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jaclaz

Well, we do have the Cinta Senese breed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Il_Pa...

that is (still today) actually very similar to what the Author describes as "medieval pigs".

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That's a better role model indeed.

But the author doesn't say that medieval-looking pigs are uncommon around the world right now.

They say that pigs in medieval themed games are represented by pigs as seen in intensive pig farming: confined, fast growing, furless and pink.

Yep, they (the videogame designers) got the wrong models, in case any of them read the comments here (and accept the critique in the article), the Cinta Senese is proposed as an alternative model.

To be fair, if you quickly look for pigs breeds, you will probably find images like this one:

https://www.breedslist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Types-...

where all breeds seem rather chunky and short-legged.

Aw. The Gloucestershire Old Spot looks kind of like a floppy-eared puppy. Very cute.

Also they’re delicious. Our local farmer had some of them and it’s the best bacon I’ve ever eaten.

Purely from a visual standpoint it's also pretty much the only one that still looks to have somewhat natural proportions and skin. The rest just look adipose and/or at risk of sunburn to me.

Also what they’re fed on makes a huge difference, for any breed.

these look much cuter than the farm variety

Di Young - Pixel Pig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiC7_167hQ0

I thought one of the most interesting points of the article was towards the bottom. Part of inaccuracy is that you'll be wandering around the village in the game and you'll find adult pigs in pens. It sounds like pigs were mostly free-range and in the woods for their adult life. Later on, as the "wilderness" shrank they transitioned to more of a farm animal.

Not medieval times, but when my grandfather was a kid (nearly 100 years ago now), the pigs would roam his Sicilian town and its outskirts. He was about 6 when he decided to piss off a sow in a field. It mauled him and near killed him.

That's still standard in Corsica (and I think Sicily though less sure), local pigs are partially feral.

Parts of Corsica, other parts seem to be run by a small breed of cattle who keep pockets of human tenders around.

Observing the pigs at the Col de Vergio I imagined to notice a pattern of the bigger/older pigs venturing further away into the wild, as if they eventually developed a certain nagging suspicion but were too trusting minds to really act on it.

I love this on a deep level. Great writing.

‘Imagined to notice’ is a lovely way of embracing those flights of fancy.

The imagery of the older pigs subconsciously coming to a conclusion they’ll never quite get to really touched me.

Thank you.

Not exactly "roaming in the town", but just last week I was talking with someone that remembered how - in the late 1950's or early '60's - her family (in Tuscany countryside) had usually three or four pigs that were routinely brought (by her, at the time 8 or 9 years old) to the nearby woods and it happened more than once that one of them would flee and get to the village, and be later brought back by this or that neighbour.

On an extended visit to a small village in Mexico where the pigs would wander, I made a sport of stalking the piglets and attempting to pick them up. I achieved my aim once and the mother sow came charging at me & thereby convinced me to yield up the piglet toot suite. No mauling ensued thank goodness.

FYI, tout suite is a French term meaning immediately. The toot suite sounds like where the hogs go on holiday.

If I may invoke Muphry's law, the french term is "tout de suite"

Then I'll happily contribute my second improvement of french: suivite.

(For the curious, the first one is "toujourd'hui". And yes, this is tongue-in-cheek -- until these catch on and I'm celebrated by the Academy Francaise. Then it's Very Serious Business and was always intended as such, this post notwithstanding)

I did not know it was a thing in English! This said, in French it is "tout de suite", but apparently both are correct in English.

Since the second 't' in tout isn't voiced and the 'de' is very quick and blended in, "tout de suite" sounds like "toot suite" to an English ear, hence the 'de' often being dropped (as well as spellings like the above).

Yes, in French it tends to be pronounced "tou tsuit" (if I can spell it this way :D).

Calling it “correct” is maybe an exaggeration. It’s an extremely colloquial, jokey intentional misspelling.

> The toot suite

Claiming as my band^h^h^h^hMastodon app name.

"toot suite" is slang in English, an intentionally incorrect derivation from the French. But it probably is where the hogs go as well :)

It's actually "Toot Sweets" :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMFha1nmeXc

The song "Toot Sweets" from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"

oh boy, arent they like 200 kg of angry meat?

Big enough that when the cousin he was with returned with adult help, the sow had shredded all of his clothes and he had bites all over his body.

As a kid I briefly lived in a rented trailer on a smallish farm which grew mustard greens and raised hogs. The owner was missing half an ear, taken by a hog. At least, that was the story he told when he caught me one day about to stick my hand into the hog pen. True account or not, the lesson is true all the same: hogs eat people, and angry or hungry hogs are not to be trifled with.

But some can be truffled with.

The largest domestic breeds push up to 300 to 400 kilos. We had one free-range pig on our farm that was certainly over a quarter-tonne, and she was agile enough that she'd occasionally run down chickens and eat them, and jaws strong enough to chew up cow skulls left over from home-kill.

Pigs are generally smart and friendly if they haven't been mistreated. I would not want to mess with one.

People like to joke about all the native Australian animals that can kill you, but the animal I was most afraid of as a farm kid was the feral pigs. I saw photos of recently shot pigs that were too big to fit on the back of a ute, and often found small trees completely uprooted by them.

Fortunately the largest feral pigs I ever ran into were a litter and a small sow that preferred to scatter than stand their ground.

I've seen wild hog videos of them charging forward, full tilt against much larger animals. Things that would eat pigs for dinner, I tell you, they don't care and their charges mess you up.

It is a funny quirk of evolution that herbivores or mostly herbivorous omnivores often end up being more aggressive than predators. The predator would prefer dinner that doesn't fight back!

I visited Georgia (the country) a few years ago and their pigs were roaming freely around the villages.

Here's a photo I took: https://imgur.com/a/ehETWOK

You could have also looked for pigs and cows at their tea plantations. Kinda surreal view.

I had no idea they had tea plantations, that's kinda surprising. Seems I need to go back.

They are probably much harder to come by than in my days, but still exist:

https://www.teaandcoffee.net/feature/2061/georgia-works-revi...

With government support and private-sector interest, Georgia aims to rebuild its once highly regarded and significant tea industry – dating back to the Russian Empire – that was destroyed following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In its history, first in the Russian Empire, then in the Soviet Union, Georgia played a crucial role in the tea market, producing at its peak up to 133,000 tonnes of packed tea per year from nearly 70 species, enjoying demand not only within the country, but also in some export destinations, including Mongolia, Iran and Afghanistan. However, this ended with the collapse of Soviet Union, when communism-style, tea-growing cooperatives appeared not to be ready for any competition with import supplies.

As a result, the tea industry was almost completely ruined, as annual volume of production dropped to nearly 4,000 tonnes. Approximately 95 percent of tea plantations have been closed, while out of nearly 100 tea factories, only 12 are operating now.

It sounds a lot like sheep and shepherds. Hopefully, modern ideas of how sheep were taken care of are more accurate?

I suspect that Kingdom Come: Deliverance has the pigs in their work accurate to what it was at the time and the author is taking sources about specific regions and then extrapolating over all of Europe. Yes, there are inaccuracies in most games, but I suspect that the author is also themselves inaccurate.

What do you base that on? This seems like a pretty long bow to draw; pigs didn’t look like they do now, that’s a pretty accepted fact, even if you might quibble with their other points.

Probably based on the sheer level of detail and research that went into making that game.

It’s easy to overlook something and get it wrong. And they also took plenty of artistic liberties, like having highly anachronistic clothing and armor for Hungarian Cumans in the setting.

And it's very easy for an author of an opinion piece such as this to overlook something or over extrapolate something or assume that medieval drawings are accurate. In the case of this article, most of what the author has cited is information about the British Isles and then extrapolated that information to cover all of Europe even though regional differences almost certainly existed and things likely changed over time as well. It's not like the world was just static for 600+ years.

These are expert historians, not random people posting an "opinion piece". Do you have information they don't that shows that they're wrong here?

Part of this is because without full-time pig herders, the pigs tend to go feral and cause a hell of a lot of damage. There are huge numbers of feral pigs in America. They can be quite dangerous:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/us/pigs-san-francisco-cal...

I once read about a medieval case where a sow and her piglets attacked and killed a random villager. The medieval court sentenced the mother to death but concluded that the offspring were too young to know right from wrong and were acting under the influence of their mother, ruling them innocent.

There's an old book from about 1906 where the author goes through a bunch of old European cases of animals being tried in court for crimes. It's an interesting and bizarre read.

https://archive.org/details/criminalprosecut00evaniala

It also is one of the (potential) bases for laws regarding self-driving vehicles/robots/drones.

Because law builds on precedent. And it can be argued that self-driving vehicles are a bit like an animal (has a "mind" of its own, but has a human owner responsible for it).

I'm sure it was just a suspended sentence.

The practice, and the woodland used for it, is called pannage. Somebody below pointed out that it's still done in the New Forest in England.

You used to have the right to fatten your pigs by letting them go root around in the forest during the late summer/early autumn. Pigs can eat acorns and beechmast just fine without processing; and in the late fall they get brought in and slaughtered. This also keeps underbrush down, fertilizes the forest floor, and is less smelly than keeping the pigs confined. Nicer for the pigs, too.

There are lots of places around New England called "hog island", which was usually the place the farmer would row the pigs out to-uninhabited, and filled with oaks and beeches. Pigs are unwilling to swim too far from shore, keeping them on the island (and away from crops!) until bacon time.

(Here is an article touching on the practice of pannage, and how it was related to the first indian wars in New England, as well as the Hog Island that I grew up near!)

https://www.sjsu.edu/people/ruma.chopra/courses/h170_MW_S13/...

In villages they probably managed to mostly keep the pigs under control, but in towns and cities there do seem to have been free-roaming pigs. They were known to eat babies on occasion, and the French, at least, liked to put them on trial for this (and execute them).

That article also includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Ambro... which is an actual medieval picture with a very recognizable Cinta Senese pig in it. Which is a testimony that at least some medieval pigs looked exactly like that.

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