, blue, yellow – a complicated, unreliable system of colour coding that we’ll have forgotten by the time we come to plant out. While we work, we talk, of course, about Little Pig. We reminisce: remember when he …? Remember how he …? I realize how sad I’d be if he died.

  But when winter comes round again, I’m going to kill him. Aren’t I?

  I wonder about what constitutes a good death. One way or another, Little Pig is going to die. So should it be on my terms, when and how I want it, so that he can contribute, as intended, to the family economy? Does this kind of death have a purpose, an animal-killed-for-meat purpose, which therefore implies it is a good end to things, or at the very least, orderly? Or does Little Pig have a right to a different fate, unplanned? Once again, a pig and a paradox. A conundrum. Would I rather my pig passed away in his straw bed that evening, naturally – or would I prefer him grazing through a few more months, so that I can then dispatch him with a large knife?