The Unexpected Genius of Pigs

by Matt Whyman

  If I consider his role in their great escapes, it was always Roxi who led the way. Looking back on those episodes, having spent time with Wendy and the Professor, I wonder whether Butch only followed to keep a watchful eye on his temperamental and flighty friend. Apart from the time when the fermented apples got the better of him, I always found him close beside her.

  In his own quiet way, I think, as if mindful of his physical shortcomings as much as the sensible head on his shoulders, that put Butch in charge.

  Love is in the air

  It’s no surprise to learn that for an animal with such acute olfactory senses, smell plays a pivotal role in pig courtship. The smell of a sow is incredibly potent to the boar. It can draw his attention, shape and determine his mood, and dictate his behaviour with predictable consequences. It will even make other sows around attempt to mount her, though she simply shrugs them off.

  At the same time, the boar sends out signals of his own. He’ll mark his territory with urine, and also chomp, chew and gnash his teeth to produce a foam-like saliva. This is rich in a sex pheromone, and works with the heady notes of his wee to alert the sow and make his intentions known. It may not be subtle, and there’s certainly no room for romance, but it works.

  On average a sow can produce a litter of up to 12 piglets twice a year. That number can reach 20 in some cases, which makes the pig one of the most productive livestock on the farm. Whether they live in captivity, or come and go as they please under the watchful eye of a keeper like Wendy, any breeding requires close care and attention to prevent being overrun by tiny trotters. This begins by determining if the sow is ready for the boar, but, according to Professor Mendl, not all pigs are as easy to read as my Roxi.

  ‘We can use aerosols to detect oestrus,’ he tells me, and describes how such sprays contain a synthetic hormone that mimics the presence of the boar. If the sow gets a whiff and locks her back legs, she’s in what’s called ‘standing heat’. This can also be determined by pressing down on the sow’s back. If she doesn’t seek to get away, the Professor explains, the time has arrived to bring out the boar.

  I cannot pretend that the coupling of a boar and sow is anything other than functional. Pigs pretty much follow a script. I can’t say if that makes it joyless, but it is clearly efficient. On meeting, with the boar still frothing at the mouth, and the pair sniffing enthusiastically as they circle and size each other up, the boar will often nudge at the sow’s flanks with his snout. This might look like some kind of courtship ritual, and maybe there is something flattering in it for the sow, but it’s believed that the boar is physically encouraging the release of eggs ahead of the special moment.

  The mount, when it happens, can last for up to half an hour. I once watched a few minutes of such an encounter, alongside Emma, midway through a pig-keeping workshop on a farm. The coupling wasn’t part of the programme, but it was a bonus. We had just been wandering around during the lunch break and found them in full swing. Every now and then the boar would thrust as if to remind the sow that he wasn’t asleep at the wheel, which I learned is standard pig practice, but mostly he just clung on. The sow, meanwhile, seemed more interested in grazing.

  ‘Priorities,’ my wife observed, before we decided to leave them to it.

  While I missed the climactic moment, which can last for up to three minutes, I am heartened to learn during my conversation with Wendy that the boar doesn’t simply move on in search of his next conquest. They make time for each other, even if the reason why is open to interpretation.

  ‘There’s definitely a connection,’ she assures me. ‘Once they’ve mated, they will lie down and curl up with each other. It’s rather sweet, and cuddly, but the truth is they’re probably both knackered. I don’t think they’re saying, “Ah, that was nice”.’

  9

  What Pigs Can Teach Us About Parenting

  In pig

  Three is a significant number when it comes to pig gestation. As a rule of thumb, from the moment of conception, it takes a sow three months, three weeks and three days for a pregnancy to come full term. When I first learned about this during my time as an overwhelmed keeper of pigs, it struck me as being quite magical and continues to do so now. I had no desire to increase the pig count in my garden – quite the opposite, in fact – but I still think of this means of counting down towards the arrival of a litter as a form of poetry.

  The nesting instinct

  Maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention when we did the traditional primary school trip to the farm. Perhaps I’d left the room to put the kettle on when they covered it in the natural world documentaries. Whatever the case, it’s only recently that I realised I have drifted through life without ever coming across the quite wonderful fact that pigs are masters in the craft of building nests.

  I’ve always known that birds don’t have the monopoly here. Mammals from the mouse to the gorilla are known to spin together a nice, safe space to sleep or raise their young. When Professor Mendl tells me that pigs belong to the same exclusive club, my first response is to pretend I knew this all along and hope he doesn’t see through me.

  ‘In the wild, if you know what to look for you’ll find wild boar nests,’ he says, and, frankly, if I wasn’t so intimidated by these animals I would head straight out and look for some. ‘Generally, piglets stay with their mother in a structure like this for the first week. Then they start to venture out.’

  The Professor tells me that nest building is a form of functional behaviour, for domestic pigs as much as wild boar, in that it serves a specific purpose. If she’s free to create such a structure, the expectant sow is able to isolate herself from the group in an environment that feels protected, safe and warm. We talk about the evolution of the farrowing crate, which is a box used in industrial pig farming that allows the mother just enough space to lie down to give birth without crushing the piglets. In doing so, I begin to understand how important the Professor’s work is in constantly striving to improve pig welfare. The nest is a home woven by the occupant to meet their needs exactly. We might be able to create an artificial space in the name of grand-scale efficiency, but the ultimate aim must be to encourage that nesting instinct and allow pigs the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from any self-build.

  When I raise the subject of pig nesting with Wendy on her farm, she tells me that it isn’t just reserved for the sow preparing to farrow.

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen boys building nests,’ she says quite casually. We’re standing at the edge of her courtyard now, taking turns with a hose to wash down our wellingtons. I’ve already had one go, but it’s going to take several attempts to properly clean them. ‘Pigs are just clever at building something warm and cosy, where they can sleep.’

  ‘What does it look like?’ I ask, having come clean about the fact that I only learned about their crafting skills during my conversation with the Professor.

  Wendy hands me the hose again.

  ‘Like a giant bird’s nest,’ she says. ‘If a sow is about to have piglets, she’ll spend 24 hours building it. During that time she’ll take anything: buckets, hosepipes, brushes – whatever she can drag. It’s just her instinct to dig a hollow and then pile anything into a big bowl shape.’

  By now, I am itching to see an example. Wendy tells me she hasn’t come across one for a while, which just makes them seem even more mythical in my mind.

  ‘Are some pigs better than others at nest building?’ I ask.

  ‘The Swedes are unbelievably good at it,’ says Wendy, in a moment of rare praise for the breed. I want to ask her if they build them from a flat pack, but decide to keep that to myself. ‘They tend to collect stuff around four in the afternoon, often when it starts to get cooler and darker in the winter months. They’ll go up into the woods, find a bloody great big branch and drag it out. And then I’ll hear an almighty rumpus because they can’t fit it into their ark. So, they have to abandon it and find something smaller.’

  ‘So, the nest building doesn’
t always happen out in the open?’ I ask, because something here has struck a note with me.

  When Wendy confirms that she often finds nests inside the pig’s sleeping quarters, I realise that I have seen plenty without realising.

  A magpie in the house

  During their early residence inside our house, Butch and Roxi tested me in many different ways. As they were Emma’s pet project, I hadn’t envisaged that I’d have much to do with them. Then the first day of the week arrived and I found myself in the role of writer and sole carer to a pair of tiny, squeaking pigs that seemed really pleased to be in my company.

  In some ways, the house went to ruin as much as my work throughout this time. If I wasn’t scrubbing the carpet in the corner of the front room I was banging extra nails into the floorboards to stop them from being uprooted. The fridge was another flashpoint, in that I couldn’t attempt to make a sandwich for lunch without Roxi staging a drama. But perhaps Butch was responsible for the greatest test of all, and that took the form of thieving.

  In a busy household, things are always going missing. Socks end up in the wrong drawer, and go on rotation from one bedroom to another, while the kids almost always wait until we’re heading out for school to declare that they’ve mislaid their PE kit. I’m used to putting stuff down and then finding it gone. Living under the same roof as Butch, I found I couldn’t even put that thing down, because it would be missing in the first place.

  It wasn’t just the frequency with which things disappeared. The items our boar stole seemed both random and baffling. In a typical week, I could lose everything from the insole of a shoe to a towel from the rail in the bathroom, my hole puncher and the tongs for the wood burner. Naturally, in the beginning, I blamed the youngest of my children. My poor son was accused of wandering off with a box of plasters, the kitchen apron and a recipe card for paella. He also received a grovelling apology when I found all the items rammed inside Butch and Roxi’s little pig ark.

  ‘What does he think he is?’ I asked Emma one time, having searched the house for a phone charger and then found it in what had become a robbers’ lock-up. ‘A minipig or a magpie?’

  All this occurred at a time before they trashed the house and then went on to become a growing responsibility in my garden. As far as Emma was concerned, I was just moaning because I had yet to bond with Butch and Roxi as she had, and then fill my social media feed with improbable pictures of the pair.

  ‘It’s just stuff,’ she reasoned. ‘Nothing precious.’

  A few days later, she changed her tune, but not the channels on the TV, when Butch stole the remote. It was one of the kids who bellowed that it was missing, and me who conducted a search of the pig ark in my office. Sure enough, I found it among the Lego bricks and pens. Of all the things my family couldn’t function without, I thought to myself on returning it to the front room, it was this. He could’ve taken the car keys or my wallet, but the TV remote was a step too far.

  ‘Here.’ I tossed the remote to Emma and then addressed the kids as they stopped panicking and ceased turning the house upside down. ‘In future, if you want to keep anything safe in this house, place it at least three feet off the ground so the pigs can’t reach it.’

  This wasn’t the kind of advice I had ever imagined I would share with my children, but they certainly took it on board when their mother tutted and drew our attention to the remote in her hand.

  ‘Look at it,’ she said, though a moment passed before I realised what was wrong. ‘Look at the buttons!’

  I am guessing that Butch was drawn by the scent of all those fingertips searching the channels for something decent to watch. Having dragged the remote into the straw, he must’ve just got carried away and nibbled pretty much all of them down to nubs. The remote was useless, and life in our house transformed beyond recognition until the replacement arrived a few days later. That was the moment Butch earned everyone’s forgiveness, but it wasn’t until I spent time with people who truly understood pigs that I realised his true motive.

  ‘He was nest building,’ says Wendy with absolute conviction when I tell her the story. ‘If you give a pig a chance, you’ll always find something in amongst the straw.’

  The mothering instinct

  If both male and female pigs are instinctively skilled in creating nests, only the expectant mothers do so in preparation for the arrival of their young. Given their skills as homemakers, I ask Professor Mendl if the boar shows any interest in antenatal care.

  ‘It’s a good question,’ he says with a half-smile, and I can tell as he looks to a point midway between us that he’d like to respond with a list of all the things they do to support the mother. A moment later, having found nothing to report, it seems, the Professor blinks and returns his attention to me.

  ‘I suppose defending behaviour would make sense if such a situation arose,’ he offers finally, ‘but the boar don’t provide in any way, the mother does everything.’

  From the moment a piglet arrives in this world, weighing just a couple of pounds, it relies on strong guiding signals. While the sow tends to lie on her side for the first few days, she serves as a command centre for her brood as much as a source of life. With litters numbering on average between eight and 12, the piglet quite literally faces a fight for survival. Firstly, piglets are poorly insulated. They must huddle to stay warm, both with each other and by staying close to their mother in the nest. Piglets also shiver to achieve the same effect, and critically, they have to suckle in order to thrive, as well as receiving antibodies in the milk that are vital to boosting immunity. Led by the smell from the mother’s teats, they follow the direction of her bristles. Like a signposting of the senses, these grow in such a way as to take the sow’s newborns to the source. Here, the piglet and her hungry brothers and sisters overcome a scene of potential chaos every feeding time and achieve something extraordinary.

  Smart suckling

  ‘Teat order is set up soon after birth,’ Professor Mendl tells me. ‘Calling upon odour cues from the sow and whoever is next to them, each piglet claims a teat. There’s usually a bit of pushing and shoving to begin, and it must be challenging for the ones in the middle, but eventually the order emerges and they settle down.’

  Known as ‘teat fidelity’, this established system holds true throughout the suckling period. The Professor goes on to explain that the teats towards the front of the sow produce more milk than those at the back, which is often where the weakest will end up. The runt, as we often call the unlucky piglet, may well have been the last to be born. It’s a cruel outcome based on chance, but begins to school the piglets in vital life lessons. In the time it takes for them each to settle on a teat, they’ve come to recognise the importance of a social hierarchy as much as the benefits of working as a group. Meantime, the mother has barely begun to school them.

  ‘In the wild, she’ll suckle them for between eight and 12 weeks,’ says Professor Mendl. ‘On farms they can be weaned at one month, and in that period the mother is the most important pig of all to them.’ He explains that the sow produces milk approximately once an hour, but in order for the milk to be let down, the piglets must stimulate her teats. ‘The mother will grunt to her offspring in a particular way to indicate when it’s time for them to latch on, which means the piglets quickly learn to respond to her voice,’ he continues. ‘They’ll massage the teats for up to 15 minutes, before she tells them that the milk is on the way, and then everything is synchronised so that all the piglets get their milk at the same time.’

  I am surprised to learn that this drinking phase only lasts for up to a minute, during which time the mother’s grunting can become lower and softer in tone. Some have observed that it sounds a little like she’s singing to her young, but it’s believed that in fact she’s providing a kind of running commentary. In return, once that milk drop is over, the young will continue to knead her teats as a means of reporting back with a nutritional update – with more kneading serving as a request for a bigger dr
op next time, and less for a reduction. It’s an intensely close bond, and one that enables the mother to be certain that she is providing to the best of her abilities. In the wild, she also relies on her young to notify her when they are ready to be weaned. ‘As they grow older, the piglets will massage less,’ says Professor Mendl, ‘and so gradually the milk production begins to dry up.’

  The other mothers

  The mother will remain a central influence on her piglets once she’s rejoined the group with them. Even so, the youngsters will pick up on vital survival skills from the other members. In effect, the group will teach them how to dig, work out what’s good to eat, resolve differences and acquire all the tools they need to effectively become a good pig.

  ‘It’s mainly the sows that teach the young to forage,’ says Wendy. ‘If I hand-rear piglets, then I can have a hell of a job getting them to eat naturally. I can put anything on the floor, but unless it’s Frosties – which they love – they’ll just ignore it. I have to put food raised up on bricks before they’ll even show an interest, whereas a piglet that’s been on the teat will be taught to forage within 10 days.’