Thank heavens for greedy pigs. Nothing comes close if you want to prepare land for planting without resorting to weedkiller, pesticide or a flamethrower. Pigs definitely beat the thick black plastic sheeting option. When staked out on ground to be cleared, black plastic is supposed to spell certain death to anything attempting to grow underneath. I tried it once, but the sheeting soon loosed its earthly bonds and was last seen heading for the coast of France.
This is the first of many ways in which pigs prove themselves to be the organic gardener’s friend. Not only do they refuse to fly, they won’t even flap in a high wind. Better still, they love to root. Pigs are never happier than when pushing their huge and powerful snouts deep into the soil and making a snack of pretty much anything they come across. Weeds haven’t a chance.
Things can’t go badly enough for the weeds in my acre of walled garden if I am ever to make anything of it, which is why I have just been to collect a new herd of two dozen adolescent pigs. Getting them home was not what I would describe as a laugh. They didn’t want to go into the horsebox and, once in, didn’t want to come out. When I finally extricated them, amid vociferous squealing, they huddled together under a tree for a whole day, eyeing me reproachfully and refusing to be tempted by even the choicest of delicacies. They had never been outside or experienced natural daylight in their entire lives.
Your modern, intensively farmed pig has a pretty unpleasant time of it. Mine were lucky enough to come from an enlightened farmer who used a group housing system. So although the pigs were indoors all the time, they could at least walk around and lie down in some straw. Frankly, you don’t want to know how most pigs are reared, but if dogs were kept in the same conditions there would be a national outcry. I mention this because pigs have a comparable level of intelligence to dogs and not dissimilar personalities. Dylan Thomas summed them up rather well in Under Milk Wood: “Pigs grunt in wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting pig fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal of yesses of the female pigs in rut. They mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, snug, after-swill sleep.”
Pigs are incredibly gregarious creatures — inquisitive and playful. Mine, once they got the hang of the whole free-range thing, began running themselves ragged. In between hiding and chasing games, they taught themselves to turn on taps and open gates.
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Clever as they are, however, I couldn’t persuade them to move out of the sun and into the shade during the recent heatwave. I was worried that they would get sunburn and created a mud pit for them — mud being the factor 30 sunscreen of the animal kingdom — but no amount of coaxing would induce them to wallow, either. I even offered up a prayer or two to St Anthony, the patron saint of swineherds, but to no avail. The creatures burnt eventually, filling the air with the delicious aroma of grilled bacon, and forcing me to take drastic action. In addition to feeding and watering them in the morning, I now apply suntan lotion. In the evening I spray them with aloe vera. The pigs seem to enjoy the attention and push each other out of the way so that they get the next turn.
When visiting friends express surprise that I plan to eat the pigs after they have finished their tour of gardening duty, I quote John Berger: “A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not a but.”
All animal fats tend to be flavoured by their diet. So the meat of animals fed on, say, onions will taste of onions. I would rather eat my pigs — even if they taste of Ambre Solaire — than shed-raised animals that have led a miserable, confined life and probably been pumped full of drugs.