GROWING up in South Africa, author Lyall Watson owed his life to the sharp sense of smell of his pet warthog, Hoover. Seeing the little beast disappear down a convenient bolt-hole alerted him to the fact that he was walking straight into the path of a lion.
Years later, he has shown his gratitude by penning a testimonial to the many talents of the common warthog and its porcine kin – particularly the domestic pig, that docile offspring of the fierce Eurasian wild boar.
The familiarity gained through a 30,000-year association has made most humans indifferent to the many virtues of pigs. Sure, outside Muslim and Jewish societies, we like pigs well enough to keep about 1 billion of them. But most of them don’t live long enough to become boon companions rather than breakfast.
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Watson argues that pigs deserve better. Anatomically and physiologically they are much closer to primates than their membership of the order Artiodactyla would suggest. But that has only made them candidates to be used as spare body-part factories for transplant surgery. Instead, Watson says the pig’s behaviour and mental abilities deserve wider study as a research model.
The Whole Hog
Profile/Smithsonian