2.1f – War Pigs

As a final curious note to the story of pigs, these fine animals were notably and unfortunately used as a major turning point in a war in 266 BC, which is nearly 2300 years ago. The army of Antigonus II Gonatas, a Greek who was King of Macedonia, was besieging the city of Megara, which belonged to a different Greek state.

The siege was broken when the Megarians covered a number of pigs with a combustible material, likely pitch. The pigs were then set on fire and driven toward the enemy’s war elephants. The elephants, understandably terrified by the oncoming tide of squealing, flaming pigs, broke and ran away through their own army, killing a large number of Macedonian soldiers.

The use of pigs against war elephants was a well-regarded tactic of the day, noted in several accounts and learned in India by Alexander the Great as a sort of secret weapon. The next time you hear that elephants are afraid of mice, give a mighty and disdainful sniff, content in the knowledge that what really keeps elephants up at night is the thought of angry, flammable pigs.

2.1e – Big Pig, Little Pig

There are pigs of all sizes in them there hills. The world’s biggest wild pig is the Giant Forest Hog, which is a native of woodsy habitats in west and central Africa. Despite their immense size, which would seem to make them a target of hunting, they are widespread and their population is in no danger. But just how big are they?

Fact: a giant forest hog's grunts cause small earthquakes. (Photo by Michell Zappa)

The giant forest hog is up to seven feet long from rump to snout, and stands nearly four feet high, so look at the picture above and remember that it is larger than most basketball players. It can weigh as many as 600 lbs, which I know from personal experience is more bacon than a person can eat in one sitting. (Barely.)

The world’s smallest pig is the appropriately named Pygmy Hog. It is incredibly endangered, and was once thought to be all but lost to the world. Today there are only 150 individuals remaining, and their future prospects only exist at all thanks to conservation efforts such as those by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and its partners. These pigs were once found throughout India, Nepal, and Bhutan, but now live in only one tiny part of India, their habitat being destroyed by human encroachment and controlled fire programs. But just how little are they?

Pygmy hogs are so small that they are the only pigs to build full-fledged nests. Aww. (Photo by Kalyan Varma)

The pygmy hog is only about two feet long, and less than a foot tall. They often weigh fewer than 20 lbs. No bacon joke for these poor, rare fellows.

2.1d – The Babirusa

(Photo by Masteraah)

If the warthog is one of the most distinctive pigs, the babirusa is without doubt the strangest. Known as the pig-deer, there are three species of babirusa, all found on a handful of islands in Indonesia. They are all threatened by extinction, but are protected by Indonesian law.

One thing that makes the babirusa so strange is that two of the species have almost no hair to speak of, while the other is covered in dense, golden hair. They are the only pig type to have only one or two piglets at a time. They have an odd population distribution, being found on certain islands but completely absent from islands that lie in-between. It is possible that humans traded them as gifts to more distant islands; another possibility is that the pigs built tiny boats for travel but decided they didn’t like the look of some of the islands around them.

None of this, however, has anything to do with the strangest feature possessed by the babirusa, which you can likely guess based on the picture above. Whereas other pigs have tusks that grow down and then out between the lips, the babirusa’s tusks grow upward from their upper jaw. The elongated teeth grow up through the top of the mouth instead of down, breaking through the skin and then curving back toward the face. A second set of tusks grow up from the outside of the lower jaw, and curve in a similar inward pattern. All of these tusks are completely the opposite of those possessed by other pigs, and to add insult to injury they are practically useless. The upside-down tusks are brittle and are held loosely in their sockets. A strong jolt can break them off.

This is likely why the babirusa does not fight like a typical pig either. Rather than clashing with tusks, males box instead. They rear up on their hind feet and try to strike one another with their front hoofs. Why such a strange sort of pig developed, no one knows.

2.1c – The Warthog

A warthog, with four prominent warts, on the grasslands of central Africa. (Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson)

The warthog is one of the most distinctive-looking members of the pig family, with its large, flat head, its prominent tusks, the mane of hair down its back, and the titular warts that adorn its face. The large warts that give this animal its name are used partly for defence against the tusks of other warthogs during mating season, and partly as fat reserves. It is in fact the main way that warthogs store extra fat, as they do not store fat beneath their skin as many mammals do. This seems like a great way to stay thin and svelte, until you remember that all the fat goes into lumpy warts on your face instead. Warthogs have two large warts beneath their eyes, and sometimes two smaller warts down near their tusks as well.

Unlike many species of pig, the female warthog has well-developed tusks. These tusks can be used to defend her piglets from predators, and warthogs have been known to fatally gore a lion that tries to attack them. When possible, however, they prefer to run away, and are quite fast.

An interesting thing about warthogs is that they are the only pig that has has adapted to a grazing lifestyle. They will still root about for bulbs and roots and insects, and will also take advantage of any berries or even carrion it might find, but when possible the warthog survives by grazing on grasses.

The warthog will go down on its front knees in order to graze, allowing it to clip off the grass as low as possible. This gives it the appearance of praying as it eats, and the warthog will in fact scoot around on its front knees as it eats, rather than wasting energy standing up and kneeling again. This kneeling and scooting action is more than just a habit — baby warthogs develop protective padding on their knees even before they are born. It’s a strange sort of genetic feeding strategy.

A warthog kneeling to graze. (Photo by Kibuyu)

Another interesting behaviour exhibited by the warthog is an almost disturbing partnership with the banded mongoose. When a warthog has accumulated too many annoying ticks and parasites on its skin, it sometimes seeks out a group of banded mongooses. The warthog will lie down and the mongooses will swarm over its body, picking the ticks off and eating them, a great meal for the group. This clearly benefits the warthog as well, but to sweeten the deal, sometimes, rarely, the warthog will eat one of the mongoose babies. How’s that for gratitude? The slight risk of mongoocide is considered worth running in exchange for the easy tick smorgasbords.

Though the warthog is fully capable of digging its own burrow, which it always backs into so that its head faces outward, it instead prefers to occupy abandoned aardvark burrows, already fully formed and basically the right size. In the wild, any energy you can save by using second-hand burrows is energy you have saved up the next time you need to make a lion bleed to death.

The warthog is found throughout savannah areas in central, eastern, and south-eastern Africa.

2.1b – The Intelligent Pig

(Photo by Ian Britton, FreeFoto.com)

Let’s get it right out there off the bat — barring cannibalism, pigs are probably the smartest thing you are ever going to eat. Even then, it might depend on who you were cannibalizing.

Many people know or have heard that pigs are somewhat clever, but the truth is that they are likely even more intelligent than you could have guessed. Pigs are smarter than cats, and they are smarter than dogs. Many scientists think that pigs are just as smart as primates, including the vaunted chimpanzee. A few people think that in some ways, pigs might even be smarter. Pigs are one of the most intelligent animals in the entire world.

Pigs lead highly complex social lives that include recognition of the individual and social structures that rival monkeys and apes. One way they demonstrate their intelligence with each other is in attempts to outsmart one another. One pig will attempt to follow and spy on a fellow pig to learn where it hides its food cache, so that the first pig can steal it. The second pig will try to throw the first pig off the trail, using evasive maneuvers and changeable behaviours to keep its secrets safe.

A pig can quickly learn how to use mirrors, recognizing how reflections work and using them to find hidden food in test situations. A pig can learn its own name, and can be taught to sit, fetch, come, stay, jump through hoops, stand on its back legs, all the things that dogs can do. A pig can also be taught the names of other things. In one test, a scientist taught a pig to recognize the names of three different items, along with commands to sit beside, jump over, or retrieve one of the specific items. The pig was then separated from the items for three years, and when tested again remembered exactly which item was which, and also remembered what the commands were.

Pigs in fact have spectacular memories. They can cache food just like a squirrel, and remember where they put everything and how much is in each cache. If a pig is frightened by something, it will remember it for the rest of its life and will probably always be scared by it. They can even remember pictures.

A pig can manipulate a joystick to draw lines on a screen, and are able to remember the patterns they draw. They are able to find their way home over great distances, just like dogs. Pigs can learn complex behaviours simply by watching another pig do something. Pigs dream, and a mother pig will sing to her piglets while they are nursing. Pigs are playful and protective of one another within their social units. They enjoy listening to music.

Learning new behaviours comes easy for a pig as well. When shown how to operate a shower that was built specifically for them, the pigs quickly grew capable of not only turning the shower on themselves when they were hot, but also turning it off again when they were finished. If they have access to temperature controls, pigs can teach themselves by trial and error how to make the temperature comfortable for them.

Pigs don't sweat the small stuff, because they don't sweat at all. Also because they can figure out how to control your thermostat. (Photo by Jim Champion)

In fact, pigs are so clever that in some parts of the world they are taking over jobs that people previously thought only a dog could do. In Israel, pigs have been trained to search for buried mines, and are able to detect them with great accuracy. They can find a mine that is buried deeper than a dog can typically discover. It seems to me that next will come seeing eye pigs, search and rescue pigs, and pig talent shows.

Pigs have a rudimentary language that they use with each other. It is not as complex as a dolphin’s, for example, but researchers have identified more than 20 specific sounds that pigs make among their grunts and squeals that communicate a specific situation to each other.

And in a lot of ways, pigs are quite close to humans. Our genetic codes are fairly similar, as far as these things go, and pig behaviours are similar to human behaviours as well. The organs from pigs are very nearly compatible with human bodies, and scientists are researching how to make transplants possible in the future.

There have been several documented cases of a pig saving its owner’s life, similar to what a dog can do. Pigs have been recorded going for help, saving people from drowning, and chasing away intruders. Sometimes one has to wonder if the reason dogs became man’s best friend instead of pigs wasn’t simply because dogs are fuzzy, and pigs taste good. As far as personality and loyalty go, a pig can do everything that a dog can.

Don’t get me wrong; I love dogs and cats both, quite a bit. But there is simply no denying that pigs are more intelligent and have just as much individual personality. And even though I also love the taste of pork, it is clear that a pig’s talents and smarts and lovableness are rather wasted as food.

2.1a – The Pig

A Bearded Pig, one of the hairiest pig species. (Photo by Bluemoose)

Pigs are fantastic animals. If your idea of a pig is a gluttonous, smelly, dull sort of animal that is only good for bacon, it is simply because you don’t know them well enough. Let’s see what we can do to change that.

There are 19 species of pigs in the world today, and pigs originally come from Africa, Europe, and Asia. Today pigs live in every part of the world except Antarctica, because humans brought pigs with them everywhere they went. They are quite different from most members of the Artiodactyla group. Pigs are largely omnivorous, meaning that they eat both meat and plants. They only have two stomachs, compared to the three or four seen in most of their close relatives. They do not ruminate their food. Pigs are the only hoofed mammals that have litters of babies, while all the others have only one or two babies at a time in most circumstances. They are also known to build nests. Pigs are the rebels of Artiodactyla. They march to a different drummer.

Pigs are squat animals with a barrel-shaped body, slender legs, and a big head set on a short neck. Their reputation for dirtiness stems from the fact that their sweat glands do not work very well, meaning that they have a difficult time cooling down in hot climates. To help them with this, pigs tend to wallow in dirt or mud to keep the sun off when they get too warm. They have as much reason to be dirty in the heat as you have to be sweaty.

A pig is a highly social and intelligent animal (we will look at just how intelligent in a future post). Pigs communicate with one another through series of grunts and squeals, and have excellent senses of hearing and smell. Male pigs often travel alone or in small groups, while female pigs and young can usually be found in slightly larger groups called sounders. This is a typical pattern for many hoofed mammals.

There are three interesting bits of anatomy that you can find on a pig. The first and most prominent is their tusks. Two teeth in their upper jaw, one on each side, grow tremendously large and curve down, then out, then sometimes up, protruding from between the pig’s lips. Males have larger tusks than females. The tusks are used mostly for digging and rooting through soil, which helps the pig find insects, worms, and tasty roots to eat. This rooting action makes wild pigs a serious pest in agricultural areas.

The tusks are also used for defence, and are put to work when males fight one another during mating season. Pig battles come in two varieties that are much like naval battles — head-to-head and broadside. In a head-to-head fight, which is practised by pigs with warts on their faces (the warts provide protection against tusks), the two animals charge one another and have a pushing match, each pig trying to push the other off balance. A broadside fight involves pigs without warty faces, and typically with shorter tusks. In this sort of contest the two males will slash at the shoulders of their opponent, attempting to inflict what is normally a non-fatal injury.

In literature, wild boars are well-known for their ability to gore and kill a careless hunter with their tusks, and this is certainly something they can do in real life as well. In reality the wound is rarely fatal, but it can be very painful and dangerous. A wild boar will only charge in this manner if it feels threatened when surprised or cornered. Female wild boars will also charge to protect their young, but as they do not have large tusks, they will bite instead of gore. If you have never been chomped on by an angry female pig, I recommend you take steps to stay that way.

As a side note, the wild boar and domestic pigs are all the same species. The different breeds of domestic pig, including the sorts that become pork on your table, are all considered sub-species of the wild boar, and were all indeed true wild boars before humans domesticated them 9000 years ago. Some breeds of domesticated pig have escaped over the years since and become feral pigs. Humans are highly dependent on domesticated pigs for a wide variety of food products, many of which, it must be said, are just plain delicious.

As a side-side note, in the Forest of Dean in England there is a legend about a giant wild boar, called the Beast of Dean, that terrorized the countryside in the mid-19th Century. He was this big. Seriously.

A wild boar piglet. The Beast of Dean was probably a little bigger. (Photo by Sander van der Wel)

The second interesting anatomical feature is the snout. A pig’s snout maintains its characteristic flat cylinder shape due to a disk of cartilage just under the skin. The disk is supported by a small bone, called the prenasal bone, which is only found in pigs and exists in no other mammal in the world. The strong, reinforced cartilage disk allows the pig to use its snout to help root for food.

The third bit of unique anatomy, and also the least family friendly and least likely to be shown on daytime television, is the pig’s penis. You may have heard somewhere around the Internet that a pig has a corkscrew-shaped penis. If you imagined something that spirals the entire way out, that’s not quite correct. For the most part it is narrow and straight, but at the tip it unexpectedly spirals into a corkscrew shape for the last couple inches. This fits into a similarly shaped groove inside a female pig.

If you’re wondering how I know so much about the look and shape of a pig’s unmentionables, it’s best not to ask. I think I’ll go delete my Google image search history now.

Pig distribution. They are found throughout the world because of their relationship with humans.