50 Fun Facts About Pig

What is the scientific name of the domestic pig?

Some authorities treat it instead as a subspecies of the Eurasian wild boar, which is where every domestic breed began.

Domestication happened independently twice in the Neolithic: in China and where else?

When those herds later reached Europe they interbred heavily with local wild boar but kept their domesticated traits.

How many teeth does an adult pig have?

The rear ones are built for crushing, and in males the canines keep growing into tusks that sharpen against each other.

What strengthens a pig's snout, letting it dig through hard soil?

The snout is also an acute sense organ, which is why the animal can locate food buried well out of sight.

Why do pigs wallow in mud on hot days?

Their eccrine sweat glands are limited to the snout, and they are poor panters, so mud does the work skin cannot.

Which breed is unusual for having a woolly coat?

Most pigs carry only sparse bristles, so a fleece-like coat stands out in a farmyard line-up.

How many hoofed toes does a pig have on each foot?

The two big central toes carry the weight and the outer pair only bite in when the ground goes soft.

Which country is the world's largest producer of pork?

The European Union comes next, then the United States, out of roughly 1.5 billion animals raised worldwide each year.

Roughly how many pigs are raised worldwide each year?

That output comes to some 120 million tonnes of meat a year, a large share of it cured as bacon.

Which meat does pork trail as the world's most commonly eaten?

Evidence of pig husbandry goes back some 8,000 to 9,000 years, long before either was farmed at scale.

What is the binomial name of the wild boar, ancestor of domestic breeds?

The second half of that name is simply the Latin word for a female pig.

In a wild boar's two-part scientific name, what does the second word mean in Latin?

The English word for a female pig comes down from Old English and is related to the Latin sus and Ancient Greek hus.

Across most of its range, which predator hunts the wild boar?

In the Far East that role passes to the tiger, and on the Lesser Sunda Islands to the Komodo dragon.

How is wild boar society organised?

Fully grown males live alone outside the breeding season, which is why a lone boar is the dangerous one to meet.

Which animals were historically used to hunt truffles before dogs took over?

The problem was appetite: the hunter would happily eat a fungus worth thousands of dollars a pound before the human got to it.

Which breed became a short-lived American pet fad after arriving from Canada in the mid-1980s?

Many were not purebred, and buyers who expected a lapdog-sized animal watched it grow to considerable size.

Which position does the Pig hold in the twelve-animal Chinese zodiac?

Five element-flavoured versions exist, so a metal, water, wood, fire and earth version each turn up once per sixty-year cycle.

Five versions of the zodiac Pig exist, one for each of what?

They correspond to the Heavenly Stems, which is why the same animal year feels different to astrologers every sixty years.

In which country were coin-holding pig figures revered as good luck, popularizing the piggy bank?

The oldest surviving example there dates to the 13th century and turned up during construction work.

In which decade does the Oxford English Dictionary first record the phrase 'piggy bank'?

Newspapers were already printing the variant 'pig bank' in 1900, so the object is older than its best-known name.

In the fable of the three little pigs, which material defeats the wolf?

In the older printed versions the wolf then comes down the chimney, lands in a pot of boiling water and is eaten for dinner.

The earliest published version of that tale, from 1853 Dartmoor, starred which creatures instead?

The version everyone knows comes from Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales of 1890, which credited an earlier nursery-rhyme collector.

Walt Disney's 1933 Silly Symphony gave the trio names. Which one built in brick?

The cartoon softened the ending: the wolf merely burns himself and runs off, rather than being boiled and eaten.

Who wrote Charlotte's Web, published in 1952?

Garth Williams illustrated it, and the book appeared through Harper & Brothers on 15 October that year.

What kind of creature is Charlotte in that story?

The words spun overhead - Some Pig, Terrific, Radiant, Humble - are what talk the farmer out of the slaughter.

Which two words appear first in that famous web?

Terrific, Radiant and Humble follow, each one buying the runt another few weeks of life.

Wilbur was the runt of a litter of how many?

Fern Arable talks her father out of killing him, and only later is he sold on to her uncle's barn.

The 1995 film Babe was adapted from which novel?

Dick King-Smith published it in 1983; the screen version mixed real animals with animatronic puppets.

In which country was Babe filmed?

The farm scenes were shot at Robertson, New South Wales, in 1994, a year before release.

How many Academy Award nominations did Babe collect?

They included Best Picture and Best Director, unusual company for a talking-animal comedy.

What is the title of the 1998 sequel?

Most of the cast returned, but it landed far less well with critics and audiences than the original.

Which song does Farmer Hoggett sing and dance to when Babe stops eating?

It restores the piglet's faith in him just in time for the sheepdog trial that ends the film.

Which puppeteer performed Miss Piggy from 1976 to 2002?

Eric Jacobson took the role over from 2001, and the character had already debuted back in 1974.

Which martial art does Miss Piggy practise, complete with a shouted 'hi-yah'?

The chop usually lands on Kermit, and the character was built from a hook Frank Oz described as a truck driver who wanted to be a woman.

Which institution honoured Miss Piggy in 2015 for her cultural contribution?

TV Guide had already ranked her 23rd on its list of the 50 greatest television stars of all time.

Peppa Pig first aired in which year?

Each episode runs about five minutes, and the show has since been broadcast in more than 180 countries.

In how many countries has Peppa Pig been broadcast?

Hasbro paid US$3.8 billion for Entertainment One in 2019 largely to own the little pig outright.

How old was Harley Bird when she began voicing Peppa?

She held the part for a decade, one of five performers to have voiced the character across the series.

Who narrates Peppa Pig, sighing 'Oh, dear' when things go wrong?

Most episodes end the same way, with every character rolling onto their backs laughing.

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

Orwell wrote the book between 1943 and 1944, when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union and publishers wanted nothing to do with it.

What subtitle did Orwell originally give Animal Farm?

American publishers dropped it for the 1946 edition, and it has drifted in and out of print ever since.

What is the average gestation period of a pig?

Piglets are born with sharp teeth and quickly fight for the front teats, which produce the most milk.

What is the maximum recorded life span of a pig?

Medieval European pigs farrowed once a year; by the 19th century they routinely bore two litters annually.

Which giant pig weighed a record 1,157 kg (2,551 lb) and stood 1.5 m at the shoulder?

Ordinary adult pigs weigh between 140 and 300 kg, although some breeds exceed that range.

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

Each species has a different modification to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor that stops alpha-neurotoxin binding.

Roughly how wide is a pig's panoramic field of vision?

Their binocular vision covers only 35 to 50 degrees, and they are thought to lack eye accommodation.

Pigs have how many genes for smell receptors, slightly more than dogs?

Dogs have 1,094; pigs identify one another by smell rather than sight and are trained in Europe to find truffles.

What is the smallest known pig breed, weighing around 26 kg as an adult?

Around 600 pig breeds exist; the Choctaw hog, Mulefoot and Ossabaw Island hog were listed as critically rare in 2016.

In which year did a pig become the first animal to successfully donate an organ to a human body?

The donor pig was genetically engineered to lack a carbohydrate, alpha-gal, that the human immune system attacks.

Pigs were the most successful Spanish-introduced animal on which southern Chilean archipelago?

They thrived on shellfish and algae exposed by the islands' large tides during the Columbian Exchange.