The Unexpected Genius of Pigs

by Matt Whyman

  As for escaping and running away, I could guarantee that no matter where Butch and Roxi ended up, I would always find them together. So do pigs form loyal friendships as we do, or undertake feuds with one another? And what’s with the need for a partner in crime? Can they love and loathe, offer comfort, or share wisdom and advice? Are they playful or mischievous, truly lazy or actually greedy, as we often say when suggesting someone is behaving like a pig? Free from the technology that links us, how do they communicate and what do they say? And what is it that drives them to dig from dawn to dusk in order to unearth a single acorn? It’s all a mystery to me, but one I’d like to pick apart in a spirit of curiosity and enthusiasm in order to understand them better.

  With help from people who have looked a pig in the eye far deeper than I ever managed, I intend to learn more than I did from all the mistakes I made as a reluctant keeper. Not just about pigs and their personalities – and we’ll meet quite a few – but what it means to connect with these animals and to recognise that they lead lives that can be just as complex, challenging and rewarding as our own.

  2

  The Ancestral Pig

  Windows to the soul

  Looking a pig in the eye, as Churchill famously discovered, can be an unnerving experience. Levelling with a dog in the same way will instinctively tell you that you’re in charge, while most cats simply turn away dismissively, but a pig prompts pause for thought. Nose to snout, gazing into those little orbs you’ll find a depth of contemplation to match your own. A pig will blink just like you, batting eyelashes like the wings of a resting butterfly, and invite you to glimpse a spirit as shining and sophisticated as your own.

  They’ll also grunt, in a primal way, as if to remind you of their origins.

  A pig in time

  The ancestral line from today’s domestic pig dates back between nine and 13,000 years to the European Wild Boar. Still in existence today, these are powerful, bristle-backed beasts, long in the skull and often dark in colouring compared to their pink and hairless cousins. They stand on broad shoulders that taper towards their hind legs, like a large breed dog in a heavyweight division.

  Also known as Sus scrofa, variations of the wild boar can now be found from Africa to Asia, the Far East to Australia, and in a variety of habitats, including forest, scrub and swampland.

  They live in groups and move around depending on what resources are available to them. For a variety of reasons, wild boars are drawn to areas of dense vegetation. In short, their world revolves around three elements: food, water and protection. They can find this in undergrowth and beneath leaf canopies near rivers and streams, but it’s also something humans can provide – which is where the connection between us was first forged.

  In a bid to find out more about what drew the boar into our world, I visited Michael Mendl, Professor of Animal Behaviour and Welfare, a recognised expert in the cognition, emotion, individuality and social behaviour of domestic animals. He’s also a man who is passionate about pigs. A warm, softly spoken and thoroughly engaging individual, Professor Mendl opens the door to his office at the Bristol Veterinary School wearing a T-shirt and jeans. This is my kind of academic. And when he gets on to our chosen subject, I am delighted to learn that his immense knowledge base also comes with recognition that we can never know precisely what makes another animal tick – and that within this mystery lies some magic.

  ‘We can look at fossil records from human settlements dating back about 10,000 years ago for signs that wild boar were on their way towards domestication,’ the Professor begins. ‘It’s likely that an association developed in terms of co-location, and that the boar ventured into the settlements because they were scavenging. As omnivores there would be things that they were interested in, like food that people had left. And I imagine those people looked at the boar and had ideas of their own,’ he adds with a grin. ‘There’s plenty of information available to help us calculate when this happened, but the fact is we don’t really know how the pig was first domesticated.’ The Professor considers me through his glasses for a moment. ‘You can always make up a story about it.’

  The origin of the species

  By and large, a pig is a docile and benign beast. There are times when it’s best to steer clear, as we’ll discover, but with some understanding they’re generally easy to read. Instinctively, I think, before reaching out to scratch a flank or rub behind an ear, we’ll talk to them. There is something about pigs that always prompts us to do this. They respond to human voices, just as we respond to them. We speak very different languages, but the tone of both a grunt and our greeting seems to effortlessly cross the divide.

  The wild boar, on the other hand, is a very different creature. Visiting the outskirts of Bucharest on a work trip recently, I decided to use some free time to go for a run. I have always been a runner (apart from the period when Butch and Roxi devoured my time). I find it helps to clear my head if I’ve been writing all day, and basically serves both my mental and physical health. That day, unfamiliar with the city, I planned a route on Google Maps. I had assumed I could plot a circuit that might take in a park with a lake and suchlike. I just hadn’t realised that this quarter of the Romanian capital contained a vast swathe of dense forest. From above, this dark and ragged expanse looked completely out of keeping with the grid of avenues surrounding it, one of which I would have to follow to pick up the trail path. Aware that stray dogs roamed the streets, I asked at the hotel reception if it would be wise.

  ‘No problem,’ the receptionist told me. ‘The dogs are harmless if you leave them alone, but in the forest you must watch out for the boar.’ Her English, and my non-existent Romanian, didn’t allow for finding out more. I just thanked her, smiled, and headed outside, where exhaust-stained snow had been shovelled to each side of the avenue.

  Despite being dressed in technical shorts and a luminous Lycra top, with the receptionist’s warning in mind I felt like an age-old character from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. All the way to the forest, no more than a mile at most, I dwelled on what I might face. I passed lone street dogs that paid me no attention, and a Rottweiler behind a fence that chased alongside me for a while. It was noisy, but I wasn’t alarmed. We see dogs of every temperament. They live among us, unlike the animal I had been warned about, and as I approached the trailhead I felt as if I was leaving my world and entering one that belonged to them.

  I have never seen a wild boar for real. I know they’re beginning to populate pockets of the UK once more, but I still think of them as a livestock version of the Loch Ness Monster. Having become hunted into extinction in the seventeenth century, their quiet reappearance in forested regions from Scotland to the south coast of England is largely believed to have begun in the 1980s as a result of escapes from captivity. Today, it’s estimated that 4,000 wild boar could be at large in the British countryside. It may not sound like many, but an adult male can weigh in at 150kg of muscle and tusk, and is unlikely to turn tail if startled, in the manner of a rabbit or deer. In rural parts of Europe, however, especially to the East, the wild boar is commonplace, and this was uppermost in my mind on leaving the avenue behind and heading deep into the trail.

  With my running shoes crunching through the snow and the low sun hanging behind the trees, I found myself becoming all eyes and ears. The only thing I knew about wild boar was that as territorial creatures they could be aggressive when disturbed, and here I was breezing through their kingdom without a pass. I admit to feeling some apprehension, seeing movement in the thickets when there was none, and I picked up my pace along with my heart rate on registering the sound of something scramble away. When I heard a distant but guttural snort my nerve deserted me completely. In my mind, I faced imminent attack by a beast that suddenly embodied my greatest fears. As casually as I could, I turned and ran back the way I had come.

  ‘You were lucky,’ the receptionist told me when I reported the experience on my return. I am pretty sure she was simply telling me what I needed to he
ar. There was every chance that I had just been startled by my own shadow, but as a hotel guest I hadn’t paid to be ridiculed. Nevertheless, I returned to my room with a renewed sense that we are hardwired to be wary of wild boar. Like the bear, it’s a creature that we consider to exist across a divide – one that represents danger, should we venture far from home.

  The crossing

  With no nice hotels to hide out in, or room service to cater for their needs, our ancestors were right to be wary of the bear and the boar when they ventured into the woods and forests. After all, these creatures had a significant advantage in their domain: they would be aware of your presence before you saw them, which would be sure to unsettle anyone but the hunter. So they were best left alone.

  And yet the wild boar viewed the world beyond their own through different eyes. Unlike the bear, the boar ventured out from their kingdom and into ours. By extension, they duly broke the spell between man and beast. I like to think they did so with some trepidation, crossing the line under the cover of night to claim the scraps that had been discarded on the outskirts. In a sense, they had found a way into human life that presented no threat. If anything, by clearing the ground of waste that would otherwise attract vermin, these pioneering forebears of the common pig offered something back, and thereby laid the blueprint for a relationship that would thrive.

  ‘The boar really is quite a wild animal,’ Professor Mendl points out when considering how we took things to another level on discovering a taste for the meat. ‘Some would have been bolder than others, and willing to interact with people, and so the selection and breeding process would have been gradual.’

  At one with the pig

  Studying fossils, it’s possible to look back through time and see the pig evolve as humans moved from foraging to farming. For the swineherds through the ages, however, the emergence of the docile beast from its wild ancestor would have been imperceptible. Every generation continued the work of the last, slowly shaping form and nature through one century and on to the next. The tail coiled as the skull broadened and the nose flattened into a snout. The dark bristles softened and yielded to a pink and hairless skin, while the ferocity and fury that defined a wild boar under fire burned out to reveal the gentle soul we recognise today.

  In many ways, the pig allowed itself to become domesticated in order to earn a place in our world. In changing itself for ever, and submitting to our needs, it brought us closer together.

  Throughout the ages, our relationship has become ever more tightly intertwined. The pig assumes the final position in the Chinese zodiac, having shown up last when Jade the Emperor called a gathering of animals. In this story, the pig is celebrated for its honesty and determination, having admitted it fell asleep along the way, and yet it’s believed this might also be where it picked up a reputation for being lazy.

  Other areas of folklore see the pig ascribed with different qualities. In Ancient Egypt, the pig was associated with Set, god of storms and disorder, and by Native Americans as a herald of rain; while the Celts considered it to be an icon of fertility and abundance. Pigs have impacted on religion, most notably in being unfit for consumption under laws of both Islam and Judaism. Buddhism portrays a deity called Marici as a beautiful woman in the lotus position astride seven sows, and the New Testament tells the story of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, in which Jesus cured a man possessed by casting the evil spirits into a herd of swine.

  Across the world, from one culture to another, pigs have come to represent extremes of the human spirit, from sloth, gluttony and dirtiness to irrepressibility and sheer lust for life. There is no middle ground. Love or loathe the common pig, it has made its presence known.

  Today, it is believed that the world pig population exceeds one billion. The vast majority are raised for meat on an industrial scale, with breeds such as the Large White and Land Race, Duroc and Piétrain optimised for fast growth and large litters. While pig farming became big business after the Second World War, rare breeds have seen a renaissance in recent decades. Whether driven by welfare issues or the texture and taste of the meat from pre-industrialised breeds, there’s something reassuring about the sight of an old-time pig turning the soil under the sun.

  Visit any smallholding or select farm and you’ll find the Gloucester Old Spot, the Berkshire and the Tamworth, the Oxford Sandy and Black, and the Saddleback. While these breeds are physically distinct from one another, with some showing behavioural traits such as the Tamworth’s remarkable escape skills, you’ll discover that each pig also possesses a force of character and spirit that immediately defines one from another.

  Approach a pen or a field of pigs and you can be guaranteed a greeting. Bold or shy, they’ll always register your presence – especially if you bring something to eat – and never cease talking to you. From The Three Little Pigs to George Orwell’s revolutionary swine, Winnie-the-Pooh’s timid friend, Piglet, to Miss Piggy, Wilbur and Babe, we have anthropomorphised pigs in the stories we tell one another to better understand ourselves.

  Pigs are far from human, however. With outsized ears and disc-shaped snouts there is something unearthly about them, and yet eye to eye, that connection with us is there. What goes through their minds is something we can only wonder at. Be it driven by emotion, instinct or a blend of both, the bond we share has strengthened over time and continues to grow. Just look at advances in modern medicine. Not only has the pig genome been sequenced, opening up their inner world, we have established that our anatomical and physiological make-up – including our cardiovascular systems – are remarkably similar. While we already call upon pig tissue in some life-saving surgical procedures, there will surely come a time in the near future when the pig becomes a viable donor for organ transplants.

  In a sense, our hearts already beat as one.

  3

  The Mind of a Pig

  Strands

  The animal kingdom will always be a mystery to us. We can explore it in many illuminating ways, from a biological or behavioural perspective, but we will never share that singular strand that binds a species together. As humans, we understand each other in a way that the dog and the cow can only observe from their own world. In the same way, when we peer into the realm of the pig, we do so from a step away.

  So, in asking ourselves what makes an animal like a pig tick, let’s not be afraid to call upon our imaginations to bridge the gap. George Orwell did just that in Animal Farm by proposing that, ‘being the cleverest’, the organisation of the livestock into a force to be reckoned with should fall naturally to the swine. In the same way, we’ll never truly know whether a pig feels love or grief, calculates, deliberates or daydreams, of course, but if we take a leap of faith and accept that it’s as sentient a creature as we are then we have the vocabulary to explore that missing strand.

  Survival of the smartest

  Butch, my not-so-minipig, lived in the shadow of his so-called sister. Growing up together, they had certainly bonded like siblings. They shared the same sleeping quarters, flopped side by side with their snouts poking out, rose at the same time as the cockerels and then picked and foraged their way through each day.

  Size informs the porcine equivalent of a pecking order, and this dictated that Roxi was the dominant pig. At feeding time, she could shove Butch to one side with such force that it could knock him off his trotters. I found this alarming at first, and worried about a breakfast-related injury. I took to filling their big rubber feeding bowl and then trying to engineer things so that Butch could get there first. This involved standing between Roxi and the bowl. Then I found that Roxi would just try to barge me out of the way, so that strategy didn’t last long.

  Despite her insistence on breakfasting before Butch, she never finished the pig nuts I had measured into the bowl. This might have been down to the fact that Roxi couldn’t manage double helpings, or perhaps she purposely left enough for him. Either way, Butch always got his breakfast. It’s just he only ever did so on her terms. Unti
l, that is, Butch began to use his brains.

  To a certain extent, he was only following Roxi’s example. She had figured out that by making a lot of noise from the moment she woke, I would come running like her personal servant. When I say noise, I mean a blood-curdling squeal that must come close to what would accompany the opening of the gates of hell. As she did so at the crack of dawn, it always forced me to career from the house in a half-tied dressing gown in a bid to shut her up before every resident along the lane turned against us.

  Over time, it made me so anxious that I took to setting my alarm just ahead of her call to arms. That way, I would at least have time to slip on my wellington boots rather than bound there barefoot. And it worked, for a while. If I crept down to the pigpen, and lifted the latch without making a squeak, I could leave out breakfast and be back in bed before Roxi had a chance to rise and draw breath.

  Several weeks into my new strategy, sleep deprived but with the peace of the neighbourhood intact, I found myself under observation as I quietly filled the bowl. I paused and glanced across to the pigs’ sleeping quarters. In the breaking light, a pair of beady eyes peered back at me.

  ‘Shhh,’ I whispered at Butch, and finished the task at hand.

  I retreated to the garden and closed the gate behind me. As I did so, the little black pig slipped out into the open so quietly that all I heard was the crackle of straw. With the sun just a promise behind the woods, he stretched and then crossed to the bowl. I fully expected Roxi to follow. Instead, as he began to pick and graze, she slumbered on with barely a twitch of her ears. It wasn’t until I was back in bed, in fact, with my alarm reset for an extra half an hour, that I heard the familiar rumble and squeal. Only this time it stopped just as soon as it had started. In the silence that followed, curiosity got the better of me. I crossed to the window overlooking the garden, peeled back a curtain and peeped outside. There, in the first bars of sunshine, just as Roxi finished guzzling greedily on what looked like a fair share of pig nuts, I watched the cunning little boar make his way back to bed for a post-breakfast snooze.