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

by Jacqueline Yallop

  Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s eighteenth-century chronicles of Paris suggested that butchers couldn’t help being savage ruffians. Living with the sights and sounds of slaughter, he claimed, inured them to brutality and death, and transformed them into some kind of man-beast monster prowling the stinking abattoirs in search of a fight: ‘ferocious and blood-thirsty with their naked arms,5 a thick neck, blood-shot eye, dirty legs, bloody apron; a knobby and massive baton arms their heavy hands and always ready for a brawl which they enjoy.’ Other eighteenth-century writers in Paris readily agreed, continuing to promote butchers as ‘violent undisciplined men’ – ‘If one could gather eleven to twelve hundred in three or four places, it would be very difficult to contain them and to prevent them from beating each other to death,’ one learned article noted grimly. And it wasn’t just Paris that housed such desperate hooligans: London’s Victorian cattle market at Smithfield was also a place renowned for lawlessness and violence, reputed across Europe for its filth, ‘drunkenness, confusion and riot’; the workers there – drovers and butchers – were commonly described as ‘savage’.6

  Under the influence of such real-life examples, folk tales and fictions delighted in the butcher as a figure of darkness and violence. The French equivalent of the bogeyman, le croque-mitaine, is a butcher who cuts up and devours small children, while a distinctly menacing character from traditional French Christmas stories, Père Fouettard (Father Whipper), accompanies St Nicholas in his search for good children, punishing miscreants along the way: in several versions of the story, Père Fouettard is a butcher who kidnaps three wealthy, plump young boys and eats them. The fear that butchers were only a good meal away from cannibalism crops up time and again, and is still a powerful undercurrent in popular culture: the 1991 French film Delicatessen features a darkly comic butcher-landlord called Clapet who lures the poor and unemployed to his lodgings, prowling around the staircases with a large knife and neatly filleting human bodies in the basement.

  Without too much undue butchery violence, we finally end up with beautiful long strings of sausages. Three recipes, each a different colour and texture: a Lincolnshire-type sausage, with dark scraps of sage visible through the casing; a basic pork sausage which is soft and fat; and a peppery, spicy version, reddish, rusty from plenty of Spanish pimentón, and grainier to the touch. It seems like good work. But holed up in the kitchen with the grinder cranking and the evocative scent of crushed herbs, we’ve been cocooned in our own world and it’s only when Mo barks that we’re shaken out of our sausagey reverie.

  He’s barking excitedly; it’s the high, eager bark he gives when someone he knows comes to the house. He wants to get out; he wants to leap and greet.

  I look out of the window next to the front door to check for visitors. I see Little Pig. He’s on the path between the lawn and the steps, looking around as if in search of something. He’s listening to Mo, following the sound, trying to unpick the mystery of a dog indoors, a bark behind walls. Has the fence failed again? We pull on our outdoor clothes and head out into the cold. I’m weary, a bit fed up of pig in all its forms. Little Pig clatters into us and I grab him by the loose skin of his neck in an attempt to haul him down the side of the house and off my front garden. He’s stubborn for a while; he digs in, pulls away, grumbles. It’s only when Mo goes running past, delighted at this unexpected outing, that Little Pig brightens. Ah, just the dog he was looking for. Mo comes back and they waggle together, nose to nose, as they used to do at the fence. And then Little Pig comes with me, trotting happily alongside, allowing me to guide him across the terrace and on to the grass at the back, his tail swishing contentedly.

  We take Little Pig back to the enclosure and repeat the fence operation: drive the poles in, tighten the wire across, check and recheck, click on the battery to run the current. ‘The battery must be draining a bit,’ Ed suggests. ‘We’ll ratchet it right up and it’ll be fine.’ We set the dial as high as it will go, check the water in Little Pig’s bucket in case it’s beginning to freeze, and step over the wire to make our way back to the house. As we do, we hear a noise behind us. We turn to see Little Pig barging the fence. He’s trampling through all three wires, bringing down two plastic posts at the same time, disentangling himself from the wreckage with a kick and heading towards us with brisk determination.

  He’s fixed on going back to the house. It takes us several minutes to get him under control, talking to him, standing close, offering a handful or two of grain. Eventually, he calms down. Since my dad, sensibly, has given up the pig-droving business after a short but glorious career, it’s my turn to lead Little Pig backwards and forwards across the grass and keep him happy while Ed mends the fence, again. At this point we still believe – we have to believe – that there’s some kind of malfunction with the equipment. But I’ve only just begun steering Little Pig awkwardly back towards the bottom of the garden, pushing against him with my legs, tacking sideways in a clumsy loop like a lopsided supermarket trolley, when I hear Ed squeal. He stumbles back, rubbing his hand and arm. The electric fence is working.

  With the dial turned up so high, there should be enough current running to shock a much bigger animal even than a large fat black pig: a horse or a cow, or a man. But we saw Little Pig barge through. Without hesitation; without making a sound. For another minute or two, as I work Little Pig back in the direction of the enclosure, Ed checks the flow of electricity around the complete circuit and we discuss the possibility that there’s some kind of ‘dead zone’ where the current is reduced or not flowing at all. We don’t quite know how this might be true. Even with my rudimentary grasp of the rules of physics it seems far-fetched, but we cling to the idea because we don’t want to believe the alternative explanation.

  The alternative explanation is that Little Pig is so lonely and distressed that he’s willing to push right through a live electric fence.

  We try just one more time. The usual routine. Posts, wire, battery; the clicking green light. Current running; all round. But Little Pig knows the routine, too, and even before we’ve left him this time, he’s off. There can be no doubt. We watch as he simply walks through the fence, steadily, without pause, without the slightest flinch.

  Big Pig and Little Pig, together, respected their enclosure because there was no real reason not to. There was no incentive to break out. Now Little Pig has a reason: he doesn’t want to be on his own; he wants to be with us, at the house; he wants to leave this place he doesn’t know, with a shelter he’s never claimed; he wants to find Mo and stand with him, the two of them waggling, doing their dog–pig thing.

  We let him walk. What else can we do? But it’s the afternoon before Christmas Eve and we’ve got a 170kg pig that we can’t enclose and can barely control. A sad, frantic, disorientated pig. This feels like a disaster, and an emergency.

  Mo stands inside the house at the front window. Little Pig stands outside, a step or two away. They keep an eye on each other. Little Pig shows no desire to roam; he’s apparently quite content to loiter in the front garden with a Dalmatian for company, and we leave him for a while. We attempt to solve two impossible conundrums: how to clean the squishy gunge of meat from the mechanics deep in the body of the sausage grinder, and what to do with Little Pig.

  We briefly discuss ways of securing the enclosure or creating some kind of pen in the woodshed. We face the prospect of walking endlessly with Little Pig, up and down through the Christmas holidays, finding a way to pass the nights. We take heart from the fact that he’s not rampaging through the neighbourhood, but we know that he’s becoming more and more unpredictable and unruly.

  We ring the abattoir.

  We’ve got a pig. We need to bring you a pig.

  We don’t stop to think whether this is really what we want. I’ve read horrible stories about slapdash abattoirs and cruel practices; I’ve been told that the stress of an abattoir death can affect the final quality of the meat; I’d dismissed the idea of our pigs going anywhere near the municipa
l abattoir a long time ago. But things have changed. We can’t go on with Little Pig as he is, and we can’t come up with an alternative. We feel cornered, desperate; we need to find a solution, and this appears to be it.

  Hello? Yes? Can you tell us what to do?

  Because we’ve made all the arrangements at home, we don’t know much about how the abattoir works. The man on the phone is very helpful but he warns us straight away: tomorrow is the last slaughter day before a long holiday closure. It’s Christmas Eve; after that there’ll be no one at work until the New Year has passed. Everything’s easing down. They might not be able to accommodate us.

  It’s only one pig. A big pig (a Little Pig), but only one. It’s urgent.

  There are set days for things, the man explains – days for taking large numbers of commercial stock and days for taking one or two animals from particuliers, smallholders. In addition, there are days for different animals: cow days are the most frequent, this being cow country, but there are designated sheep days, too, and pig days. Yes, there are pig days.

  There’s no flexibility in the system. French bureaucracy doesn’t allow it. Certain animals on certain days; that’s the rule. But, the man says, you might be all right. Tomorrow, the last day before Christmas, is a smallholders’ day, and a day when they can take pigs. A lucky 1-2. A godsend. ‘But you have to get your animal here this afternoon. It has to stay in overnight.’ How long do we have, then? ‘You have to be here by four thirty,’ he says. ‘Absolutely no later.’

  We can’t afford to miss this deadline. We can’t be stuck with Little Pig for two more weeks and don’t want to spend Christmas slaughtering and butchering a pig. But it’s only a little after 2 p.m. and the abattoir is no more than twenty minutes’ drive away. That leaves us about two hours to find some kind of transport and to devise a method of capturing free-roaming Little Pig to put him in it. Surely that’s possible; surely.

  Sapient. Knowing. As I watch Little Pig pressing his snout into the gap under the front steps, I wonder how much animal instinct can look like human thought or emotion. We’ve killed one pig and we’re about to send another to its death but Little Pig is concerned with nosing up grubs from the mossy slime that clings to the stone in the damp shade. He’s apparently untroubled by memories of the weekend slaughter; he seems to have completely forgotten a morning spent pining for company and barging fences. He cannot know what might happen next. No past, no future, just hunger and curiosity, grubs and stone, and the occasional itch that needs vigorous attention on the door frame.

  I think about my other pig story, the tale of Learned-Pig-turned-Toby, and I wonder what clue, if any, it might give me to the real nature of a pig. The distance between my pigs’ lives and the singular experiences of performing pigs two centuries ago seems enormous. It’s easy to think there can be no connection at all between Little Pig, waiting for a ride to the abattoir, and the glory days of multiple stage-struck Tobys. But Toby’s story forces me to return to the puzzle of anthropomorphism, and it’s here that Little Pig’s life collides with the older history; it’s here that I’m forced to consider, again, what it is that Little Pig perceives or understands or feels; what it is that makes Little Pig a pig and only a pig.

  We’re so accustomed to slipping across the boundary between the animal and the human that it’s perhaps only moments like this with Little Pig that force us to confront the strange and unpredictable intim-acy of our relationship with the beasts around us. The earliest of stories from around the world endowed animals with human qual-ities: Aesop’s fables from Ancient Greece; the fourth-century Buddhist Jātaka tales; fairy tales and Biblical stories of all kinds. The modern pigs of Charlotte’s Web or Babe have been made at least partly human, as have lovable, family favourites, like Piglet in Winnie-the-Pooh or Peppa Pig, and Orwell’s memorable allegorical pigs in Animal Farm. We habitually think of animals in human terms. But keeping my own pigs has made me think more closely about this tradition, and why it has such a hold on us, and at this moment, with Little Pig’s fate in the balance, the problem of anthropomorphism seems to me more complicated and personal than ever.

  And stepping back into the early nineteenth century, I catch sight of anthropomorphism run wild: the flurry of Tobys set light to something of a craze for pigs with human qualities and humans with piggy features. In particular, it resulted in a revival of the fascination with the pig-faced women of folklore. A learned editorial in The Times in 1815 brought readers up to date with the history of pig-faced women in general while it became popular knowledge that just such a young lady was living right under readers’ noses in London’s Marylebone. Reputedly young, of Irish noble birth and possessed of an excellent fortune, she had only been spied briefly, heavily veiled, and it quickly turned into something of a sport to spot her in a passing carriage and send a letter to the press describing her snout or her hairy pig’s head. In February, The Times carried an advertisement from a ‘young gentlewoman’ who volunteered to be the pig-faced woman’s companion in return for a ‘handsome yearly income’,7 and a month later George Cruikshank published a cartoon of ‘The Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square’ playing the piano, her svelte body and shapely legs turned to the viewer and visible under a scanty dress, her pretty pig’s face covered with a flimsy lace veil. Several would-be suitors and members of elite society were rumoured to have seen the woman in the flesh in her refined London home, while pig-faced women of less obvious gentility became a staple freak-show attraction at country fairs until the middle of the century.

  This rather prurient appetite for a not-quite-human, not-quite-pig hybrid prompted Toby to step off the stage and make a foray into literary circles, where he presented himself in distinctly human terms. ‘The Life and Adventures of Toby the Sapient Pig: with his Opinions on Men and Manners.8 Written by Himself’ was published sometime in 1817 and sold for a shilling. It begins with a dedication to ‘great persons’ and a moralizing paragraph espousing the virtues of ‘time, assiduity, and patience’. Then it plunges into a new Learned Pig story, the black pig reinvented, his history retold for a new gener-ation and his celebrity reaffirmed: ‘I was born,’ it begins, ‘in a place, if I am rightly informed, called Aversall, or Avershall, on the Duke of Bedford’s demesnes.’

  This is Toby presenting an autobiography in the tradition of rambling, conversational eighteenth-century adventures such as Robinson Crusoe or Henry Fielding’s History of Tom Jones. This is a pig relating its history and its career as though he were a man; a pig giving itself the airs of the aristocracy, a famous pig pandering to the curiosity of its audiences and laying claim to an entirely new readership. This Toby is well above the squalor of the sty: ‘I have never since been suffered to mix with any of the family,’ he snorts dismis-sively. This Toby teaches moral lessons about ‘irreproachable conduct’; he praises his ‘purity’ and the brilliancy of his own intelligence which ‘shone like a constellation’. He looks down on the bestial, uncivilized behaviour of some of the human louts who come to watch him perform: a drunken man, he notes primly, ‘outsteps the brute creation, in his thoughts, words, and deeds’.

  The slim pamphlet, which claimed to be ‘literally the truth’, was ‘published and sold by Nicholas Hoare’, Toby’s trainer. It’s playful and eloquent, sly and celebratory, a fine piece of advertising, a final flourish in the uneven story that has brought a sapient pig from a country pub in eighteenth-century Ireland to a sophisticated late-Georgian reading public. At the same time as readers were relishing Jane Austen’s novels, poems by Byron, Keats and Shelley, historical romps by Walter Scott, the ‘Songs’ of Robert Burns, Hegel’s philosophy and logic, and Malthus’ political economy, Hoare was bringing us this new piece of literature – the tale of how a humble black pig had become ‘the topic of the day’.

  The pig with a human name, Toby. The pig as human, or like a human. Toby talking with a human voice, recounting our hopes and fears, laughing at our vanities, sharing our sensitivities, judging our lapses, marshalling our
sympathies. An anthropomorphic transformation, from the ambiguous, unnamed performing pig, an entertaining animal that in time became less animal, to a fully functioning, emotional, intellectual being with a family tree, a grasp of etiquette and a thorough belief in its own genius. Woman, man and pig, side by side, companions, adversaries, equals.

  Is this how I view Little Pig? Like us? Feeling things as we do; sharing a human grasp of life? A Toby? I don’t, surely. I’m thoroughly aware of him as animal. I’ve been clear about that, all along. An intelligent, sentient, unique animal, but an animal, nonetheless. But in that case, why do I worry about the abattoir, a place designed for the efficient dispatch of animals? Why does it seem such a big step?

  We only know one person with a working trailer that’s big enough to take a fattened pig. There are such trailers all over the neighbourhood, obviously – all the farmers have them – but we only know one person well enough to ask him to help us at short notice the day before Christmas Eve when we’ve made a mess of managing our pigs. His name is Claude. He’s a dairy farmer. He’s been kind to us before: he’s lent us his JCB and had us round for dinner and taken us cycling with his children and helped us locate our septic tank. He sells us our wood every year and Ed has sometimes worked with him, splitting logs. We call him as calmly as we can and explain: we have to take Little Pig into town before he runs amok. We have to take him this afternoon before the abattoir closes; we’d like to take him now.

  Claude is in the middle of something. He, too, has chores to finish before Christmas. He’s bound by milking hours, morning and evening, and he presses all the other farming jobs in between, so he’s always busy, even in midwinter, and today he’s mending a barn roof. He speaks to us on his mobile from a perch on the rafters. We can’t let this distract us. ‘Please, can you help?’