The Rural Voice, 2005-07, Page 36This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef
This little piggy had none,
This little piggy cried wee wee
twee all the way home.
The old nursery rhyme doesn't
make much sense, but it is one of
the first games we play with our
babies toes.
There are oodles of other
rhymes and sayings about pigs,
many of which are as ridiculous
as the first one. It seems that
pigs are the most misunderstood
of animals. being characterized
as fat. dirty, and greedy. To be
called a pig may signify any of
these things, none of them
desirable traits.
My own experience with pigs
comes from the '40s when we
still kept pigs as well as cows,
horses and chickens on our farm.
The pigs were fed skim milk, and
vegetable peels from the house
along with their ration of chop.
They were allowed out in the
barnyard in the summer months
to root around. and yes, they did
love to roll in the mud puddles
after a good rain. It seems pigs
have no sweat glands so they roll
in every puddle they find to keep
their cool. Isn't a mud pack
supposed to be a beauty
treatment?
As for other kinds of hygiene,
any farmer can tell you that a
section of the back of the pig pen
is designated as a toilet area and
the rest of the pen, where eating
and sleeping takes place, is clean
and dry.
As to eating like a pig,
apparently pigs do know when they have had enough food,
which cannot be said of many of their human counterparts
who receive the epithet. 1 assume the term "piggy bank"
also refers to the idea of greedily holding on to one's
money.
Can pigs help it if they have a rotund shape? Their
covering of body fat keeps them somewhat warm in cold
weather, as they don't have heavy fur like many other
animals. Pigs also have the reputation of being hard to
drive anywhere, preferring to go their own way, from
which we get the expression "pig headed."
My first viewing of a birth occurred when my siblings
and 1 lined up in front of the pigpen to watch one of our
sows give birth. We were fully aware that my mother
would not have approved of us watching, as the thinking at
the time was that anything related to the reproductive
This Little
Piggy
Why do pigs get such a
bad rap when they have so
much to offer?
By Barbara Weiler
32 THE RURAL VOICE
system was unsuitable for small
children. We were enthralled
and stayed perfectly quiet
while one after another piglet
emerged to a total of 10. Later
on as the piglets found their
assigned teat and settled down
to feed we witnessed an
appealing picture of barnyard
motherhood.
One year one of the sows did
not take to her litter, either
rolling on them accidentally or
actively attacking them. My
father removed them from the
pen and placed them in a large
wooden packing box lined with
soft straw. He put it under a
tree near the house and we fed
the piglets cow's milk with an
old baby bottle left over from
my brother's infancy. We all
pitched in to keep the piglets
fed. Baby pigs are adorable
animals, cute and silken soft to
the touch, with wiggly little
tails. The babies survived the
first weeks but it seems to me
the litter did not do well later
on, not having acquired the
immunities that come naturally
with the sow's milk.
With this one exception. our
pigs were not considered pets
and one of them supplied most
of our winter meat. My father
slaughtered the unfortunate
animal himself, while I
retreated to my bedroom and
put my head under a pillow so 1
was unable to hear the squeal of
the victim. The deed was done
in late November or December
when the weather had turned
cold and the meat could be kept
in the unheated back kitchen.
My mother had the task of
making head cheese and sausage.
The rest of the pigs were sent to market when they
reached the appropriate size and provided part of the
sporadic income for our mixed farm. Maybe the rhyme
"This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed home"
is not so ridiculous after all.
In the late forties my father started to ship milk to a
dairy and it was apparently against regulations to house
pigs and the dairy herd in the same barn, so the pigs
disappeared.
We continue to hear the negative slurs directed at the
pig: "your room is a pig sty", "as slick as a greased pig",
"fat as a pig", "dirty as a pig". All of these expressions are
still used and perpetuate the myth of the pig as a loathsome
animal. Too bad "this little piggy" has acquired such a bad
reputation.0