Might pigs fly? Only on the pages of precious medieval manuscripts, where they also play bagpipes and lyres, or turn out in hats; where prickly pigs grin at a shower of acorns. In these illuminations, pigs are at the heart of some of life’s most significant moments – harvest, feasting, war: a French manuscript from 1420, which once belonged to Henry VIII, shows Alexander the Great driving off an attack of elephants with a battalion of fierce, tusked pigs.
But even if pigs were extraordinary enough to repel elephants, they were also commonplace and comfortable. For centuries, they had lived side by side with humans. The first known piece of cave art in the world – on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi – dates back 40,000 years, and shows a plump babirusa, a native pig-deer. And as human communities grew and developed, so did their relationships with pigs. In rural Europe, most villages, and many families, kept at least one. In the burgeoning towns, they became part of the urban landscape: as far back as the 1690s, husbandry manuals included hints on how to “fatten swine in towns”; by 1850, there were 3,000 pigs roaming the pottery districts of north Kensington in London.
The pig was a promise, a guarantee you would not starve. But it meant more than just a full larder: living intimately alongside its owner, it was also a companion. Children took turns to ride on a friendly sow’s wide back. Letters sent home from distant work or war often asked after the health of the family pig. One 18th-century Lincolnshire guide went as far as suggesting that affectionate married life without a pig was unthinkable: “To have a sty in the garden, or, as often, abutting the cottage, was held to be as essential to the happiness of a newly married couple as a living room or bedroom.”
But for obvious reasons, pigs did not always make the easiest of house guests. After all, the words we use to describe dirty, unpleasant behaviour often have a distinctly piggy flavour: “boorish”; “pig-headed”; “swinish”. Living with its human hosts, the pig gained something of a reputation for filth. In his History of British Birds, the 19th-century engraver Thomas Bewick showed a nonchalant hog strolling under an outdoor privy while its owner defecated above. During the French Revolution, thousands of caricatures brought the god-like Louis XVI thoroughly down to earth by portraying the king as a filthy, wallowing swine.
But as anyone who has kept a pig will tell you, they are clean, intelligent animals – and fortunately it was clever pigs that garnered most attention. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, a series of distinguished “sapient pigs” toured Europe and America reading minds, spelling names and telling the time. Hugely a la mode, these porcine performers became something of an obsession for the cultural elite: Wordsworth referred to them in his long poem The Prelude; Thomas Hood wrote a comic lament especially about them; the cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson drew The Wonderful Pig, and Samuel Johnson concluded that “pigs are a race unjustly calumniated”.
Look back at art and writing over time and we see the pig, sometimes centre stage in grand spectacles, sometimes in the margins of a medieval manuscript. We see a preoccupation with a paradox: an animal that is not quite farm beast, not quite pet, and which is killed at home; a clever entertainer with a reputation for filth. And often we see a fascination with the moment of slaughter when such a paradox is resolved, one way or another.
In Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig by David Teniers the Younger, from the 1660s, two things stand out: the thick mid-winter snow, and the cluster of people around the unfortunate animal. Killing a pig was hard, cold, physical work that required many hands, but it was also a work of community, a momentous occasion, a cause for celebration and nostalgia. A sense of expectation tingled throughout the entire village before a slaughter: “There was a subdued air of excitement and expectancy,” wrote one early nature writer in Hertfordshire. In the Lake District, Beatrix Potter reminisced with pleasure about scraping “the smiling countenance of my own grandmother’s deceased pig, with scalding water and the sharp-edged bottom of a brass candlestick”. The author who encouraged us to love Peter Rabbit believed the slaughter was a family affair, and protested against proposed legislation that would prevent children taking part.
Even in the dim past of “olden times”, few people killed anything of any warmth and bulk – other than a pig. The slaughter and subsequent butchery was immediate, physical, noisy, violent, memorable: an out-of-the-ordinary event. In a matter of minutes, as Ted Hughes describes in “A View of a Pig”, the family companion was transformed into a weight of meat, an object to be scoured “like a doorstep”.
And in those life-and-death minutes much is revealed about what it means to be animal, and what it means to be human. When Thomas Hardy lingers on a pig killing in Jude the Obscure, it is to dwell on some of the most intrinsic human feelings: surprise, rage, despair, betrayal. At the end of the struggle, Jude “felt dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he had done”. The slaughter provokes soul-searching and self-doubt; it forces Jude to consider his own fate.
These days, few of us have witnessed the killing of a pig. In fact, we probably don’t think very much about pigs: they are mostly hidden in sheds and pens, their final hours concealed behind abattoir walls. For thousands of years, artists and writers have investigated what it means to have a pig living – and dying – alongside us: now we no longer know what this proximity feels like. Pigs are strange to us. In the cultural record of the 21st century, there may be hardly a glimpse of them. Such distance will leave us out of touch not only with a pig’s coarse, warm, elastic hide, but also with ourselves.
• Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France by Jacqueline Yallop is published by Fig Tree.
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