Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France

by Jacqueline Yallop

  We’ll have to hang the carcasses so we can cool them, clean them and dismember them. We examine beams in the woodshed but they’re only a little over head height and when it’s hung from its back trotters, a pig carcass will be well over six feet long. A tree branch would probably work, but there are no good solid branches close enough to the house. And there’ll be the weight, too. How do we hoick such a weight up high? You’ll need a winch, somebody says. A winch! And good heavy chains. Such things might be an investment if we were planning a full-scale attack on the butchery business, but we can’t justify the expense just for Big Pig and Little Pig. So we ask around, forlornly, in the hope that someone might be able to help.

  As the evenings draw in, I watch videos of pig butchery, weighing up the subtle difference between one way and another of slicing up animal flesh. I watch English butchers enthusing over hefty roasting joints; French butchers delighting in stranger, more delicate cuts such as the levure – from the word for yeast, to rise – a little sliver of marbled meat which puffs up on the griddle or barbecue. When we feel as though we’ve some kind of understanding of basic principles, Ed and I spend a morning with Benoît, the farmer who sold us Big Pig and Little Pig as weaners. He’s converted one of his barns into a workshop for butchering and processing meat. It’s stainless steel, cold, very clean, an odd appendage to the rest of the farm which is the usual muddle of old stone buildings and rusting cars and tractors. We watch carefully as he divides new carcasses and cuts them down: joints, chops, steaks. We talk to him about sausage recipes, and about drying out saucissons and, of course, about the ham. He suggests we allow him to cure that for us and keep it for a year or two until it’s ready to eat: ‘Two years is better, if you want real flavour.’ We buy an all-purpose saw from the hardware shop, and order a series of specialist butcher’s knives over the Internet.

  And none of this seems strange. It seems a perfectly ordinary way to spend time. I enjoy the investigation, the discussion, the shopping. It seems largely an intellectual problem: how do you satisfactorily take a bulky living animal and transform it into a state whereby it fits neatly into freezer drawers without waste or damage? The act of processing the carcass is a bit like doing jigsaw puzzles, or the infant’s game where you fit wooden blocks into shaped holes, or even Tetris; it’s about packing things away tidily, managing a task. It’s little more than a question of logistics. So I become thoroughly involved with the planning, and when I’ve finished watching a video showing me how to winkle the tenderloin from under the ribs with a deft slide of a blade, I wander down to the enclosure to see if Little Pig wants his stomach tickled.

  Do I put two and two together? Do I match the butcher’s knives with the stomach? The meat with the animal? The live with the dead? Do I think about what I’m doing? Or perhaps, more relevantly, do I feel it? The moment is nearly upon me; the moment when I’ll have to decide and then act; when I will have to know, for sure, whether or not I can kill my pigs and make that knowing count. Because just now I don’t think I do know, not certainly. I think I’ve shimmied and waffled; I’ve shunted away unpleasant thoughts and left them to wither. I’ve been having too much fun. But Big Pig and Little Pig are supposed to die at my hand. That’s their destiny, preordained. And I’d better face up to it, sooner or later.

  One of the pigs’ new favourite games is pear chase. I stand at the top of the slope with a bucket of windfall pears from the tree in our garden. The fruit are too small and grainy for us, but the pigs love them, and in particular love foraging for them, so I hurl them one at a time as hard and as far as I can. The pears bounce off in all directions, ricocheting from trunks, rolling down the terraces, splatting hard against stones; the pigs follow after, galloping down the hill, slipping and sliding, stopping to find a pear, hearing another one fall close by and setting off after it, barging and wrangling, snuffling through the dug earth after the scent of fruit. When I’ve emptied the bucket I watch them for a while and then leave them to their search; they’ll be at it a long time.

  Pears. Apples. Plums. Blackberries. There’s more fruit than they can eat, and still plenty of produce from the garden, still more courgette mush, still pumpkins and spoiled tomatoes. As the nights begin to draw down damp, conditions are perfect for growing, and we begin to come across sprouting tomato plants all over the enclosure, courgette plants, too, cucumbers, all poking through now where the pigs have ‘processed’ the seeds in their dung. They eat these seedlings, too, and chomp through clumps of lilac-flowering lucerne, a high-protein food crop which has seeded from fields far away and taken root amidst the grass in shadier corners. All this, and still the acorns to come, and chestnuts, and walnuts, too, from some of the trees at the edge of the woods. The perfect way to fatten up the pigs. Well-fed pigs with a good layer of fat will be in perfect condition for the cold weather at the end of the year – and for slaughter.

  Our farming neighbours are fascinated by what we’re feeding our pigs. It’s always the first question, even though they’ve asked us several times before. Where do we get the grain? What quality is it; what’s in it, exactly? Are we supplementing from the garden and kitchen? We run through the details and they nod in approval. We go to great trouble to fetch the sacks of dry, soft, organic grain from Benoît. He’s agreed that we can go along and help ourselves from his store, keeping count of the sacks and settling up later. We go once a week or so and stand beneath the silos, manoeuvring the sacks on to the tricky spouts, holding them firmly so that the floury cereal doesn’t spray everywhere when the catch is released and the contents hurtle down the metal pipe in a burst. Benoît’s pigs hear the rumble of the feed in the tubes and come careering hopefully to the fence, keeping a close eye on us, barging so energetically and so close to the single electric wire that every time I’m sure they’re going to pour forward in a mess of heavy black pig and overwhelm us. I’m used to two pigs – this scrum of twenty or thirty squealing animals is alarming. But it’s no wonder the grain is such an attraction. The roaming herds have cleared great swathes of Benoît’s forested land, digging out the undergrowth and leaving just the oaks standing in the rocky earth, and there are dried peas in the mix, and beans and corn; good things.

  What are you feeding them? It’s an obsession that goes back a long way. Most of us now are interested in what we feed ourselves: we’re bullied and cajoled until we’re simply forced to take an interest in it. Fat? Salt? Sugar? Really? How many portions? But in the past, it was what you fed your animals that mattered because this, in turn, had a direct effect on what you ate: if your pig was healthy and stout, with plenty of meat, then you ate well for a long time. If it was ailing, or the meat was poor, then you and your family might just starve. So it was worth taking note of what food made your animals thrive.

  By the seventeenth century there was already recognition that husbandry – the cultivation of animals and crops to elicit the best possible yield – was a ‘science’ which demanded close attention to detail, as well as enterprise and experiment. In 1612, the significance of adding peas and other high-energy legumes to foodstuff as a valuable source of protein was championed in a husbandry manual written by Gervase Markham,4 a soldier, horse breeder and poet who also found time to urge the housewife to acquire the ‘inward and outward virtues’ of a ‘complete woman’, and to tackle modern farming methods. But cereals and pulses were (and still are) expensive, so most cottagers or pig farmers continued to rely largely on forest grazing, known as pannage, to fatten their animals. Wooded land, and access to it, however, declined steadily from the Middle Ages onwards, as trees were cut for timber or charcoal, populations grew and towns expanded. Particular conditions in some areas also had an effect: the increase in demand across the world for high-quality English wool, for example, meant that trees were felled and forest cleared as more farms were laid out to grass – sheep were more profitable and much less labour intensive than pigs. In the early nineteenth century, the fortunate inhabitants of the New Forest had rights to pannage
from fifteen days before Michaelmas, at the end of September, until forty days after: around 6,000 pigs were let loose to feast on the nuts and acorns. This right to graze, called the ‘Common of Mast’, still exists, although fewer pigs are given the opportunity to fatten in this way. But in general, by the 1900s, unless you were rich enough to own your own stretch of woodland – or fortunate enough, like us, to borrow some for a while – it could be a struggle to find good land for fattening your pig. While cottagers in the New Forest might have been able to feed their animals conveniently right throughout the autumn, in many areas, acorns, beech mast, hazelnuts and chestnuts were becoming a scarce commodity.

  The reduction in forest grazing meant fewer and fewer big herds of pigs, and more emphasis on the family pig fed from scraps and scavenged hedgerow titbits. And the pig’s natural ability to fatten on all kinds of waste products was put to good use in some places with inventive reciprocal arrangements between pig owners and local industries. The nutritious leftovers from distilling and beer making were particularly popular: brewer’s grains, sweepings from the barley stores and general beery sludge fattened some 9,000 pigs a year around the large London breweries at Vauxhall, Battersea and Wandsworth. Dairies, too, were a good source of food; the mutual dependency of the pig and the dairy endured well into the last century and led to the establishment of an important droving route taking pigs from Wales to the dairies in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire and eventually on to the London meat markets. Pigs loved the whey skimmed off during cheese making and, in turn, they supplemented the income of the dairy farmer for no additional cost: during his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain in the 1720s, Daniel Defoe stopped to admire the pigs in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, and the system which sustained them. ‘This bacon is raised here by their great Dairies,’5 he remarked, ‘as their Hogs are fed with the vast Quantities of Whey, and skimm’d milk, which the farmers must otherwise have thrown away.’ Even today, here and there, the long-standing link between the dairy and the pig remains intact: Big Pig and Little Pig, when they were very young, had their diet supplemented with the petit lait (whey) from the goat’s cheese farm just down the road from where they were born.

  The acorns are beginning to fall, pattering through the undergrowth on breezy days like intermittent rain; plums and apples are still in abundance. The pigs spend almost the entire day eating, taking only occasional breaks from foraging to wallow, rarely dozing. They don’t look fat. But they’re beginning to seem heavier, more cumbersome: it takes them longer to puff up the slope to the field; Little Pig sometimes pauses halfway up the climb, gazing mournfully towards the summit. They’re no longer sprightly youths; in their black skins, they have more of a studied air about them, like portly Victorian gentlemen. This new bearing suits Big Pig perfectly. He’s growing firmer of flesh and character. He’s begun to separate himself from us a little, responding less urgently to our calls, measuring his place in this haphazard herd of humans and dogs and pigs; his calm self-reliance is not yet aloofness, but admits more and more a wary distance. Little Pig is just burly. He still wants company, entertainment, attention, and presses for it more vigorously.

  The harvest from the garden is almost finished. There’s little more to be done now except the usual clearing of dead plants and sorting of stakes and nets and ties. Since the pigs have so much food in the woods, and are so busy foraging for it, we decide to take the opportunity to have a couple of nights’ holiday. Jean-Claude agrees to keep their water topped up, and dole out the grain rations; we walk the perimeter of the fence with care, slowly, checking for any possible glitches that might cause problems while we’re away. I’m struck again by how successfully the pigs have opened up the land and swept the forest floor; I watch Big Pig snuffling methodically along one of the terraces, turning up the soil, crunching his way towards the big oak with Matthieu’s swing, where the acorns are gathering. It’s all orderly, calm, disciplined. There seems no reason not to take a holiday. Ice cream. Swimsuits. No pigs.

  When I was young, one of my mother’s many reasons for not allowing pets was the work involved in keeping them. It’s a tie, she always said. Having a pet, she maintained, would mean a loss of freedom; it would mean not being able to do things. And in part, of course, this is true. Most people these days have some free time and choose to spend it doing something, usually away from home, in town with friends or travelling, unconstrained by the routines of animal feeding. Keeping pigs is a reminder of a different age when families didn’t expect to go anywhere and there was not much room for leis-ure. It made no difference if you had to be home to feed the pig because you would be at home anyway. Solange has been away once in her life, on her honeymoon: she and her new husband took a couple of days to visit the shrine at Lourdes and pray. Since then, for fifty years or so, she’s been at the farm, every day. But, like other things, this compact world view is changing: young families around us go off on holiday, professionals fly abroad for meetings, couples take weekend breaks in the cities to go to concerts or theatres. Farming is no longer, by default, associated with the patch of land on which the farm stands – many expansive barn roofs are newly cloaked in solar panels, growing energy as a crop, supplying homes and businesses far distant – nor is it assumed that cultivating fields and keeping livestock has to be all-consuming: there are vegetable gardens kept for pleasure, chickens too, ducks, sheep, a few cattle. Even in this ancient heart of agriculture, farming is losing its hold, its constriction, on living – the daily professional devotion to livestock is much loved and respected but is no longer considered a natural, inevitable occupation.

  But slipping from the old ways perhaps has more impact than is immediately obvious. The apparent timelessness of the landscape belies the pressure on farmers to expand and diversify. Gradually, in an almost invisible, piecemeal fashion, old field systems are nudged and tweaked to make them easier, larger, more profitable. Stone-walled paths are pulled out quietly – by the time someone notices a track marked on the map is no longer where it should be, the land has been flattened and evidence concealed. Around our house, several of the smaller fields have been melded together, hedges uprooted and trees felled, small fallow meadows replaced with larger plots that can be ploughed and harvested by tractor. This does not seem, on the face of it, a terrible thing. Farmers need to make a living; the landscape has to be shaped to new demands. The fields are still fields, flickering with butterflies and bright with flowers, only they’re larger now, and the view has opened up between them, one from the other. But look more closely and even in this place of apparent permanence you can spot the effects of these changes. When we first came here, a summer twilight bustled with hedgehogs; glow-worms sprinkled the verges; barn owls perched on the fence posts and swooped low when we passed. There are glow-worms still, sometimes, glittering here and there like tiny splinters of neon, but there are fewer of them; I hear a barn owl chuntering occasionally, or screeching, but it’s a long time since I’ve driven home late from town and caught the beautiful pale swoop of them in the headlights, one after the other, many owls like puffs of ghosts; it’s several summers since I’ve seen a hedgehog. There must be a decline in other creatures, too; in things I haven’t noticed – bugs and insects, mice and moles, unspectacular and uncountable little birds – and in the plants that thrived in the tiny sheltered meadows.

  Perhaps I’m saddened by these tiny shifts in the environment because my own place in it is so uncertain; because Ed and I force ourselves to peek now and again into the future to see whether we can picture ourselves here or whether we’ve been carried far away by economic forces and family loyalties. Perhaps I want this place to remain the same, timeless, unchanging, because that would indicate something reassuring about my own position and even the state of the much larger world beyond; it would suggest that, yes, there are places where small lives flourish quietly and undisturbed as they always have done. But I don’t think my observations are merely sentimental. I realize that they’re not scie
ntific record either, but they are carefully and thoughtfully made over time. It may be a very small decline in this very large tract of land that makes up the natural treasure chest of south-west France, but it’s a lessening, nonetheless, a sign that nothing is what it once was, and my fear is that too soon, as in other rural landscapes, the balance will lurch and the hedgehogs and glow-worms and owls will be fully lost, as the old pig-keeping ways have been lost, and only the widows will regret them; and then the widows, too, will be gone.

  In this poised moment of the not-quite-ancient, not-quite-modern Aveyron heartlands, the life of the land is still just about held in balance with the pressures of farming but it’s clear that small-scale agriculture is struggling, and we’re fortunate that we’ve been able to keep pigs as an interlude, a hobby. We haven’t needed them or their meat to ensure we won’t starve; we haven’t had to fit their care around the exhausting demands of working the land. We haven’t had to calculate overheads per kilogram of meat in order to turn a profit. It’s been an indulgence, a treat. We’ve been tied to them but this has been our choice; we’ve welcomed the bond. It’s not meant missing out. Rather, it’s made new things possible, and has forced new things upon us: I now know, for what it’s worth, how to put in a proper electric fence; how to mix animal foodstuff correctly; how to inject a pig. But more than this simple process of learning, it’s also brought a kind of freedom quite different from the ability to go away for the night or take a day off. Tramping round to the enclosure three times a day, every day (sometimes more), caring for and simply watching the pigs, has gifted me what I can only describe as a ‘freedom of being’, a kind of licence to be nothing other than this, a person with pigs. This sense of liberation is unexpected, and I’m not entirely sure how it’s come about. It has something to do with connection and repetition, but also with new experience abutting tradition, and the physical sensations of mud, dust, grass, grain. It’s as much about grubby, tiring, welly-boot tasks as the brief interludes of walking with the pigs or showering them under cloudless skies; the daily interaction with the pigs and the land they’re inhabiting has become like an extended meditation, each moment, each experience incubating the next, serenely but certainly; it’s allowed me to place myself in time – here we are with weaners; here they’re too big for their enclos-ure; now they’re moving to the woods, growing, fattening – and this is comforting, freeing, because it’s a definite chronology, unequivocal: I remember when it started and I know when it’s going to end. It’s going to end with the death of the pigs.