According to the encyclopedia, the pig is "of the genus Sus, within the suidae family of even-toed ungulates". That sounds pretty close to the last word. However, once you've met a few English pig-people you realise that it barely scratches the surface. We're talking obsession here in pig world. George Clooney keeps a pig, as do Paris Hilton and Lily Allen, but it's not until you encounter the Berkshire or the Middle White that you really begin to qualify as a friend of the English suidae family.
The English pig has pedigree in literature and if there is a prose poet of the pig, he must be PG Wodehouse. His Berkshire sow, the Empress of Blandings, made her debut in a 1927 story, Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey! After that there was no hope for the author of The Inimitable Jeeves. When Wodehouse lifts his pen to salute the Empress, he goes into another, more poetic dimension: "The Empress could have passed in a dim light for a captive balloon, fully inflated and about to make its trial trip."
To the outsider, these animals are just pigs. Step inside the pig pen, however, and you find, among the prize breeds, the Gloucester Old Spot, the Berkshire and the Tamworth, followed by the more commercial Middle White, the Large Black and the Large White. As a grownup pursuit, pig breeding falls somewhere between stud farming and bee-keeping in seriousness.
Sue Fildes (pronounced: Files) has a lovely hillside smallholding in Devon, overlooking the river Dart. She breeds Berkshires, and writes a column in Pig World. One of her sows, Dittisham Lady 36, won the Champion of Champions prize at the 2009 Newbury Show. Since her husband died six years ago, she has been alone with her pigs and attributes her wellbeing to their company.
Do pigs really make one feel better? "Ooh yeah!" she exclaims. "Pigs give you a purpose in life." It's more than just the pigs. "Pig people are the nicest in the world. So sociable and friendly. It's a wonderful experience to show a pig in competition." Fildes shows her prize pigs at West Country fairs. "Pig-keeping is infectious," she continues. Like Lord Emsworth, she keeps a shelf of pig manuals, though has never, she admits, read Emsworth's vade mecum, Whiffle on The Care of the Pig.
Sue Fildes watched a bit of this year's BBC Blandings series on TV, and can't get over the fact that, although the Empress is a Berkshire, the film-makers selected a massive Middle White sow (more than one, actually) to play the pig. "That was a bit of a scandal," she says. "It caused a lot of ill-feeling in the pig world."
"Ill-feeling" is not a mood pig people like to nurture for long. Inspired by their greedy, grunting, easygoing, bristly companions, they prefer to look on the bright side. "It's so very English to keep pigs," says Fildes. "If you have an acre or two of land, the first thing we all want to do is have a couple of pigs. Yes, the English dream is to have a pig. And if you have a pretty pig, it doesn't get better than that."
Just outside Arundel, West Sussex, lives Suzi Westron, whose prize Berkshire sow Louise won the Breed Champion trophy at the Great Yorkshire Show last month (Louise was formerly "Young Pig of the Year"). Westron got into pig-rearing by chance. She and her husband Stewart maintain a family dairy farm, and have to be careful with money. "I said to my husband," she remembers, "'Why don't we get a pig? Then we can eat it.'"
This was about 10 years ago. Soon after, she spotted a Berkshire sow at the Royal Show, and fell for it. "It was all about promoting the breed," she says. For the Westron family, it was win-win: "We had plenty of food in the freezer, plus we were keeping the Berkshires going." Westron is devoted to porcine and human welfare. She works nights at the hospital as a healthcare assistant, and keeps pigs by day. Now, at any one time, she will have up to 70 Berkshires in her yard. At first, she found it hard to send her pigs to the slaughterhouse. "When I sent off my first two, I cried my eyes out." There is, she says, something very amiable, contented and engaging about a pig. "They're chatty. Friendly. They do love a scratch. You feed them once a day, and they sit around like statues, adorning the landscape. We had a fellow who bought one of our pigs. His wife didn't see him for three months. He'd spend the whole day down at the sty."
Now the Westron family takes a more hard-nosed approach. "We're definitely running a meat paddock," she says. "I call it our piggy bank. I do love them, and I look after them. It's a good short life they have." Suzi, unlike many pig farmers, makes a point of accompanying her pigs to the slaughterhouse. "It's very quick," she says of the killing.
Her pigs are privileged, and free to rootle where they please. But in the mass market, the life of the pig is nasty, brutish and short. It's this cruelty that exercises Tracy, Marchioness of Worcester, who keeps two Kunekune pigs at home (just outside Badminton). Before her marriage to Harry Worcester, Tracy Louise Ward starred in Cat's Eyes and reached what she calls "the peak of my stage career" playing Miss Scarlett in Cluedo. Now, she's a committed member of the ecology movement, and says: "We are fighting against the corporatisation of agriculture, using the pig industry to highlight the issues." Tracy Worcester has made a campaigning video, Pig Business, an exposé of factory farming in the US and EU. Currently, she is leading the campaign against a 25,000-pig factory farm in the village of Foston, Derbyshire. She is passionate about pig welfare. "My pigs are free to roam, but the sow in the cage is suffering." She reels off a catalogue of atrocities, from conditions in factory farms, to the horrors of the slaughterhouse. She likes pork, but says she doesn't want to eat an animal that has felt pain in this way.
Encouragingly, she believes that, with a few glaring exceptions, pigs in Britain are farmed humanely. "Buying British is the first step. Things are better here." We go out to feed Ping and Pong, her Kunekune which are rooting about in a walled garden. The moment they see the bucket of kitchen waste their low-key, contented grunting becomes a high-pitched squeal of excitement. As she tips out the organic swill, Worcester describes the pig industry's misguided quest for a "Frankenstein monster" pig that will yield three or four more piglets per annum, and generate more pork and bacon. Stressed pigs, she concludes, "don't taste as good".
Which brings us to the pig on your plate. Rare breed pork tastes better, with a fuller flavour than commercially produced pork, and the qualities of the Berkshire are renowned. Mrs Beeton described it as "the most esteemed of our English domestic breeds". For a while, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust classified the Berkshire as "vulnerable". Not any more. Berkshire breeders refer with satisfaction to "the Emsworth paradox" – eager consumption of rare pork in restaurants sponsors the breed's survival. Pork's route to the plate, though, is not without its anxieties, even among smallholders.
Zam Baring, a TV producer who has worked with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, keeps a Middle White named Suzie. He admits to an Emsworth-style relationship with his sow. Baring says Suzie is "intelligent, with a sense of humour. I think she knows who I am. Yes, I like to stroke or tickle her. She makes a special snorting sound that I like." But as food? "No, I don't think I could eat her."
And yet it's the homegrown black pudding, the wind-dried ham, salami, pancetta and pork shoulder he gets from Suzie's litters that excites Baring's special interest. Finally, an irony of pig-loving, there's something about a pig that allows us to bring him into the food chain. It's as if the animal acquiesces in its fate, with stoic equanimity. Baring says, quoting Winston Churchill, one of many celebrity pig men: "The cat looks down at humans. The dog looks up. But the pig looks you in the eye." In the peculiar hierarchy of English life, the pig is our equal, the companion to the Common Man. OFM
