Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes

by Rosie Boycott

  Now, as the autumn days turn to winter, we are facing the possibility of bird flu and probably having, at best, to move our chickens indoors or, at worst, to have them all killed. We don't have a hut that is big enough to contain them and there isn't land enough to build one. If the order comes to keep all birds indoors, we will have to rent a barn somewhere in the vicinity for the duration of the outbreak. It is hard to imagine them all being slaughtered: far from being headless, chickens have personalities and looks. At anyone time of day ours will be busy having dust baths, pecking for grubs in the ground, feeding from the trough, teetering on the ramp which leads into the duck pond for a drink, sitting in twos by the fence, walking gingerly between the legs of the geese, or just jumping up into the air for no good reason at all. We've got one black Maran who hops everywhere, bouncing along on her two feet like a feathery pogo stick. On the odd occasion when I've had to pick them up (usually because their wing feathers need a clip) their hearts beat very fast under their feathers, as though all they are is heart, but this calms down in seconds and they are quite content to lie there, firmly held between my two palms, their intense eyes darting in every direction.

  We finish carrying the pigs out of the red van. They are so reluctant to leave their snug temporary home where they've been sleeping in their bed of straw. Pigs are prone to melodrama and, like an opera singer into whose behind someone has stuck a pin, they squeal madly when we pick them up to carry them to their gate. Once on the ground, though, the three boys trot happily into the run. The five resident males, all roughly the same size, come nosing up, sniffing and curious. Within seconds, they are playing tag, pushing each other, chasing this way and that, their tails alternating between curly and straight out, ears forward. Pigs don't exactly grin, but they have an expression which seems to say, 'I'm happy.'

  'So that's Boris,' I say to David as we lean on the gate watching them. Boris was the name we had already given to the boar who would become our breeding male. We had been referring to this mythical male pig as Boris for months, long before we met him, long before this actual Boris had even been born. But there is no doubt now about which pig is going to step into the role. He's small and pink, with a big bunched mass of very black spots on his rump. David is chuffed because one of Boris's ancestors had been bred by Princess Anne, who has a reputation in the pig world as an excellent breeder.

  'He'll get to be this big' - David holds his hand out, above the level of the fence. That means Boris is going to be almost three feet six inches tall, and probably very fat with it.

  Now it is the turn of the girls, two equally fine little Gloucesters, one with an endearing black splodge over her left ear. We call her Blossom. Like the boys, they squeal as we carry them through a gate and across the vegetable patch to their run. But there the similarities end. The older lady pigs - Guinness, Bluebell, Bramble and Babe - immediately freeze them out. Babe, an Oxford Black and Sandy and my favourite pig, who is now emerging as the unelected queen of the tribe, pushes them to one side, then bites Blossom on the ear. The two little pigs stand there, legs rigid, ears forward, surprised, distressed looks on their faces. They turn to try and join the group who are gathered near the gate, hoping that David or I will feed them the hard little inedible pears that have fallen from the tree growing beside the wall. Babe immediately shoulders them aside and gives Blossom another nip on the back. The two other most recent arrivals - the Empress of Dillington and her sister, Hyacinth, two small Berkshires - stand to one side, and I swear a look of relief can be seen in their eyes. They are no longer the newcomers, the butt of the jokes. Berkshires are black with fabulous white noses, and have an inexhaustible capacity for stuffing themselves. Both she and Hyacinth have literally made themselves sick by eating too many pears. Their hearty appetites make me confident that P. G. Wodehouse's great creation, the Empress of Blandings, best beloved pig of the Earl of Emsworth and three times winner of the Fat Pigs Competition at the South Shropshire Agricultural Show, has a thoroughly worthy namesake.

  Charlie has collected a big bunch of the bacon weed which grows so freely all over the nursery and he throws it into the run as a welcome gift for the newcomers. The pigs fall on it with enthusiasm, chomping up the leaves and stalks, emitting grunts of pure happiness. 'Think of it this way,' he says, 'we could have bought a Mercedes instead.'

  The Mere might be more appropriate for a QC and a journalist, but, as they say, stuff happens, chances come and go, and here we are with the pigs, the chickens, the newly planted vegetables and a plan but, in truth, very little idea of what we are doing and what is going to happen next.

  2

  The Cleverest of Animals

  The pigs make their first escape on a Sunday morning in October. The week before, the boys' run had been extended back into the wood, in the direction of the main house. It's a thickly wooded area, made up mostly of pines and laurels. A heavy-duty electric fence delineates their area, but not well enough, it turns out. At eight in the morning, before we have even gone downstairs to let the dogs out and collect the Sunday papers, the phone rings; it's one of the staff at Dillington House, calling to tell us that there are seven little pigs out on the main lawn having a field day. And they are. Pigs love worms and grubs, so using their muscular noses they have pushed up the top layer of turf, exposing the new soil underneath for grubbing and rootling. Seven little tails are curled in pleasure as they zip around the lawn, churning up the soil like a fleet of small rotavators. By the time we arrive, they have attracted a small crowd of Dillington House course members. Cameras are out and everyone is laughing, enjoying this laddish bid for freedom.

  There's something fascinating about pigs. Churchill memorably remarked that 'cats look down on you, dogs look up to you, but pigs treat you as an equal'. They do. Perhaps it's because they're smart - smarter than dogs, as tests have shown - perhaps it's because their faces are so full of expression. Haughty, curious, engaging, surprised, busy: they seem to run the gamut of emotions. All animals are not equal, whether we like it or not. Some are more equal, more interesting, more able to grab the imagination. We all know that dogs have that magic ingredient. Sheep don't. Pigs do. It was no accident that George Orwell cast a pig as the ruler of his farmyard. The task of organising the others 'fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognised as being the cleverest of animals', while the sheep were content to lie around in the field bleating 'Four legs good, two legs bad! Four legs good, two legs bad' for hours on end.

  Babe and the other six breeding females, or gilts, have organised their pen with military thoroughness. Not for them any confusion about where they sleep, eat or go to the lavatory. Each area is clearly defined. They have a mud wallow which allows them to cool off in the summer heat and keep their coats clean through regular mud dips, which, once dry, can be scratched off, leaving behind clean, hairy skin. They help each other out with the process, reaching a fellow pig's awkward body parts, like the inside of a back leg, with their snouts. Pigs maintain a definite pecking order: Babe is top pig and capable of horrendous bullying of the smaller pigs and cavalier behaviour when it comes to scrabbling for food. But I imagine that if the herd was threatened it would be Babe who'd be out front leading the defence. And they're social too, keeping in touch with each other through a medley of small, agreeable sounds which rise to squeals if one of the pack feels threatened or if there is the possibility of an unexpected snack.

  On the lawn that Sunday morning, the pigs are making small delighted squeals, their snouts working overtime, churning through the turf. The strong, flattened tip of a pig's nose is supported by a tough pad of cartilage which lets them shovel through hard ground. I read a story recently about two wild boar in the Bronx Zoo who took out their boredom on their outdoor concrete run. Beginning with one tiny crack and using only their snouts, they reduced concrete paving four inches deep to rubble in just three weeks. Apart from its strength, the snout is also the pig's main organ of external information. Their sense of smell is acute
and the two small nostrils in the middle of the snout close up quickly to prevent dirt getting in. In the same way as a dog can learn from a lamppost just who was there before, how long before, their sex and, amazingly, their class, so a pig's snout can sort out details of his environment. That day their snouts are telling them that the best food is to be found a few inches below the lush green grass of the lawn.

  A couple of minutes after Charlie and I arrive, David appears, carrying a bucket of pig nuts. 'Pigs!' he shouts, rattling the bucket, so that the nuts make a satisfactory clanking noise against the sides. Seven heads look up in curiosity. Stuff the worms, they seem to say, as each one falls into line behind the bucket to trot off in the direction of their run.

  The fuss over, we walk back across the park to brew coffee and read the newspapers. They're full of stories about a parrot that has died in quarantine in Britain from avian flu. The bird had the lethal form of the virus and the prospect of having to lock up our chickens moves a little closer to reality. At least we have found a suitable place: David's father, Dennis, has a mechanical repair shed in a run-down set of farm buildings in the neighbouring hamlet of Atherston, and there will be room in his shed for the birds if the worst comes to the worst. But what will they then be? We can't describe them as free-range any more, so will we have to take a cut in the price of our eggs? And if that happens will DEFRA, as the old ministry of agriculture is now known, pick up the difference?

  What will happen to very small producers who can't afford to build a shed big enough to house their chickens or who can't find one? Since the debacle of the foot and mouth crisis, which so affected farmers, no one has any faith in the government to do the right thing at the right time. Looking back on foot and mouth, it is so clear that the simple act of curtailing all movement of animals around the country from the moment of the first diagnosed outbreak could well have stopped the disease in its tracks. Instead, countless animals were slaughtered, ruining farmers both financially and emotionally. Of course for the beef-buying public, ignorant of the human toll the crisis was creating, life went on as normal. The huge supermarket chains ensured that we never ran out of a single hamburger, steak, or packet of mince. They simply looked abroad for supplies.

  'Did you know that the imports of beef from South America have risen by 70 percent in the last year alone?' I'm in Bonner's, Ilminster's champion butcher's shop, on a Saturday morning in October and the shop, as ever, is heaving with life. The queue for the meat counter stretches out into the street, and inside the store people are jostling between the deli area and the meat counter, picking up food for the weekend. As always, it feels good to be in this shop. The Bonner family is headed by Clinton Bonner, known to me as Mr B. Thirty years ago, when the elder Bonners arrived from Kingston-on­Thames, there were five butchers in the town. Now we just have Bonners. The noticeboard to the right of the cash registers lists the provenance of the meat, game and poultry on sale that morning. Everything is local, everything is sourced. The pork has come from a farm that Mr B has known all his life, the chickens come from Mr Cracknell's and the lamb from Ashill Farms. I am looking forward to the day when Mr B chalks up that the Gloucester Old Spot was reared at Dillington Nurseries, as we've decided to call our smallholding.

  As ever, Mr B is in fine form. If you had to paint a picture in your mind of what a classic butcher would look like, an image of someone looking uncannily like Mr Bwould float into your mind. He's red-faced, with a smile that stretches ear to ear. On his head he wears a white cap, to go with his white butcher's coat, which is usually speckled with red splodges of blood. He doesn't so much talk as boom, with laughter, advice and general bonhomie. Mr B makes entering his shop an experience, something much more than just buying a piece of meat and handing over the money. For a brief moment you sense that you've entered an essential and wholesome part of the old-fashioned ways of commerce where you, the buyer, are part of a chain that supports the local farmer, the local feed­producer, the local abattoir, the man who drives the van and the butcher. With the meat in your basket, that chain extends its way to your family and friends, who feast on the sum total of all those transactions.

  Importing beef from South America distorts and destroys that chain. In a globalised world, supermarkets can buy from countries where labour costs are far lower, meaning that farmers here in Britain today have increasingly less control over what they can charge for their livestock. The buying power of the big supermarkets is so great that they can dictate the prices, with little regard as to how much it has actually cost a farmer to rear a chicken or a cow, and if the farmer can't produce beef (or lamb, or pork or chicken) to meet that price, tough. Until 1990 Brazil produced only enough beef to feed itself. Since then, its cattle herd has grown by some fifty million and one region is responsible for 80 percent of the growth in beef production: the Amazon rainforest. In 2004, 26,000 square kilometres of rainforest were burned to clear ground to grow animal feed, primarily destined to feed cows in North America.

  But, more sinisterly, no one quite knows where in the UK the beef is being sold or how hygienic it is. The big super-markets profess not to stock it, or only in minuscule quantities. George Monbiot wrote recently in the Guardian that the high levels of corruption in Brazil, where he reckons some 25,000 workers are employed on the beef-producing ranches, mean that farm hygiene standards are lax. Foot and mouth is now endemic in the Brazilian Amazon, yet certificates can be easily bought from officials caught up in the gravy train. When the disease hit Britain in February 200I, the government blamed it on meat imported by Chinese restaurants. But Monbiot's investigation revealed that the farm where the outbreak started, Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland, had been taking slops for its pigs from the Whitburn army training camp near Sunderland. And some of their beef had come from Brazil and Uruguay.

  I can't really understand just why we became so fixated on meat. I know how and when we did, but the why still puzzles me. When I was a child, we ate meat on Sundays and at celebrations. The leftovers were recycled into meals on Monday, Tuesday and, in the case of a good fat chicken, through to the back end of the week, when chicken stock would form the basis for soups and my mother's version of risotto. Nowadays, in the UK, we expect to eat meat every day, and our consumption has increased five-fold in fifty years. In the last forty years America has increased its per capita consumption of meat from 80 kilos to 184 a year. European consumption has risen from 56 to 89 kilos. If we go on increasing our consumption at the same rate, in the next fifty years we'll have to produce five times as much again.

  Our increased consumption of red meat has led to an increase in heart disease, certain cancers and obesity: our bodies just weren't built to absorb such huge amounts of saturated fat. The consumer desire for skinless chicken and non-fatty cuts of red meat means that the inevitable waste products are used for mass-produced food like turkey twiz­zlers, burgers and chicken nuggets, which, as Jamie Oliver revealed in Jamie's School Dinners, are being dished up daily to our children. Some nuggets contain as little as 16 percent meat and much of that is waste skin. The single, most astonishing fact for me in Oliver's series was that hospitals in Durham have had to set up special clinics to deal with chronic constipation among children who sometimes don't go to the lavatory for up to six weeks. An excess of sugar and salt in these products promotes behavioural disorders. Chicken flu, salmonella and e-coli all result from the dirty and overcrowded conditions in which factory-farmed chickens are raised. A factory-farmed bird is allotted the space of an A4 piece of paper in which to spend its entire, sorry little life. Force-fed from the day it hatches to slaughter in just six weeks, its body weight increases faster than its bone strength, with the result that the chicken's legs give out and it spends its brief life sitting in muck and dirty feathers.

  As a nation we have a very strange relationship with meat: we make a big fuss about additives and the importance of good, clear labelling on food products, but we never want to know how an animal has lived and died in order
to get to our plates. We are a nation of supposed animal lovers which has recently spent over fifteen parliamentary hours discussing whether or not we should hunt foxes. I read a 2004 report from Churchill insurers which calculated that we spend an average of £5,000 on our dogs in the course of their lifetimes. Our two dogs, Bingo and Dylan, are very spoilt and overindulged, but I doubt that we will spend a quarter of that on the two of them together; even so, if at all true, it is a startling statistic. As a society we feel abhorrence when we hear of needless cruelty to animals and we stock the coffers of the RSPCA accordingly. Yet we conveniently glaze over the details when it comes to the animals we eat.

  When I'm standing next to our pigs, watching them go about their business, rooting and snuffling in the grass, I'm often reminded of a story my aunt Val told me when I was a child. Val had a friend who kept pigs in her orchard in Buckinghamshire. Every year, in the autumn, she'd take the three pigs, which she'd reared over the summer on her apples, kitchen leftovers, rejected vegetables and generous helpings of full cream milk, to the local abattoir. They'd travel in a straw­filled trailer, towed behind her car. It was a short, four-mile journey to the abattoir in Thame and, provided that she threw in a final bucket of food, it always passed peacefully. But one year, just as she was rounding a bend, a car roared out of a side turning. She skidded into the verge and the trailer ended up on its back in the ditch. Trapped inside, the pigs were in an uproar of fear and confusion. It took a few more hours to get the show back on the road and the pigs to their final destination. When Val's friend came to eat the pork, she found it had a slightly bitter taste. The vet explained that animals in fear release adrenalin into their bloodstream which affects the meat and its subsequent flavour.