by Matt Whyman
I love the fact that the sow relies on her sisters in the group to help raise and educate her young. In this matrilineal structure, each new generation is effectively mothered on a communal level. This is the glue that bonds each group, providing a secure environment for the young males to find their feet and ultimately strike out independently, while forging strong ties between the females that can last a lifetime.
Of course, piglets also learn a great deal from each other, as Professor Mendl explains. ‘Certain actions are intrinsically rewarding for pigs,’ he begins. ‘Just like it is with humans, one of those actions is play. There is evidence that when animals like pigs are playing it causes a change in brain chemistry. In this case, the reward may drive the behaviour.’
So, what looks like frolics, fun and games is in fact an experience for the piglet that’s as enjoyable as it is enlightening, and brings them back for more. Play between the piglet and its brothers and sisters can begin from three weeks and grow until they’re interacting with each other more than they are with the adult sows. But while the rest of the group will watch out for the piglets, it’s their mother who makes every sacrifice for them. Ultimately, her sense of nurture and protection knows no bounds.
‘A sow would kill to protect her young,’ Wendy tells me. ‘When there are little piglets around she can be very aggressive towards you, but mostly I am struck by their commitment to nursing. Sometimes during this time their teats can get ripped to shreds. The little ones might be arguing over the teats, and pulling or biting and generally being really naughty, and that poor mother is just lying there and feeding them. Occasionally, she’ll roll onto her tummy and shout “Enough!” and will only let them feed again when everything is calm. But the fact is no matter what the circumstances, those piglets are always fed.’
‘Do they respect their mother?’ I ask, thinking that if I let my kids scramble for food at the table they would be feral in no time.
‘Oh, yes!’ says Wendy. ‘I have seen a sow chuck a piglet in the air with her snout if it’s misbehaving. She doesn’t interfere with the fights when they’re little, because they have to establish their own pecking order, but there is always discipline within the group.’
The spare-part parent
Having had just one job so far, I’m curious about the role of the boar during this nurturing phase. What part do they play as the piglets grow in size as much as confidence, and wake up to their place in the world? Despite doing nothing to help during the pregnancy, does the father have an input in raising his young or is it all down to the sows?
Professor Mendl tells me the boar is very ‘spare-partish’ as a parent, and I judge from his tone that he’s being kind. When I ask Wendy, even she thinks long and hard before answering.
‘Well, they are nice to them,’ she says diplomatically. ‘They’ll certainly protect piglets. There is an instinct there to do that. He’ll sleep in a huddle with the piglets and the sows in the group, and if anything disturbs them, he will act. I suppose the younger boars might copy his behaviour to a certain degree, but that’s where it ends,’ she tells me, before stressing how important it is as a pig-keeper to separate the boar from the youngsters before they become sexually mature. In a way, this just serves to foreground the boar’s primary role, while highlighting the fact that the greatest formative influence for all young pigs are the females in their lives.
Sybil
‘She was a sow who produced my first litter. It was an amazing experience, but also a story about survival.’ Wendy turns off the hose we have been using. Our boots are clean and glistening wet, but rather than head back inside the farmhouse we remain in the courtyard. It’s a beautiful day, and it feels like a rarity after the weather we’ve had. ‘I can’t describe the feeling when I saw Sybil for the first time,’ she continues. ‘She was a tiny piglet just toddling around, and we grew really close. I was really excited when she fell pregnant as an adult sow, and knew she’d be an amazing mother. But soon after she gave birth, Sybil fell sick.’
Wendy hesitates, having told me this. All of a sudden, her eyes start to shine. ‘The vet said she must have torn something inside, and so all we could do was dose her with penicillin and hope for the best. And do you know what? For the next three weeks that pig dragged herself through so much suffering just to nurse her young. I swear she kept herself alive just to get them over the cusp so that they could survive on their own.’ A catch in her voice stops Wendy once more, and she takes a moment to compose herself.
‘I was in with her just before the end, but I really wasn’t prepared for her to go,’ she continues. ‘I held her trotter and promised that I would look after her piglets for her, and she just slipped away. My only regret was that I didn’t sit with her for long afterwards. I was just so broken, and had to go inside. I left her with her piglets for the day, and was just so sad for them. They stayed to drink her dry and say goodbye, but I was true to my word. I raised them as if I had lost a daughter and been left with her children.’
Striking out
There comes a time in any family structure when the sons or daughters decide to move on. For us as parents, it might be a day we come to dread, or one that finally arrives after endless hints only to discover it also leaves a hole behind that’s hard to fill. We might long to hear from our children after they’ve departed, even though they were always under our feet when we shared the same roof. Whatever the case, it’s heartening to see them spread their wings and grow into adults in their own right.
In some ways, pigs have perfected this uneasy transition in a way that suits everyone involved. In the wild, the boys will drift away to form sounders of their own, while other boars may draw some of their sisters from the group. With some of her girls left behind, the sow never experiences that empty nest feeling. She might well fill it to the brim once more by repeating the process all over again, or become a grandmother. As for the domestic pig, it could be said that they have enrolled our help in the separation process to make it as painless as possible.
‘I tend to wean the piglets at eight weeks,’ says Wendy, describing a commonplace part of livestock management on farms and smallholdings in which the young are switched from teat to solid food. ‘If it’s a massive litter and exhausting for the mother then I’ll do it at six weeks, but if there’s only three or four piglets, I might leave them to it for 10 weeks.’
By then, as Wendy points out, the piglets are no longer tiny tots but marauding teenagers with a milk fixation. The key, as she explains, is in separating the mother and her litter with both efficiency and sensitivity. ‘Initially, I remove all the young ones so the mother’s milk dries up,’ she says. ‘The female weaners can rejoin her with no problems, but as the boys are approaching sexual maturity I keep them separate.’
‘How do the girls respond to each other?’ I ask.
Wendy turns her attention to the pigs in the yard.
‘It’s not so much a mother and daughter bond,’ she says after a moment. ‘I don’t feel like pigs recognise each other as relatives, but there is a companionship which is really important to them. It’s about feeling safe,’ she suggests, ‘being able to curl up together and having someone to talk to.’ Wendy falls quiet, still contemplating her pigs, and then nods to herself. ‘Aren’t those the three things that all of us want in life?’
10
The Companion Pig
Not just for Christmas
Do pigs make good pets? From experience, I would say there is an unbridgeable gap between the fantasy and reality. Pigs are smart and friendly, characterful and gentle. They enjoy your company, make very good listeners and will happily conduct a conversation for as long as you like. Pigs like being scratched and tickled, and if there’s a treat involved then no doubt you can teach them tricks. But there is a reason why the cat and the dog are often ranked as the second and third most popular pets in the world, eclipsed inexplicably by the freshwater fish, and why the pig doesn’t even feature in the Top 10.
Despite the close relationship between human and animal, the fact is that we live in completely different worlds. It’s possible for these worlds to interlink, as Wendy and countless smallholders demonstrate. In fact, anyone with a passion for these deeply rewarding creatures as well as the resources and commitment to their welfare can make it work. Nevertheless, unlike a dog, it has to be said that a pig is not just for life, it’s a way of life.
For one thing, you need a lot of land. I had no issue in giving up our garden to accommodate Butch and Roxi. That was the price we paid for not doing our research properly. Of course I grumbled on getting out of bed before dawn each morning to feed them, but it had to be done for the sake of our neighbours. It’s just that as time passed, and the minipigs turned into maximonsters, it became apparent to us all that everything we could offer them wasn’t enough.
Take my composting system. For a period of time, Butch and Roxi produced the perfect amount of dung for me to mix in with the grass clippings from what little lawn we had left. The result was a fertile cocktail that I scattered on my flowerbeds in spring and used as mulch in the autumn. Slowly, however, the delicate balance between dung and clippings began to tip in favour of the former. My compost just became a pile of poo, and with that came a plague of flies. During the warmer months, we couldn’t step outside without walking into a malevolent buzzing cloud, while the heap itself slowly towered and teetered unsustainably.
My first plan of action was to salt away what I could, much like some rural version of The Great Escape. Rather than drop the dung through my trouser legs as I took the dog for a walk in the woods, I planned to carry a bucket with me and deposit it along the way. Then Emma reminded me that pigs are so carefully controlled by DEFRA that I’d possibly be looking at prison time, and the burning shame of having to tell my cellmates why I was inside. Just as the pile looked set to topple, I found a sympathetic stable owner who lived a short car ride away. He had no problem with me adding my waste to his industrial-sized compost, which could easily accommodate the weekly output from two domestic pigs.
The challenge, I discovered, was in transporting it there.
On our first journey, I pulled up in the car with Emma at my side, both windows open and the pair of us dry-heaving at the wretched stink we had brought with us. We had loaded not just buckets but three black plastic bins, one of which had tipped over in the back when I turned off the lane. Then we had to manhandle our cargo to the heap itself, which stood beyond a sea of slurry that more than engulfed our boots. The upshot was a car that required an industrial clean and a marginally reduced pig-dung pile at home that promptly returned to its former magnificence within a week.
As fast as I dug out their latrine area, Butch and Roxi filled it. In fact, the perimeter of that space they had so carefully created steadily began to grow. Meanwhile, both pigs had dug and turned their enclosure and their emergency extension so comprehensively that it quite possibly shared the same nutrient content as the surface of Mars. I needed to rest both areas in order for it to recover, but the hard truth was I had nothing more to give. Our friendly pig man down the road cut us a break around this time, and offered to take our oversized swine on his fields for a while. We seized upon the opportunity, as did Butch and Roxi – on finding a way out of there that none of his sows had ever previously found.
By then, Emma and I were schooled in pig search and rescue, as were most of the village. It was no longer a novelty, and with the field deemed unsuitable and the pair back in our enclosure we knew that something had to change. A domestic cat or a dog didn’t present this much grief on a daily basis. Pigs might have come in from the wild just as those animals did, but as pets, they arrived at a price.
Man’s beast friend
So, you can’t let a pig curl up in your lap at the end of a long day, and taking one for a stroll with you is not as easy as slipping on a leash. For one thing you need a movement licence. Quite frankly, if walking the dog required doing some paperwork first, our four-legged friend would plunge out of the pet popularity charts quicker than a Christmas novelty song in January.
Having said that, I can fully appreciate why people like Wendy have such a close connection with pigs that they couldn’t envisage life without them. They may not be loyal like a dog, preferring the company of their own kind, but it’s perfectly possible to share a level of reckoning with a pig. Even when Butch and Roxi travelled beyond the limits of my patience, I always considered them soulful and deeply sensitive animals. We shared a bond – I just didn’t have the means to nurture it.
Mindful that in general pigs are raised for the table, which is not something that registers in my life, I turn to Professor Mendl to find out if the pig serves any other useful purpose to us.
‘Could they act like guard dogs?’ I ask. ‘They certainly protected our chickens, because we never had a fox attack on their watch.’
‘Wild boar can certainly be dangerous animals,’ he says, ‘and a domestic pig could serve some alerting function. Then again, a dog can do the same thing, and you can move a dog.’
I still like the idea of recruiting a couple of pigs as patrollers. They are sharp-eared and likely to pick up on any uninvited presence. They can also be intimidatingly big and frankly, terrifying, should they be provoked into squealing. I also recognise that pigs aren’t known for coming to heel, just as the Professor points out, and accept that Alsatians everywhere need not worry about their jobs.
I float the idea to Wendy, simply because in telling me stories about Rocky, her huge free-roaming pig, she mentioned that visitors were often persuaded to stay inside their cars on the drive when he trotted round to greet them. Does she feel safer in her farmhouse at night, knowing that the pigs are out there, watching over her?
‘No,’ she says, quite simply, and brings my little fantasy crashing down. ‘Pigs sleep really deeply at night. I can walk around outside in the dark and nobody stirs. They just snore really loudly.’
Across the courtyard, I notice several hens perched on a partition wall between two enclosures. They have plenty of space available to them, no doubt to lay their eggs in peace, and look relaxed in the company of the occupants below. I also don’t suppose the foxes are foolish enough to regard Wendy’s flock as prey.
‘Do the pigs get on well with other animals here?’ I ask.
‘Oh, they’re friends with goats, horses and sheep,’ says Wendy. ‘I don’t see any hierarchy between the species,’ she adds. ‘If I fed them all together, I might find out who’s in charge, and I suspect it would be the sheep.’
‘How so?’ I ask, and Wendy responds by headbutting the air.
‘Oh, I see.’
‘The horses can be instinctively scared of pigs,’ she says, ‘but if you let them get over it, they’re fine together. I’ve even seen them asleep together, and the same goes for pigs and dogs.’
I smile at the thought, and tell her that I’m taken by the idea of the pig as everybody’s friend on the farm. I’m still searching my mind for the role that would make a pig invaluable to a human, however, and decide to address the obvious.
‘How about truffle hunting?’ I ask, for it’s believed that these precious underground fungi give off a smell very similar to the animal’s sex hormones.
Wendy reacts like she’s been waiting for me to ask her this question all this time. ‘If I could do that then I’d be rich,’ she laughs. While recognising that truffle-hunting pigs are often fruitfully employed on the continent, she tells me that in her experience domestic pigs aren’t big on mushrooms and believes this might be down to their heritage in the wild. ‘We’re switched on about not eating any old mushroom from the woodland because of the risk of poisoning,’ she says. ‘Pigs are just the same.’
From this hillside farm, with its elevated views, it’s possible to watch sunset shadows reach across entire fields. I’ve had a lovely time in the company of Wendy and her pigs. It really does feel like another world, but I do need to get back to my humdrum reality.
Emma is at work, and my children are old enough to survive without me after school. They have my number if they need me, but perhaps more reassuringly, my dogs are there. Neither of them will mediate any arguments or help to cook them tea, and frankly, a clapped-out old rescue mutt and a miniature sausage dog won’t do much to stop someone stealing the lawnmower from the shed. Still, I know they’re watching over our kids, which brings me back to the concept of pigs as companion animals. Wendy has been astute in helping me to understand what they see in each other, but what does she see in pigs?
‘It’s what they give back. They appreciate your affections and love you for it,’ she says quite clearly. ‘I know that’s a human expression,’ she adds, ‘but I really do feel a lot from them, and you get what you put in. Some of my pigs are oblivious to me. They don’t give a damn, but when you get a pig like Rocky or Brad, then I put the time and effort into getting to know them. Is it worthwhile?’ she asks, taking the question from my lips and then providing an answer I completely understand. ‘Oh, I get a huge amount in return.’
Pastures new
There is, of course, one role in particular that is perfectly suited for the pig. If there’s any truth in the saying that doing a job you love means never having to work again, then Butch and Roxi lucked out on every level.
In short, we found them gainful employment as ground labourers.
Several years after the minipigs arrived in a cat basket, they set off for their new lives in a horsebox. By this time, Butch and Roxi couldn’t even be considered to be normal-sized pigs. While Butch was the size of a ridgeback, Roxi stood waist-high to me, measured six feet in length and clocked in at an estimated 25 stone. They had become hogzillas, and despite our best efforts, care and attention, the life we provided them was no longer sufficient for their needs.
