97 Fun Facts About Pig

In Disney's The Lion King, what kind of wild pig is Pumbaa?

Warthog: Pumbaa the warthog and his meerkat friend Timon take in the exiled Simba and teach him to live on bugs under their motto, hakuna matata.

Pigs were domesticated independently in two parts of the world; which of these was one?

The Near East: pigs were domesticated there and separately in East Asia, and the herds farmers took into Europe bred with wild boar so often that almost none of their Near Eastern ancestry survives.

A male pig's tusks are overgrown versions of which teeth?

Canines: a boar's tusks are canine teeth that never stop growing, and the upper and lower pairs grind against each other, which keeps them sharp.

The small bone inside the tip of a pig's snout is an adaptation for what?

Rooting in soil: the bone stiffens the snout's cartilage disc for digging, and the babirusa, whose snout bone is weak or missing, roots only in soft mud.

Pigs wallow in mud to cool off because they can barely do what?

Sweat: a pig's few sweat glands do almost nothing to cool it, so evaporating mud does the work, and the coating may also guard against sunburn and parasites.

Which pig breed is unusual for its thick, woolly coat?

Mangalitsa: this Hungarian lard pig grows a curly fleece, and it nearly died out, with fewer than 200 left in Hungary around 1990 before breeders revived it.

Pigs aren't kosher: they have split hooves but don't do what?

Chew cud: Leviticus permits only animals that both have split hooves and chew the cud, and it singles out the pig as having the hooves without the chewing.

As of 2023, which country is the world's largest producer of pork?

China: about half of the world's pork is eaten there, most of it home-raised, and the government even keeps a strategic pork reserve to smooth out swings in price.

Roughly how many pigs are slaughtered for meat worldwide each year?

About 1.5 billion pigs were slaughtered in 2023, and the total is fragile: it fell by more than 100 million in 2019 as African swine fever swept through herds in Asia.

Which meat overtook pork in 2016 as the world's most produced?

Poultry passed pork in 2016 after decades in second place, and by 2023 the world produced about 142 million tonnes of it against 125 million of pork.

What is the two-part scientific name of the wild boar, ancestor of the domestic pig?

Sus scrofa: scrofa is Latin for a breeding sow, and it also gave medicine the word scrofula, literally 'little pigs', for a swelling of the glands in the neck.

In Homer's Odyssey, which enchantress turns Odysseus's crew into pigs?

Circe drugs the crew's wine and turns them into pigs with a stroke of her wand, leaving their minds human, until Odysseus, protected by a herb from Hermes, makes her change them back.

Across most of its Eurasian range, which predator is the wild boar's main hunter?

The wolf is the wild boar's main predator across most of Eurasia, but in the forests of the Russian Far East the tiger takes over, with boar among its chief prey.

How is wild boar society organised?

In matriarchal groups: a sounder is made up of related sows and their young, led by an old female, while young males leave and come back only for the mating season.

Which country has banned the use of pigs to hunt truffles?

Italy outlawed truffle pigs because their digging tears up the underground threads the fungus grows from; trained dogs, often the curly-coated Lagotto Romagnolo, now do the sniffing.

Which breed became a short-lived American pet craze in the late 1980s?

The pot-bellied pig reached the United States in the mid-1980s, originally bound for zoos, and became a pet craze that faded as buyers watched their piglets grow far bigger than promised.

Which position does the Pig hold in the cycle of the Chinese zodiac?

Twelfth and last: in the legend of the Jade Emperor's great race the Pig is the final animal to arrive, and in one telling it had stopped along the way for a meal and a nap.

Each Year of the Pig comes in one of five types, named after what?

The Chinese elements: Metal, Water, Wood, Fire and Earth take turns, so a given pairing, such as the Earth Pig of 2019, comes round only once every sixty years.

The piggy bank's popularity in the West is often traced to which country, where pigs symbolise good luck?

Germany, where a Glücksschwein, or lucky pig, is a good-luck charm: the country's oldest known piggy bank, a medieval clay pig found in Thuringia, turned out to hold no coins.

Terracotta money boxes shaped like wild boar were made in the Majapahit empire on which island?

Java: the Majapahit boars are thought to have held Chinese copper coins, and the Javanese word for a piggy bank, celengan, comes from celeng, a wild boar.

In The Three Little Pigs, how does the villain finally try to get in?

Chimney: down he comes, straight into a pot of boiling water, and in Joseph Jacobs's 1890 telling the pig then cooks him and eats him for supper.

Which band flew a giant inflatable pig over London's Battersea Power Station for a 1977 album cover?

Pink Floyd flew it for the cover of Animals; the rope broke during the shoot and the pig drifted up into the flight path of Heathrow Airport.

Who wrote Charlotte's Web, published in 1952?

E. B. White raised pigs on his own farm, and four years earlier had published 'Death of a Pig', an essay about a sick one he sat up with for nights and could not save.

In Charlotte's Web, what is the name of the pig that Charlotte the spider saves?

Wilbur is a spring pig being fattened for slaughter until Charlotte, the spider living above his pen, promises to save his life, and does.

In Charlotte's Web, which two words does the spider weave first?

'Some Pig' comes first; Terrific, Radiant and Humble follow, and the crowds they draw to the barn make the pig too famous to slaughter.

In Charlotte's Web, why does Fern's father plan to kill the newborn piglet?

He is a runt, the weakling of the litter, and not thought worth raising; Fern talks her father out of it and feeds the piglet from a bottle herself.

The 1995 film Babe was adapted from which novel?

The Sheep-Pig came out in 1983; its author, Dick King-Smith, had farmed for twenty years before he turned to children's books in his fifties.

In which country was the 1995 film Babe shot?

Australia: it was shot in the green dairy country around Robertson, New South Wales, and in 2025 the town painted its giant roadside landmark as a pink pig to mark the film's 30th anniversary.

The film Babe won its only Oscar for Best what?

Visual Effects: its talking farm animals beat Apollo 13 to the award, the one win from seven nominations that included Best Picture.

George Miller directed the 1998 sequel to Babe under which title?

Babe: Pig in the City cost at least $80 million to make and took about $69 million worldwide, a costly flop after the hit original.

Which puppeteer gave Miss Piggy her voice on The Muppet Show?

Frank Oz was also Fozzie Bear, Animal, Cookie Monster and Bert, and he first played Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, so one man voiced the diva and the Jedi master.

Which martial art does the Muppets' Miss Piggy practise, usually on Kermit, complete with a shouted 'hi-yah'?

Karate: her chop usually sends Kermit flying, and in an essay for Time in 2015 she put her success down to grit, perseverance and karate.

Which French word does Miss Piggy famously use to refer to herself?

Moi: she used it all through the essay she wrote for Time in 2015, the week the Brooklyn Museum's Sackler Center gave her an award for women who break barriers.

Which company bought Peppa Pig's owner, Entertainment One, in 2019?

Hasbro, the American toy maker, agreed to pay about US$4 billion in cash, chiefly to own preschool brands such as Peppa Pig and PJ Masks.

What is Peppa Pig's favourite pastime?

Puddle jumping, always in muddy puddles, is what the whole pig family does for fun; her first cinema release, The Golden Boots of 2015, ran all of 15 minutes.

Which 2009 mobile game made villains of egg-stealing green pigs?

Angry Birds: its Finnish maker Rovio was near bankruptcy with money for just one game, and when the birds needed an enemy the designer, by his own account, drew the pig he had doodled since he was ten.

Which pig rules the farm in George Orwell's 1945 novella?

Napoleon, a Berkshire boar modelled on Stalin, rules the farm; Orwell wrote the book in 1943–44, when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union and publishers wanted nothing to do with it.

In Animal Farm, the final commandment calls some animals what?

More equal than others: 'All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others' goes up on the wall, and by the next day the pigs are carrying whips.

Roughly how long is a sow's pregnancy?

About 114 days, which farmers remember as three months, three weeks and three days; it is short enough for a sow to raise two litters a year.

What is a female pig called before she has had her first litter?

A gilt becomes a sow once she has farrowed, just as a heifer becomes a cow; farmers track the difference because a first litter is usually smaller than the ones that follow.

On an uninhabited island in which country do tourists swim with a colony of feral pigs?

The Bahamas: the pigs of Big Major Cay in the Exumas paddle out to meet boats for food; legends blame a shipwreck, or sailors who left them for a later meal and never came back.

Pigs share with mongooses, honey badgers and hedgehogs a receptor mutation protecting them from what?

Snake venom: honey badgers, hedgehogs and pigs each evolved, separately, a changed muscle receptor that cobra-type neurotoxins cannot grip; mongooses got there by another route.

In a 2021 study, four pigs learned to use their snouts to do what?

Play a video game: they nudged an arcade-style joystick to steer a cursor into targets and scored well above chance, despite having no hands and poor eyesight.

The 2012 pig genome revealed an unusually large set of genes devoted to which sense?

Smell: pigs turned out to have one of the largest sets of working smell-receptor genes of any mammal, which suits a scavenger that noses out its food.

The Göttingen minipig was bred not as a pet but for what purpose?

Medical research: a small pig needs far less of whatever is being tested than a farm pig would, and its body works much like a human's.

In 2021, New York surgeons attached which gene-edited pig organ to a brain-dead patient?

A kidney: for more than two days it worked like a human one with no sign of rejection, because the pig had been engineered so the body would not treat the organ as foreign.

The 1859 Pig War on San Juan Island began when an American farmer shot a pig he caught eating his what?

Potatoes: the pig belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, and Royal Navy warships faced US troops across the island for weeks, yet the pig was the only casualty.

Ancient writers describe squealing pigs being driven into battle to panic which enemy war animals?

Elephants bolted from flaming, squealing pigs at the siege of Megara in 266 BC, trampling their own Macedonian troops. Their king is said to have kept a pig with the herd afterwards to cure the fear.

Which burrowing African mammal has a name that means 'earth pig' in the Afrikaans language?

Aardvark joins the Afrikaans words for earth and pig, a nod to the animal's burrowing habits. It is no relation of pigs: it is the only living member of its entire order of mammals.

In the old warning against buying a pig in a poke, what exactly is a poke?

A sack hid the goods from a careless buyer, so the phrase warns against paying for anything unseen. A later tale says tricksters slipped in a cat instead, hence letting the cat out of the bag.

Footballs got the nickname 'pigskin' because early balls were made by inflating which part of a pig?

A pig's bladder, blown up like a balloon, served as the first football and was later slipped inside a leather cover. Today's 'pigskins' contain no pig at all: they are made of cow leather.

Which Nordic country, a major pork exporter, raises about five pigs a year for each of its citizens?

Denmark raises several pigs a year for every Dane and sells most of the pork abroad. Its farmers turned to pigs and butter in the 1800s, when cheap foreign grain undercut their exports.

Until a lab-made version arrived in 1982, which hormone came from the pancreases of pigs and cattle?

Insulin from pigs differs from the human hormone by a single amino acid, so it worked well in people. Purifying eight ounces of it could take as much as two tons of pig parts.

Which Pixar film series features Hamm, a wisecracking pig voiced by John Ratzenberger?

Toy Story's Hamm is a plastic piggy bank with a cork in his belly, and he knows more about the outside world than any of Andy's other toys. At playtime Andy casts him as a villain called Evil Dr. Porkchop.

Despite its name, the guinea pig first domesticated in the Andes belongs to which group of mammals?

Rodents known as cavies, guinea pigs were first raised for meat in the Andes, where they are still eaten. They are no more native to Guinea than they are related to pigs.

In which 2007 animated film does a father rescue a pig from a burger chain and nickname it Spider-Pig?

The Simpsons Movie has Homer save the pig, which he names Plopper, from slaughter at Krusty Burger. Its overflowing waste silo, dumped in a lake, gets Springfield sealed under a giant glass dome.

In Britain, the Christmas side dish called pigs in blankets is a small sausage wrapped in what?

Bacon wraps a small chipolata in the British and Irish version, a traditional partner to the Christmas turkey. In the United States the name usually means a hot dog baked in croissant dough.

Which voice actor took over the stuttering Porky Pig in 1937 and kept the role until his death in 1989?

Mel Blanc replaced Joe Dougherty, whose real-life stutter made recording sessions run for hours and pushed up costs. Blanc kept the stammer but timed it precisely for laughs.

The failed Bay of Pigs invasion by CIA-backed exiles was an attempt to overthrow which leader?

Fidel Castro's forces defeated the landing within three days. The bay may not be named for swine at all: in Cuban Spanish, cochinos can also mean the queen triggerfish that live on its coral reefs.

What name is given to the rendered fat of a pig, long prized by bakers for making flaky pastry?

Lard is made by rendering a pig's fatty tissue, while the similar product from beef or mutton fat is tallow. Rendered properly it is nearly odourless and tasteless, which lets it stand in for butter.

Which word for a small outdoor pig enclosure sounds exactly like the name of a painful eyelid infection?

Sty comes from an Old English word that could mean a hall as well as a pen. Pigs are clean animals by nature: their yards turn to mud because they strip every plant and churn up the ground.

In Pig Latin, the code that moves a word's first consonant to the end, what does 'pig' become?

Igpay follows the standard rule: shift the opening consonant sound to the back and add 'ay'. Words that start with a vowel simply gain 'way' or 'yay', so 'open' turns into 'openway'.

Which motorcycle maker, whose bikes are nicknamed hogs, switched its stock ticker symbol to HOG in 2006?

Harley-Davidson traces the nickname to a 1920s racing team of farm boys whose mascot was a live pig, taken along on victory laps. Its owners' club later turned the word into Harley Owners Group.

In which Disney film does the daughter of a Polynesian island chief keep a pet pig named Pua?

Moana wants to take Pua beyond the reef to look for fish, but it is her dim-witted rooster Heihei who ends up at sea with her as a stowaway.

Which 1954 novel shares its title with a pig's head that stranded schoolboys set on a stick?

Lord of the Flies is what the boy Simon calls the head during an imagined conversation with it. The phrase is a literal translation of Beelzebub, the name of a biblical demon.

Which novelist popularised the idea that Norman nobles ate 'pork' while Saxon peasants kept the pigs?

Walter Scott's picture stuck, but it is too neat: 'pork' reached English from French around 1300, long after the Norman Conquest, and may owe more to the prestige of French cooking than to who did the farming.

Which pig-like American mammal, also called the javelina, belongs to a different family from true pigs?

Peccary species form their own family, the closest living relatives of true pigs. A musky odour strong enough for people to notice has earned them another nickname, the skunk pig.

Which farming term, from an Old English word for a young pig, describes a sow giving birth to a litter?

Farrowing follows a burst of nest-building: in the day before the birth, a sow hollows out the ground and lines it with twigs and leaves. It is a habit pigs share with carnivores.

Which word names a group of wild boar, which young males leave before they are fifteen months old?

Sounder members look after one another's young: if a mother dies early, her piglets are adopted by the other sows. A grown male only seeks one out again when he is ready to breed.

Which Sulawesi wild pig has upper tusks that grow up through its snout and curl toward its forehead?

Babirusa males that fail to grind their tusks down can, in rare cases, find them curling far enough to pierce their own skulls. The animals are also known as deer-pigs.

The pygmy hog, the world's smallest pig species, survives only in the tall grasslands of which country?

India is its only home. Thought to have died out by the early 1960s, the species was rediscovered in 1971 when a small group was seen fleeing a fire in Assam.

In a 2009 experiment, seven of eight pigs found a hidden bowl of food by learning to use which object?

A mirror revealed food hidden behind a wall, and pigs given five hours to get used to their reflections worked out where it really was. Pigs new to mirrors searched behind the glass instead.

Newborn piglets fight to claim the front teats of a sow: what makes those teats the prize?

They give more milk, so piglets are born with sharp teeth and battle for them. Once the pecking order is settled it stays stable, with each piglet feeding from its own teat or group of teats.

Spain's finest grade of jamón ibérico is named after which food that the pigs fatten on?

Acorns give the top grade its name, jamón ibérico de bellota. The pigs roam oak pastures known as dehesa, and labels also record how much Iberian ancestry each animal has.

At a Hawaiian lūʻau, kālua pig is traditionally cooked in an imu, which is what kind of cooker?

An underground oven, the imu is a pit of fire-heated stones lined with pounded banana plants, then sealed under leaves and earth so no steam escapes. The meat cooks inside for several hours.

Lechón, a whole pig roasted over charcoal, is counted a national dish of which Southeast Asian country?

In the Philippines, cooks stuff lechón with lemongrass and tamarind leaves, and whole-pig roasting there predates Spanish rule. The Spanish name first meant a suckling pig, but Filipinos now use it for any spit-roasted one.

The 2009 swine flu pandemic, a blend of avian, pig and human viruses, was caused by which strain?

H1N1 was also the subtype behind the 1918 Spanish flu. The 2009 strain got its nickname because part of its genetic mix came from a Eurasian pig flu virus.

In which Studio Ghibli film are a girl's parents turned into pigs after eating at a deserted restaurant?

Spirited Away sends young Chihiro to work in a witch's bathhouse to win them back. Her final test is to pick her parents out of a group of pigs, and she rightly answers that none of them is hers.

Which 1960s CBS sitcom featured Arnold Ziffel, a pig treated as a son by a childless farming couple?

Green Acres needed a new piglet almost every year, because each Arnold soon outgrew the part. The role was usually played by a female, and it won three Patsy Awards for the animal's trainer.

In the 2021 drama Pig, which actor plays an Oregon truffle forager whose beloved animal is kidnapped?

Nicolas Cage plays a once-renowned Portland chef who leaves his forest cabin to find the pig. The performance earned him a Critics' Choice nomination for Best Actor.

Which Korean director made Okja, a 2017 film about a girl and her genetically modified 'super pig'?

Bong Joon Ho took the film to Cannes, where it competed for the Palme d'Or before its Netflix release. Tilda Swinton plays a dual role in a cast that mixes Korean and Hollywood actors.

Which 1985 Disney animated film sends a young pig-keeper to protect Hen Wen, a pig with oracular powers?

The Black Cauldron's villain, the Horned King, wants Hen Wen because her visions could lead him to a relic that raises an army of the undead. The tale is set in the land of Prydain.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, whose baby turns into a piglet while Alice is holding it?

The Duchess hands the baby over herself, and once it has changed Alice simply lets the piglet go into the woods. The same household keeps the perpetually grinning Cheshire Cat.

Who wrote The Tale of Little Pig Robinson as a backstory for the pig in The Owl and the Pussy-Cat?

Beatrix Potter said her book explained how the poem's Piggy came to be there. Edward Lear's nonsense verse, first published in 1870, also invented the word 'runcible'.

Which comic novelist created the Empress of Blandings, a prize-winning sow doted on by Lord Emsworth?

P. G. Wodehouse made the enormous sow a regular of his Blandings stories, where she wins the Fat Pigs class at the local show and is forever the target of kidnap plots.

Which 16th-century novel features Zhu Bajie, a lazy pig-headed monk known in English as Pigsy?

Journey to the West makes him a former heavenly marshal, banished to Earth for drunken misbehaviour and now part human, part pig. He travels as a disciple alongside the monkey Sun Wukong.

Which heavy metal band opened its 1970 album Paranoid with the anti-war protest song War Pigs?

Black Sabbath first called the song Walpurgis, after the witches' sabbath, but the record company thought that title sounded too Satanic.

The Pig War of 1906 to 1908 began when Austria-Hungary closed its borders to pork from which neighbour?

Serbia refused to give in: it built new packing plants with foreign investment and looked for other markets, and Vienna conceded the trade war by March 1908. Pork had been the country's main export.

Which US state capital began as Pig's Eye, a settlement named after a bootlegger's popular tavern?

Saint Paul got its present name in the 1840s, when a Catholic missionary told the settlers to drop Pig's Eye and call the place after his new log chapel. The bootlegger, a former fur trader, was nicknamed Pig's Eye himself.

Which Pacific island nation's flag carries a curled boar's tusk, a traditional symbol of prosperity?

Vanuatu shows the tusk around two leaves of the local namele tree. On the islands such tusks are worn as pendants, and the emblem stands for custom and tradition as well as wealth.

In Norse myth, which god owns Gullinbursti, a boar whose golden bristles glow in the dark?

Freyr received the boar as a gift from the smiths Eitri and Brokkr, who made it by throwing a pig's skin into their furnace. He rode it, or a chariot it pulled, to the god Baldr's funeral.

In most tellings of the myth, which Greek huntress first wounded the Calydonian boar and won its hide?

Atalanta hit the boar with an arrow before the hero Meleager finished it off. He gave her the skin, and the quarrel with his uncles that followed ended in his own death.

Which injectable blood-thinning drug is still purified from the intestinal lining of slaughtered pigs?

Heparin is drawn from the mucous lining of pig intestines or from cattle lungs. It was discovered in 1916 after a second-year student at Johns Hopkins, Jay McLean, isolated an anticoagulant from dog liver.

Which Spanish explorer landed in Florida in 1539 with pigs whose escapees became wild razorbacks?

Hernando de Soto owned 700 hogs by the time he died, three years into the march. Animals that escaped the expedition became ancestors of the razorbacks of the American Southeast.

The Tamworth Two, pigs that fled an English abattoir in 1998, were named after which film outlaws?

Butch and Sundance, a sister and brother, squeezed through a fence and swam the River Avon to escape. They stayed on the run for more than a week while the hunt became a media sensation.

In 1968 the Yippies paraded Pigasus, a 145-pound pig, in Chicago as their candidate for which office?

US President was the prize, with the stunt staged just before the Democratic convention opened. The rally ended with police confiscating the pig and arresting several of his backers for disorderly conduct.

Which Ohio River city was nicknamed Porkopolis in the 1800s for its booming pork-packing trade?

Cincinnati still plays on the name: a park built for its 1988 bicentennial has four smokestacks each topped with a winged pig, and the city's marathon is the Flying Pig.