“I like pigs. Dogs look up to you. Cats look down to you. Pigs look you in the eye and see you as equal.” Winston Churchill
Newborn piglets learn to run to their mother’s voices.- Adult pigs can run at speeds up to 11 miles per hour. Not that they would… but they could!
- The highest density of tactile receptors is in the snout, making it incredibly muscular and incredibly sensitive. A pig’s sense of smell is over 2000 times stronger than humans’!
- Pigs are the oldest domesticated animal, domesticated over 6000 years ago. The Chinese were the first to raise them for food, and are still the top pig producers and consumers today!
- Pigs exist on every continent except Antarctica.
- Commercial pig production dates back to the 1800s. Farmers used the new Erie Canal to ship pigs back to the East Coast. Pigs were often called “Mortgage Lifters” because the profits from hog production was enough for farmers to pay for their new homesteads in the Midwest.
- Big Bill of Poland set the record for the World’s Largest Pig in 1933. He was 5 feet tall, 9 feet long, and weighed a whopping 2,552 pounds.
- The largest litter of piglets ever born included 37 piglets, out of which 36 were born alive, and 33 survived.
- Bacon is one of the world’s oldest meats. Dating back to 1500 B.C., bacon has been a favorite for millennia. The phrase “bring home the bacon”originated during the 12th Century when a church in England offered a side of bacon to any man who could swear before the church that he had not had a fight with his wife for a year. Any man that could bring home the bacon was then highly respected among the community. Today bacon is big business, with over 2 billion pounds of bacon being produced annually in the United States.
- Pig are louder than jet engines. Pigs can scream up to 130 decibels! With jet engines coming in at 120 decibels compared to diesel engines at 80 decibels, you can imagine how noisy a group of pigs can be if they decide to cause a commotion.
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