Pig Breeds

Europeans did not import pigs as cherished pets, but as food animals. In America semi-domesticated pigs were the rule into the nineteenth century depending on the region and were dubbed “hogs” once reaching maturity regardless of gender. Living on mast, or nuts that accumulate on the forest floor, they were prized for their fatty meat and their lard. Purebred pigs created with specific attributes, such as greater reproductive abilities, to produce specific kinds of meat or bacon, appeared in the later eighteenth century and most modern breeds are nineteenth-century creations. Thomas Jefferson may have begun the trend by importing Calcutta pigs (Sus indicus) in the early nineteenth century. The same Asians had been imported to England in the 1770s and bred with the native animals to produce the classic Yorkshire. This new breed was lighter, longer, and produced leaner meat and is considered to be the mother breed from which many others emerged. Yorkshires may have been imported to eastern Pennsylvania before 1812 and certainly appeared in Ohio in the 1830s.