The Unexpected Genius of Pigs

by Matt Whyman

  Wendy tells me this as we continue our tour. We’re talking about the kind of habitat that a pig would consider to be just perfect. While she sweeps one hand towards the forested fringes up the hill, I find myself considering a broad and uneven wedge of rough land between two fields. A brook cuts through the clay towards a small copse at the far end, with a cosy shelter nestled on a rise amid tufts of wild grass. If I was a pig, and I have no doubt there are several in the copse or the sleeping quarters who are aware of my presence, this plot would be absolute bliss. Wendy registers me and smiles.

  ‘My pigs mostly go as they please here,’ she says. ‘In general, it’s the sows with litters, or the oldies who don’t get into any trouble. But there’s so much space for them that they’re always going to come home.’

  Home is where the food is

  On my run through the forest in Romania, I had no doubt that I was being watched by wild boar. I had entered their realm, where remaining out of sight helped them to feel protected and secure. While the domestic pig has bonded with us, these two factors remain central to their welfare. They have come to trust us, and feel comfortable in our company, but much of that connection is down to the fact that we can provide safe haven. This takes the form of shelter, of course, but there’s another factor at play that might well take precedence.

  ‘Did Butch and Roxi come back whenever they ran away?’ When Professor Mendl asks me this question, he seems surprised when I tell him that I had to lead them home with a bucket of treats every single time.

  ‘They were just having too much fun,’ I tell him, having shared my account of their adventures in my neighbour’s orchard and the shaded swathes of ancient bluebells in the woodland across my village. ‘I don’t suppose they were aware that I could’ve been prosecuted for it.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure they would have come home when they got hungry,’ he offers. ‘They always remember a good source of food.’

  Naturally, I like to think that having been lured into the wild by some irresistible aroma, my pigs might have sloped back to their enclosure because my family and I represented a good source of love as much as lunch. I tell him that I was unsure Butch and Roxi even knew how to get home, but the Professor is in no doubt. ‘Their spatial memory had been closely studied,’ he says. ‘Pigs will readily return to a site where there’s a regular food source.’

  According to Professor Mendl, domestic pigs in captivity are known to employ this ‘win-stay’ strategy, in which they will stick to the same spot if they know they won’t go hungry there. At the same time, he points out, when presented with the opportunity they’ll opt for what he calls a ‘win-shift’ strategy. This is effectively old-school foraging, in which pigs will deplete one location of food and then move on to another while mentally mapping it as they go. They can even determine between two food sites, he says, and choose the better option. What brings the loose pigs home, however, rather than behaving like large pink locusts and simply destroying swathes of countryside, has to be the fact that the food on offer is always going to be more plentiful and regular than anything they can find elsewhere.

  The trustworthy pig

  As pig-keepers, Wendy and I could not be more different. Where I would go into a state of alarm whenever Butch and Roxi slipped away, Wendy regards a pig with a free pass to be a part of the package. Granted, she lives in a pocket of countyside that is as isolated as it is idyllic. She knows her neighbours, but popping round for a cup of sugar would involve quite a hike. As a result, the sight of a group of sows, along with their sisters and daughters, ambling freely past her farmhouse doesn’t send her into the kind of spin I’d have got myself into back home.

  ‘Sometimes they’ll go up the track and I won’t see them all day,’ she tells me quite casually, ‘and then at tea time, they’ll rock up and go to bed.’

  ‘Does it ever concern you?’ I ask, knowing that in her shoes I’d be out in my wellies and wishing I hadn’t called my pigs such stupid names as I’m forced to call for them out loud.

  She responds with a wry smile. ‘There’s no need for them to run away from here,’ she assures me.

  Wendy’s calm composure reaches to the four corners of her farm. In listening to her stories about keeping pigs through the years, it’s clear to me that very little about their behaviour has caused her to lose sleep. She tells me of instances where a large boar has directed a temper tantrum at her, or fought with another male to the extent that she’s had to turn a hose on them to bring the brawl to a close. It’s quite evident who’s in charge here, and perhaps her pigs recognise that as much as me. It is, I think, a question of trust. In return, they’re free to wander because their keeper is schooled in the art of livestock management and quite confident that they’ll always come back to a place where life is easy.

  Helga

  ‘Here’s a sow and her litter who can go where they like,’ says Wendy as we amble towards her courtyard.

  There, a low-slung black pig watches over her youngsters. Some share her colouring, others are pink with dark splodges, and all of them look like a test for any mother. They skitter across the concrete, moving in triple time compared to their responsible adult, and squeak like children’s toys.

  ‘Who is this?’ I ask, mindful not to get too close to a mother and her offspring.

  ‘This is Helga.’ Wendy stops at the same distance, but talks warmly to the pig, who responds in kind. ‘Her babies are only two weeks old,’ she says as several advance under the lowest bar of a gate as if it didn’t exist. ‘They’re going to be lovely, even though Helga is a Swede.’ I look across at Wendy, who plunges her hands into the pockets of her overalls and shrugs. ‘I bred her with a kunekune to take the edge off the bitchiness.’

  For a moment, we watch the little ones at play. It’s great to see them gambol freely in the sunshine, and I wonder how far they will roam. No doubt, like any youngsters seeking to find themselves, they’ll extend their range in due course. Their mother looks like she’s more than capable of shepherding them safely through this formative phase of their lives, however. Her little ones might be a handful, but Wendy recognises that there’s no need to keep them penned in. When it comes to setting boundaries, Helga has it covered.

  The pastoral pig

  We are so used to thinking that domestic pigs need to be contained. It’s often as necessary as it is practical, of course, and with enough land on rotation those pigs lead a happy and fulfilling life. Wendy is fortunate in that her fields have natural boundaries as well as perimeter fencing, but ultimately, the gate at the foot of the long climb to her cottage is wide open. While an intact boar among others requires careful management, of course, she is happy for many in her foraging family to find their own way through each day. In a sense, she makes it work by ensuring that the heart of their world contains all the security they need. In providing food and shelter, she creates a gravitational pull that presents the pig with no reason to move on. But how does she determine, I wonder out loud, whether an individual will play well with others?

  ‘I mix and match based on size, age and aggression,’ she tells me. ‘It’s a healthy thing to do, so long as I understand the pigs and put them on ground that’s new to them both, with loads of space. It means a pig can safely run away from a dominant pig,’ she explains. ‘After a while, the dominant one will give up and eat grass. They get used to each other in this way, and eventually, they’ll get tired out. That’s when they seal their friendship by lying down and dozing together.’

  Sleeping under the stars

  Weather permitting, Wendy’s pigs that are entrusted to leave their quarters if they choose are presented with an opportunity for a unique sleepover.

  ‘The heat can change their behaviour quite a bit,’ she says as we amble across her courtyard. ‘Sometimes on summer evenings they’ll head out and find a hedge or a bank and sleep under the stars. On a clear night I can look out and see them cuddled up together in rows.’

  Wendy paints a vivid pictu
re for me, and I am completely sold on the idea that pigs would prefer to leave their straw beds when it’s stuffy and sleep outside. As she describes once watching a group filing under her window on a hot night and heading out for the cool under the trees, I begin to think of them not so much as livestock but gentle countryside itinerants. I can think of nothing better, in fact, than running at dawn and passing a file of slumbering swine at the boundary between two fields.

  While the thought of coming face-to-face with a wild boar instinctively raises my hackles, I have no fear of domestic pigs. I suppose we have lived together for long enough to build into our DNA an inherent respect for one another. They might be formidable in size, but it’s no reflection of their temperament. While a mother is naturally protective of her young, and should be treated with caution, encountering a group of sows dozing nose to tail in a ditch in the dew would serve only to brighten my day. While this is unlikely to happen, of course, I appreciate what Wendy has created here simply by stepping back and recognising that many kept pigs can be successfully managed without pens.

  Creature comforts

  If there’s one thing a domestic pig prizes as much as a regular meal, it’s a bed for the night. Collectively, they like to sleep on straw, in a dry space away from drafts, and that’s about it. In short, pigs lead a very simple life and this is often reflected in the charming range of sleeping quarters that dot the British landscape.

  The pig ark is perhaps the most common kind of dwelling. It’s often constructed from galvanised metal sheeting shaped into a half cylinder, with a solid back wall and baffles on each side of the entrance to keep the wind at bay. At the same time, a pig will happily doze in any space provided that meets their basic needs, from stone outbuildings to barns and even shepherd’s huts.

  When we came to our senses and arranged to house Butch and Roxi outside, I was keen to maximise their living space. One way to achieve this was by customising my garden shed. Rather than plonk a pig ark on perfectly decent foraging ground, I called upon the help of our local pig-keeping friend to assist me in building a chamber at the back of the space reserved for garden tools I never used. With a side entrance and a sloping roof, the space inside easily accommodated both pigs and sheltered them from the elements. Once I’d lined it with straw, I called time on their tenancy inside the house and invited them to follow me.

  Ten minutes into the snout-to-surface inspection of the enclosure that followed, both pigs disappeared inside their sleeping quarters. A little bumping and crashing followed, along with a sweep or two of straw onto the ground outside. Then, when a silence fell that was so absolute, I felt the need to investigate.

  To be honest, I had worried that after just a short time lounging on sofas inside the house, Butch and Roxi would do nothing but complain about the transfer to a hard floor and no TV. Inside the shed, in case I needed to access the pigs from the top down, we had fixed the roof of the chamber on hinges. Carefully, I cracked it open and peered inside. There, facing the baffled entrance, Butch and Roxi lay side by side and half-submerged in straw. They looked like upturned boat hulls in storage, and were clearly marking their move into the garden with an afternoon nap. Gently, I closed the lid and left them to it.

  As the pair settled in, so their snouts began to appear at the entrance during sleeping hours. After a few weeks, Butch and Roxi had taken to dozing with their heads lolling over the threshold. The only variation was if Roxi had clambered inside after a day’s digging and then dropped into a slumber without turning. It wasn’t unusual, therefore, to find our little boar happily sleeping with his snout jammed between a pair of pink buttocks. It was never the most appealing of sights, but judging by the snores that would accompany this position, I believe they considered it to be a kind of mutual comfort blanket.

  The clean pig

  Among their fellow livestock, the pig is perhaps the most misunderstood. From an early age we’re led to believe that pigs are messy and unhygienic, but this is far from the truth. As a measure of this, and unlike any other farm animal, it’s a fact that pigs will create a toilet area as far from their sleeping quarters as possible. In the house, this cost me the carpet behind the television. Outside, their choice made complete sense, even if it did wake me in the night.

  Around three o’clock each morning, I would stir to the kind of exterior thump you might equate with a clumsy burglar falling from the fence. This would be followed by the sound of a grumpy old boar huffing and snorting his way from the shed to the opposite corner of the enclosure. What followed sounded like the garden hose had come alive for 30 seconds, followed by the sound of Butch returning to his quarters. There, another round of crashing and banging would commence, underpinned by complaints from the partner he’d just disturbed, until finally, he settled in again. Inevitably, having been drawn from my own sleep, I would have to get up and go through the same process in our bathroom. Naturally, I would lift the lid first, and I’ve no doubt that Butch faced the same rigorous standards from Roxi as I did from my wife.

  Outside the house – in their rightful environment – the pigs never lived in squalor. Butch and Roxi even undertook the porcine equivalent of changing their bedsheets on a regular basis. Every few weeks, once they’d crushed the straw inside their sleeping quarters to the extent that it lost its spring, the pigs would sweep it out with their snouts. Much of it had been ground to dust, and yet they worked hard to clear the chamber. It also served as a signal to me that I needed to provide them with fresh resources. So I would take this as my cue to go in with a fresh bale. All I ever did was drop it in through the hatch and then lean in to cut the twine.

  The first few times I had laid it out nicely, but they just rearranged it and left me feeling like I had done it all wrong. With the bale intact, and before I’d even closed the door at the front of the shed, they’d be inside the chamber, spreading it around to their exact satisfaction. What’s more, on regularly shovelling out their latrine area and mixing it with the old straw, I found that my compost heap became a rocket fuel for all the borders in my garden.

  Butch and Roxi were content, as was I, and my sunflowers could have won prizes. In working with the pigs and their impeccable standards at each end of the enclosure, we created our own private circle of life. In some ways it countered their groundwork in the middle, which I can only describe as hell on earth.

  The mud myth

  Professor Mendl believes that mud is responsible for the greatest misunderstanding of all about pigs.

  ‘If they’re kept out in a field, they’ll turn it into a swampy mess,’ he says, acknowledging that where there are pigs, there is muck, but then stresses that this is a by-product of their passion for foraging rather than some in-built appetite for destruction.

  Make no mistake, every pig has the potential to churn pristine swathes of greenery into a mire within a short space of time. But it doesn’t follow that they either like it that way or are beyond caring.

  When I first introduced Butch and Roxi to their new home, it had been previously occupied over several years by chickens. At the time, I thought their persistent scratching at the ground was bad. They had raked away the grass inside the enclosure and turned the surface soil to a fine powder. Within 24 hours of their residency, the pigs had taken things to the next level. Literally. I clearly remember standing at the fence to observe their work. Numb with shock, all I really registered was the fact that they appeared to have uncovered an underground water source beneath the deep strata of clod and clay. The trickle turned out to be run-off from a nearby field rather than a spring I might have bottled and turned to my advantage. Nevertheless, by just adding water to the mix I witnessed the rapid transformation from what was a shaded area of my garden into a recreation of the Somme.

  At times, usually after heavy rainfall, the cratered bog became impassable for the pigs in places. They would return from a toilet crossing with a plimsoll line of mud up to their shoulders. Both Butch and Roxi put up with it, and nothing stopped them
from their mission to mine around the roots from next door’s great oak. Nevertheless, the space was a mess and I sensed that my pigs weren’t entirely happy in it.

  ‘We need to let their enclosure rest for a bit,’ I suggested to Emma one day during a downpour. Neither pig had even bothered to emerge from their sleeping quarters, and I just felt sorry for them.

  ‘So, where shall we put them?’ she asked, and then gave me a look when I glanced through the window at the garden. We had already evacuated the chickens from the enclosure after the ground had threatened to swallow them up.

  ‘Just for a short while,’ I said. ‘I’ll pen off an area and then make it good again afterwards.’

  My wife couldn’t bring herself to watch later that day when I invited Butch and Roxi to venture onto the lawn. They emerged into the daylight looking fed up, and then pricked up their ears when I directed their attention to the open gate. Beyond, I imagine they saw the lush cut stripes and wondered if they were dreaming. With a kick of her rear trotters, Roxi was first out, and promptly raced around the space with a squeal. Butch took a moment to muster the courage, but quickly followed suit. And as I watched them roll the first of many sods, I knew that was just the price we had to pay for falling for the myth of the minipig. It had seemed like a big sacrifice at the time, but witnessing the upswing in their spirits on driving their snouts into fresh grass made it all worthwhile.

  The ground in the enclosure had taken a beating, but after a dry spell and some work reconditioning the soil, I returned the pigs to an enclosure they could turn over again. I also made good on my promise to Emma by turfing the garden where the pigs had trashed it, only for us all to repeat the process during the next round of rainfall that left both areas looking as bad as each other. With heavy hearts, we began to recognise that ultimately, we hadn’t just run out of garden but options. It was painfully clear to us both that Butch and Roxi needed more space that could be divided and rotated on a regular basis. We could put up with the noise and the early-morning breakfast commitments, but ultimately, the mess became a measure of their happiness. What mattered here above all else was Butch and Roxi’s welfare, which is why we began the unenviable task of seeking pastures new for them.