50 free Pig trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
41 free Pig trivia questions with answers. Pigs are the most underrated animal in trivia. They were domesticated twice, on opposite sides of Asia; they cannot sweat their way out of a hot day; and they have carried more of children's literature on their backs than any other farm animal. This quiz covers all of it. The first half is the real animal: teeth, tusks, snouts, wallowing, wild boar society, breeds, and where the world's pork actually comes from. The second half is the cultural pig, from the 1933 Disney short that named the three little pigs to the barn spider who saved one from the smokehouse, the Australian farm where Babe was shot, and the Muppet with the karate chop. Questions run from easy warm-ups a child can take to expert-level detail, and each one was written against an encyclopaedic or primary source with the sentence that establishes the answer attached. Good for a farm-themed quiz night, a classroom, or anyone who wants to win an argument about whether pigs sweat.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the scientific name of the domestic pig?
Sus domesticus
Some authorities treat it instead as a subspecies of the Eurasian wild boar, which is where every domestic breed began.
Q 02Domestication happened independently twice in the Neolithic: in China and where else?
The Near East
When those herds later reached Europe they interbred heavily with local wild boar but kept their domesticated traits.
Q 03How many teeth does an adult pig have?
44
The rear ones are built for crushing, and in males the canines keep growing into tusks that sharpen against each other.
Q 04What strengthens a pig's snout, letting it dig through hard soil?
A special prenasal bone
The snout is also an acute sense organ, which is why the animal can locate food buried well out of sight.
Q 05Why do pigs wallow in mud on hot days?
To cool down by evaporation
Their eccrine sweat glands are limited to the snout, and they are poor panters, so mud does the work skin cannot.
Q 06Which breed is unusual for having a woolly coat?
Mangalitsa
Most pigs carry only sparse bristles, so a fleece-like coat stands out in a farmyard line-up.
Q 07How many hoofed toes does a pig have on each foot?
Four
The two big central toes carry the weight and the outer pair only bite in when the ground goes soft.
Q 08Which country is the world's largest producer of pork?
China
The European Union comes next, then the United States, out of roughly 1.5 billion animals raised worldwide each year.
Q 09Roughly how many pigs are raised worldwide each year?
1.5 billion
That output comes to some 120 million tonnes of meat a year, a large share of it cured as bacon.
Q 10Which meat does pork trail as the world's most commonly eaten?
Poultry
Evidence of pig husbandry goes back some 8,000 to 9,000 years, long before either was farmed at scale.
Q 11What is the binomial name of the wild boar, ancestor of domestic breeds?
Sus scrofa
The second half of that name is simply the Latin word for a female pig.
Q 12In a wild boar's two-part scientific name, what does the second word mean in Latin?
Sow
The English word for a female pig comes down from Old English and is related to the Latin sus and Ancient Greek hus.
Q 13Across most of its range, which predator hunts the wild boar?
The wolf
In the Far East that role passes to the tiger, and on the Lesser Sunda Islands to the Komodo dragon.
Q 21In the fable of the three little pigs, which material defeats the wolf?
Bricks
In the older printed versions the wolf then comes down the chimney, lands in a pot of boiling water and is eaten for dinner.
Q 22The earliest published version of that tale, from 1853 Dartmoor, starred which creatures instead?
Three pixies and a fox
The version everyone knows comes from Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales of 1890, which credited an earlier nursery-rhyme collector.
Q 23Walt Disney's 1933 Silly Symphony gave the trio names. Which one built in brick?
Practical Pig
The cartoon softened the ending: the wolf merely burns himself and runs off, rather than being boiled and eaten.
Q 14How is wild boar society organised?
In matriarchal groups
Fully grown males live alone outside the breeding season, which is why a lone boar is the dangerous one to meet.
Q 15Which animals were historically used to hunt truffles before dogs took over?
Pigs
The problem was appetite: the hunter would happily eat a fungus worth thousands of dollars a pound before the human got to it.
Q 16Which breed became a short-lived American pet fad after arriving from Canada in the mid-1980s?
The pot-bellied pig
Many were not purebred, and buyers who expected a lapdog-sized animal watched it grow to considerable size.
Q 17Which position does the Pig hold in the twelve-animal Chinese zodiac?
Twelfth
Five element-flavoured versions exist, so a metal, water, wood, fire and earth version each turn up once per sixty-year cycle.
Q 18Five versions of the zodiac Pig exist, one for each of what?
The Chinese elements
They correspond to the Heavenly Stems, which is why the same animal year feels different to astrologers every sixty years.
Q 19In which country were coin-holding pig figures revered as good luck, popularizing the piggy bank?
Germany
The oldest surviving example there dates to the 13th century and turned up during construction work.
Q 20In which decade does the Oxford English Dictionary first record the phrase 'piggy bank'?
The 1910s
Newspapers were already printing the variant 'pig bank' in 1900, so the object is older than its best-known name.
Q 24Who wrote Charlotte's Web, published in 1952?
E. B. White
Garth Williams illustrated it, and the book appeared through Harper & Brothers on 15 October that year.
Q 25What kind of creature is Charlotte in that story?
A barn spider
The words spun overhead - Some Pig, Terrific, Radiant, Humble - are what talk the farmer out of the slaughter.
Q 26Which two words appear first in that famous web?
Some Pig
Terrific, Radiant and Humble follow, each one buying the runt another few weeks of life.
Q 27Wilbur was the runt of a litter of how many?
Eleven
Fern Arable talks her father out of killing him, and only later is he sold on to her uncle's barn.
Q 28The 1995 film Babe was adapted from which novel?
The Sheep-Pig
Dick King-Smith published it in 1983; the screen version mixed real animals with animatronic puppets.
Q 29In which country was Babe filmed?
Australia
The farm scenes were shot at Robertson, New South Wales, in 1994, a year before release.
Q 30How many Academy Award nominations did Babe collect?
Seven
They included Best Picture and Best Director, unusual company for a talking-animal comedy.