POOR old pigs. They don’t get a great billing from us humans, do they? We may have put Peppa on TV to children’s coos, but, mostly, we’re pejorative about porkers, scathing about swine. Here is a little of our insulting lexicon concerning Sus domesticus: pig-headed, eat like a pig, sweat like a pig, this place looks like a pigsty, as lazy as a pig…
George Orwell did porcines no favours, of course, making Old Major, Napoleon and Snowball, respectively, the Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky of his fable about Communistic evil, Animal Farm. Being Orwell, his choice of pig as totalitarian ruler of the farmyard was pawky (pun intended) and informed. Pigs are rather humanesque. Pigs are definitely clever. A duck as dictator would be risible; a 15½ stone, bright-pink Landrace piggy up on its back legs, leaning on a wall and peering over the top, looks as if it is lecturing. Like Lenin.
The humanness of pigs should never be underestimated. The pig so physiologically resembles us that it has been used in medical research for more than 30 years as a translational model. That is, if it works in a pig, it’s likely to work in humans.
Pigs, similarly to people, enjoy physical affection. Lavender, one of our Welsh pigs, a traditional breed, pens me every morning in the corner of the wood—where she and the herd live the year round—and only lets me go after I have tickled her neck. (A novel definition of ‘pork scratchings’.) Not a hardship, however, chatting with a pig as dawn rises up through the oaks. I’ll be more candid. Lavender is in love with me—and I do mean me, only me. She has girly eyes for me alone. Everybody else is ignored. (Yes, pigs can distinguish humans, by our morphology and by our scent. Obviously, I scrub up well— thank you, Dove soap—or perhaps I am simply pig handsome?)
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 13, 2021-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 13, 2021-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
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A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
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Best of British
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
