The Unexpected Genius of Pigs. Matt Whyman
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
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. Until, 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.
As a one-off, I considered the moment worth sharing with my wife and kids. Over the course of the next few mornings, when I found Butch waiting for me beside his snoring partner, and then repeating the same trick, I marked him down as being as shrewd as he was small.
It took a while for Roxi to rumble him, and prime herself to wake up just as soon as Butch slipped from their bed. Naturally, she charged out and reclaimed her position as the pig entitled to first pickings. Butch seemed resigned to the situation, and took himself off for a wee. As he negotiated his way back to the sound of crunching and munching from his sister, I tossed him a handful of conciliatory nuts to keep him occupied while he waited.
The pig in the labyrinth
Professor Mike Mendl responds to my story like a seasoned parent.
‘Initially, your pig might well have been screaming to express hunger,’ he says. ‘But if you’re rewarding that behaviour they will learn from it.’
‘I didn’t feel I had much choice,’ I tell him.
‘If it was a child you would ignore it.’
I know he’s quite right, of course. Maybe Roxi would’ve desisted had I not given in and served breakfast under my own terms. But then I am quite sure many households within a 500-metre radius would’ve countered by serving me with a noise abatement notice. Regardless of my handling, I am interested in the fact that each pig sought to manipulate the situation to their advantage. Did that make them smart, sneaky or both? As the Professor is one of the country’s foremost experts