Fine swine

CONTRARY to popular belief, pigs are not capable of sweating; but if they could they should be. The current outbreak of foot and mouth disease imperils tens of thousands of these largely blameless beasts, whose millions of years on earth have been plagued by suspicion, misrepresentation and controversy. Pigs are the fall-guys of the farmyard; the scapegoats in the sty. One of the nicest and, certainly, cleverest animals domesticated by man, they have become synonymous with greed and smelliness, and most of the other deplorable traits on which their oppressors hold a monopoly franchise.

Now they are getting it in the neck for disrupting the weekending plans of anxious-to-escape townies, for whom the countryside has been declared a vast exclusion zone. There is a "Keep Out" sign over the Cotswolds, a "Do Not Enter" notice on the Dales. Romancers, ramblers and point-to-pointers are being urged to stay at home. There is a term for how these people will be feeling: pig sick.

Yet pigs - when they are allowed to be - are resoundingly healthy creatures, fastidious of diet and scrupulous of hygiene: unlike many other creatures they will not foul their own bedding. The new film Hannibal may feature a horde of them snacking hungrily on Sir Anthony Hopkins's shinbones, but their agents must have put them up to it. Such is the fate of pigs in popular culture; two out of three got their houses blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. Piglet couldn't spell his own name. Losers.

Pigs are on the receiving end of perhaps the roughest deal in the whole animal kingdom; deemed to be not only uncouth but unclean in the unequivocal religious sense of being singled out by God as a proscribed species. The interdiction against the pig is first mentioned in Leviticus 11.7-8, "And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted? He is unclean to you. Of their flesh ye shall not eat, and their carcass shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you." To be fair, owls and lobsters are treated to a similar ostracism although no one talks of "sweating like an owl", and nor would it have naturally occurred to Sixties radicals to address the police as "lobsters".

Various explanations have been advanced for the Old Testament's stern injunction, which later spread, under Mosaic law, throughout Islam. Many scholars have attributed it to the pig's reputation as a "dirty" animal, whose habits could have been considered a liability to the early Israelites. The anthropologist Marvin Harris believes it merely reflects the difficulties of rearing pigs in primitive desert conditions, but in The Golden Bough, Sir James Fraser says that it came about because the pig was an animal of sacrifice. "The reason for not eating them," wrote Fraser, "is that they were originally divine."

And divine they still can be. Especially in the form of prosciutto, or pit-barbecued over mesquite wood in a listing Deep South rib shack, or served in the traditional English way with a teeth-busting top layer of crackling and a splodge of apple sauce. But much as those of us who are allowed to eat pig may love to see it on the menu, however hard we try, while carefully gauging the requisite crispiness of its rashers, to understand its nature, we struggle to feel affection for the animal itself. Some find it easy. "I am fond of pigs," said Sir Winston Churchill. "Dogs look up to us. Cats looks down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."

Many attempts, literary, historical and celluloid, have been made to buoy the pig's image. Plutarch, writing in the first century AD, recounts Odysseus's attempts to convince his sailors - who have been turned into swine by the sorceress Circe - that it was far nobler to be a pig than a human being. Unfortunately the mariners disagree, and as we leave the scene they are gathered menacingly around the skipper's retreating sandals. P G Wodehouse created the Empress of Blandings, the splendid and redoubtable prize-winning sow who is the pride of her owner, Lord Emsworth's life. And then there is George Orwell.

In making the pigs the commissar class of Animal Farm, Orwell at least did justice to their qualities. "The work of teaching and organising the others naturally fell to the pigs," he wrote, "who were generally recognised as being the cleverest of the animals." And this, let it be said, was not propaganda. In an American study, conducted in the Fifties, pigs were recognised as the seventh most intelligent species on the planet. Even this didn't satisfy the pigs. A follow up study in the Eighties had them soaring to fifth place, which suggested they had either been underrated before or were studying hard at home.

Pigs, of course, have had their moments; there was Babe the 1997 hit film, featuring the too-cute-to-spit-roast little porker who escapes from the abattoir to a hill farm and gets the sheepdog's job. After the film came out pork sales in the United States collapsed. And there was the pot-bellied Vietnamese pig pet craze that put pigs into Manhattan penthouses, and which - although the vogue faded - proved that to keep a pig in the home you don't need concrete floors and a hosepipe. You never did.

Pigs have been around for 45 million years, during which time they should have learnt something. They inhabit all continents, and were probably first domesticated in China between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago. They are highly trainable, endlessly adaptable, and despite the scriptural prohibitions, pork is, by a large margin, the world's most popular meat. In medieval times, pigs were an alternative currency - giving rise to the term "piggy bank" which reflected the fact of a household's wealth being invested in its pig. The said pig usually lived in the house. Nobody thought anything of it.

Used today as a butt for insults, there was a time of higher principle when Britain considered the defence of the interests of pigs worth going to war over. The little-chronicled, but, to its participants, deadly serious Anglo-American Pig War broke out in 1859 on San Juan island off Washington state, when an American settler, Lyman Cutler, shot and killed a pig belonging to Englishman Charles Griffin. When the British authorities threatened to have Cutler arrested, the Americans summoned the 9th cavalry, and the British responded by dispatching three warships under the command of Rear Admiral Robert Bayes. Anchored off the island, Bayes gravely informed the Admiralty of his reluctance to "involve two great nations in a war over a pig", but it was 10 years before the stand-off was finally resolved.

Today's pigs are no less deserving of our support. The start of the 21st century finds them at the cutting edge of bio-medical research. They provide us not only with food, but with transplant organs, tissue for skin grafts, insulin and the raw materials of many drugs. So similar is the pig's physiognomy to that of humans that they are used in the study of everything from alcoholism (exhibiting a particular fondness for fine Russian vodka) to battlefield injuries.

Where, then, did it all go wrong for the pig? How did an animal of such exceptional character, virtue and temperament land on the end of such a bum rap? And is there any way to speed the ill-done-by beast's rehabilitation? Sara Rath, author of The Complete Pig, a compendious guide to the ways of pig-kind, believes they are not only deserving of a comeback in our affections, but poised to achieve one. "These are animals," she says, "who danced to music for the Bourbon kings, who inspired the sculptors of Mesopotamia, who have been at the heart of human existence - love, war, famine and plenty - through all our time on earth. We have to get close to them again." Not only that, but pigs are one of the few animals with their own patron saint, Anthony Abbot. In the weeks ahead they are going to need him.