Pat's Wildways: Swine on my mind

In my life, I pay attention when three unconnected experiences reveal something in common to me. Recently it’s been pigs and hogs, the members of the mammal family Suidae. I didn’t go out looking for swine, but somehow here I am, my brain full of pigs.

On a recent trip through South Georgia, Bucko and I visited Hamlen Hills, an agro-attraction featuring old farm machinery, a corn maze, and a petting area for kids — both goats and children. In with and amongst the pettable goats were three potbellied pigs, a bit too far away to pet but happy to scarf up the handfuls of grain I tossed their way. These small domestic pigs are often sold as pets, but rarely do they stay small enough to be good house pets. They are intelligent, friendly and easily housebroken, but really, who needs a maybe 150-pound pig in their house? But in a petting zoo like this one, they are perfect.

A few days later, I visited the Jacksonville Zoo again to confer with a keeper with the Asian small-clawed otters, once the subject of my Ph.D. work in a California zoo where I worked, and later in Malaysia and Thailand, where I studied them in the wild. Besides talking about otter husbandry, I was given a VIP chance to safely interact with their Visayan warty pigs. These swine are a critically endangered species found in the wild only on a couple of islands in the Philippines, but happily residing in a number of U.S. and European zoos thanks to active, well-managed breeding programs. Like potbellied domestic pigs, they are friendly and fairly small. And like many animals, they like their backs scratched, a behavior that the Jacksonville Zoo has capitalized on to let select visitors interact with them with a long-handled brush, offered from a safe distance.

There are at least 18 living species of swine in the world, a group of mammals that originated in the Old World — Europe, Africa and Asia, and the heaviest concentration of these species is in Asia, notably the Philippines and Indonesia. A number of these Asian species, like the Visayan warty pig, occur only in very small areas, often islands and most are endangered. Programs like this one at the Jacksonville Zoo help protect some species from extinction, although there may not be enough habitat in the wild to ever return them there.

But most of the swine we are familiar with, like potbellied pigs, belong to one species, the domestic pig (Sus scrofa domestica), which is a subspecies of European wild boars. This species has been widely introduced throughout the world and provides protein for many. Here in the United States, wild boars have been introduced into many places, some intentionally by hunters and some from escapees from farms. Now wild pigs in North America are considered to be an invasive species that causes widespread habitat destruction. Even here on Amelia Island, there are, or at least have been, wild hogs in Fort Clinch State Park, although efforts were at one time underway to remove them.

I thought I was pretty well-versed on pigs, but then I had my third recent pig encounter. A few weeks ago I had stumbled upon Ben Foster’s farm when I took a wrong turn down a dirt road in High Springs, Florida and wrote about it in a recent column. Besides loading me up with frozen pork for free, Ben offered to show me around his farm if I ever came back that way. And so I did, a couple weeks later.

And wow what a treat that was! Ben’s group of domestic pigs are stunningly beautiful! His pigs are Kune Kune pigs, known for their smallish size, their “wattles” on their neck, their tasty, fatty meat, and their docile and friendly nature. OK. But what really got me about these pigs was their color. In the sunlight their hair glowed an almost phosphorescent gold, which, it turns out, is because their dark hairs have a yellow outer layer. Although there is only one full species of domestic pig there are hundreds of breeds, just like with dogs, which man has modified over the years for various features. And to my untrained eye, surely Kune Kune pigs are the most beautiful.

So there you have it, my thoughts on swine. I just never know what will take my fancy next. Stay tuned!

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com