47 Fun Facts About Pig

In Disney's The Lion King, what kind of wild pig is Pumbaa?

Warthog: Pumbaa the warthog and his meerkat friend Timon take in the exiled Simba and teach him to live on bugs under their motto, hakuna matata.

Pigs were domesticated independently in two parts of the world; which of these was one?

The Near East: pigs were domesticated there and separately in East Asia, and the herds farmers took into Europe bred with wild boar so often that almost none of their Near Eastern ancestry survives.

A male pig's tusks are overgrown versions of which teeth?

Canines: a boar's tusks are canine teeth that never stop growing, and the upper and lower pairs grind against each other, which keeps them sharp.

The small bone inside the tip of a pig's snout is an adaptation for what?

Rooting in soil: the bone stiffens the snout's cartilage disc for digging, and the babirusa, whose snout bone is weak or missing, roots only in soft mud.

Pigs wallow in mud to cool off because they can barely do what?

Sweat: a pig's few sweat glands do almost nothing to cool it, so evaporating mud does the work, and the coating may also guard against sunburn and parasites.

Which pig breed is unusual for its thick, woolly coat?

Mangalitsa: this Hungarian lard pig grows a curly fleece, and it nearly died out, with fewer than 200 left in Hungary around 1990 before breeders revived it.

Pigs aren't kosher: they have split hooves but don't do what?

Chew cud: Leviticus permits only animals that both have split hooves and chew the cud, and it singles out the pig as having the hooves without the chewing.

As of 2023, which country is the world's largest producer of pork?

China: about half of the world's pork is eaten there, most of it home-raised, and the government even keeps a strategic pork reserve to smooth out swings in price.

Roughly how many pigs are slaughtered for meat worldwide each year?

About 1.5 billion pigs were slaughtered in 2023, and the total is fragile: it fell by more than 100 million in 2019 as African swine fever swept through herds in Asia.

Which meat overtook pork in 2016 as the world's most produced?

Poultry passed pork in 2016 after decades in second place, and by 2023 the world produced about 142 million tonnes of it against 125 million of pork.

What is the two-part scientific name of the wild boar, ancestor of the domestic pig?

Sus scrofa: scrofa is Latin for a breeding sow, and it also gave medicine the word scrofula, literally 'little pigs', for a swelling of the glands in the neck.

In Homer's Odyssey, which enchantress turns Odysseus's crew into pigs?

Circe drugs the crew's wine and turns them into pigs with a stroke of her wand, leaving their minds human, until Odysseus, protected by a herb from Hermes, makes her change them back.

Across most of its Eurasian range, which predator is the wild boar's main hunter?

The wolf is the wild boar's main predator across most of Eurasia, but in the forests of the Russian Far East the tiger takes over, with boar among its chief prey.

How is wild boar society organised?

In matriarchal groups: a sounder is made up of related sows and their young, led by an old female, while young males leave and come back only for the mating season.

Which country has banned the use of pigs to hunt truffles?

Italy outlawed truffle pigs because their digging tears up the underground threads the fungus grows from; trained dogs, often the curly-coated Lagotto Romagnolo, now do the sniffing.

Which breed became a short-lived American pet craze in the late 1980s?

The pot-bellied pig reached the United States in the mid-1980s, originally bound for zoos, and became a pet craze that faded as buyers watched their piglets grow far bigger than promised.

Which position does the Pig hold in the cycle of the Chinese zodiac?

Twelfth and last: in the legend of the Jade Emperor's great race the Pig is the final animal to arrive, and in one telling it had stopped along the way for a meal and a nap.

Each Year of the Pig comes in one of five types, named after what?

The Chinese elements: Metal, Water, Wood, Fire and Earth take turns, so a given pairing, such as the Earth Pig of 2019, comes round only once every sixty years.

The piggy bank's popularity in the West is often traced to which country, where pigs symbolise good luck?

Germany, where a Glücksschwein, or lucky pig, is a good-luck charm: the country's oldest known piggy bank, a medieval clay pig found in Thuringia, turned out to hold no coins.

Terracotta money boxes shaped like wild boar were made in the Majapahit empire on which island?

Java: the Majapahit boars are thought to have held Chinese copper coins, and the Javanese word for a piggy bank, celengan, comes from celeng, a wild boar.

In The Three Little Pigs, how does the villain finally try to get in?

Chimney: down he comes, straight into a pot of boiling water, and in Joseph Jacobs's 1890 telling the pig then cooks him and eats him for supper.

Which band flew a giant inflatable pig over London's Battersea Power Station for a 1977 album cover?

Pink Floyd flew it for the cover of Animals; the rope broke during the shoot and the pig drifted up into the flight path of Heathrow Airport.

Who wrote Charlotte's Web, published in 1952?

E. B. White raised pigs on his own farm, and four years earlier had published 'Death of a Pig', an essay about a sick one he sat up with for nights and could not save.

In Charlotte's Web, what is the name of the pig that Charlotte the spider saves?

Wilbur is a spring pig being fattened for slaughter until Charlotte, the spider living above his pen, promises to save his life, and does.

In Charlotte's Web, which two words does the spider weave first?

'Some Pig' comes first; Terrific, Radiant and Humble follow, and the crowds they draw to the barn make the pig too famous to slaughter.

In Charlotte's Web, why does Fern's father plan to kill the newborn piglet?

He is a runt, the weakling of the litter, and not thought worth raising; Fern talks her father out of it and feeds the piglet from a bottle herself.

The 1995 film Babe was adapted from which novel?

The Sheep-Pig came out in 1983; its author, Dick King-Smith, had farmed for twenty years before he turned to children's books in his fifties.

In which country was the 1995 film Babe shot?

Australia: it was shot in the green dairy country around Robertson, New South Wales, and in 2025 the town painted its giant roadside landmark as a pink pig to mark the film's 30th anniversary.

The film Babe won its only Oscar for Best what?

Visual Effects: its talking farm animals beat Apollo 13 to the award, the one win from seven nominations that included Best Picture.

George Miller directed the 1998 sequel to Babe under which title?

Babe: Pig in the City cost at least $80 million to make and took about $69 million worldwide, a costly flop after the hit original.

Which puppeteer gave Miss Piggy her voice on The Muppet Show?

Frank Oz was also Fozzie Bear, Animal, Cookie Monster and Bert, and he first played Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, so one man voiced the diva and the Jedi master.

Which martial art does the Muppets' Miss Piggy practise, usually on Kermit, complete with a shouted 'hi-yah'?

Karate: her chop usually sends Kermit flying, and in an essay for Time in 2015 she put her success down to grit, perseverance and karate.

Which French word does Miss Piggy famously use to refer to herself?

Moi: she used it all through the essay she wrote for Time in 2015, the week the Brooklyn Museum's Sackler Center gave her an award for women who break barriers.

Which company bought Peppa Pig's owner, Entertainment One, in 2019?

Hasbro, the American toy maker, agreed to pay about US$4 billion in cash, chiefly to own preschool brands such as Peppa Pig and PJ Masks.

What is Peppa Pig's favourite pastime?

Puddle jumping, always in muddy puddles, is what the whole pig family does for fun; her first cinema release, The Golden Boots of 2015, ran all of 15 minutes.

Which 2009 mobile game made villains of egg-stealing green pigs?

Angry Birds: its Finnish maker Rovio was near bankruptcy with money for just one game, and when the birds needed an enemy the designer, by his own account, drew the pig he had doodled since he was ten.

Which pig rules the farm in George Orwell's 1945 novella?

Napoleon, a Berkshire boar modelled on Stalin, rules the farm; Orwell wrote the book in 1943–44, when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union and publishers wanted nothing to do with it.

In Animal Farm, the final commandment calls some animals what?

More equal than others: 'All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others' goes up on the wall, and by the next day the pigs are carrying whips.

Roughly how long is a sow's pregnancy?

About 114 days, which farmers remember as three months, three weeks and three days; it is short enough for a sow to raise two litters a year.

What is a female pig called before she has had her first litter?

A gilt becomes a sow once she has farrowed, just as a heifer becomes a cow; farmers track the difference because a first litter is usually smaller than the ones that follow.

On an uninhabited island in which country do tourists swim with a colony of feral pigs?

The Bahamas: the pigs of Big Major Cay in the Exumas paddle out to meet boats for food; legends blame a shipwreck, or sailors who left them for a later meal and never came back.

Pigs share with mongooses, honey badgers and hedgehogs a receptor mutation protecting them from what?

Snake venom: honey badgers, hedgehogs and pigs each evolved, separately, a changed muscle receptor that cobra-type neurotoxins cannot grip; mongooses got there by another route.

In a 2021 study, four pigs learned to use their snouts to do what?

Play a video game: they nudged an arcade-style joystick to steer a cursor into targets and scored well above chance, despite having no hands and poor eyesight.

The 2012 pig genome revealed an unusually large set of genes devoted to which sense?

Smell: pigs turned out to have one of the largest sets of working smell-receptor genes of any mammal, which suits a scavenger that noses out its food.

The Göttingen minipig was bred not as a pet but for what purpose?

Medical research: a small pig needs far less of whatever is being tested than a farm pig would, and its body works much like a human's.

In 2021, New York surgeons attached which gene-edited pig organ to a brain-dead patient?

A kidney: for more than two days it worked like a human one with no sign of rejection, because the pig had been engineered so the body would not treat the organ as foreign.

The 1859 Pig War on San Juan Island began when an American farmer shot a pig he caught eating his what?

Potatoes: the pig belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, and Royal Navy warships faced US troops across the island for weeks, yet the pig was the only casualty.