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PIG
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- "Swine" redirects here. For the river, see Świna.
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"Sus" redirects here. For the acronym, see SUS.
Pigs, also called hogs, swine, boars (male) or sows (female), are ungulates native to Eurasia collectively grouped under the genus Sus within the Suidae family. The nearest relatives of the swine family are the peccaries and hippopotami.
[edit] Description and behaviour
A pig has a snout for a nose, small eyes, and a small, curly tail. It has a thick body and short legs. There are four toes on each foot, with the longer, middle toes used for walking.
Pigs are omnivores, which means that they consume both plants and animals. Pigs will scavenge and have been known to eat any kind of food, including dead insects, worms, tree bark, rotting carcasses, excreta (including their own), garbage, and other pigs. In the wild, they are foraging animals, primarily eating leaves and grasses, roots, fruits and flowers. Occasionally, in captivity, pigs may eat their own young.
A typical pig has a large head with a long snout which is strengthened by a special bone called the prenasal bone and by a disk of cartilage in the tip. The snout is used to dig into the soil to find food and is a very sensitive sense organ. Pigs have a full set of 44 teeth. The canine teeth, called tusks, grow continually and become very sharp by the lowers and uppers rubbing against each other.
Pigs that are allowed to forage may be watched by swineherds. Because of their foraging abilities and excellent sense of smell, they are used to find truffles in many European countries. They have been domesticated and raised as livestock by some peoples for meat (called pork) as well as for leather. Their bristly hairs are also used for brushes. Some breeds of pigs, such as the Asian pot-bellied pig, are kept as pets.
A female pig can become pregnant at around 12 to 16 weeks of age. She will then go into heat every 21 days. Male pigs become sexually active at 6 to 8 weeks of age. A litter of piglets typically contains between 6 and 12 piglets.
Pigs do not have effective sweat glands [1], so pigs cool themselves using water or mud during hot weather. They also use mud as a form of sunscreen to protect their skin from sunburn. Mud also provides protection against flies and parasites.
Pigs are generally considered one of the more intelligent animals on the planet, being compared to dogs [2]. In one study conducted by a Pennsylvania State University professor, two pigs were taught to play rudimentary video games by manipulating a joy stick with their snouts while being rewarded with sweets [3].
[edit] Linguistics
[edit] Etymology
Modern English "pig" probably derives from Old English "*picg", which was found within compound words; its ultimate origin is unknown, but Dutch "big" (meaning "young pig") seems to be a cognate. Originally "pig" referred to young pigs only as the word for adults was "swine". Another Old English word for "pig" was "fearh", related to "farrow", and also to "furrow" from the Proto-Indo-European stem "*perk" meaning "dig, furrow" (compare Latin "porcus" meaning "pig") . This reflects a widespread Indo-European tendency to name animals from typical attributes or activities.
Modern English "hog", which correctly means "castrated male pig", seems to be derived from Old Norse hoggva = "to strike or cut", referring to the castration, but in modern English is often used as a byword for greed. The similar word "hogget" is used in some English dialects for "castrated male sheep".
"Swine" came via Anglo-Saxon from Common Germanic swīn-, from Indo-European sū- = "pig" (compare English "sow" (adult female pig), Latin sūs, Greek `υς or συς) plus the -īnos suffix.
[edit] Other pig-related words
- The noise that a pig makes is usually represented as "oink" in the English language but in many different ways in other languages – for instance, chrum (Polish), hunk (Albanian), hulu (Mandarin Chinese), nøff (Norwegian), and so on. See oink for a fuller list.
- A young pig which has just weaned is called a "shoat"
- Early footballs were originally made from animal bladders, often from pigs. This was the origin of the term "pigskins".
- The familiar piggybank got its name and shape as a result of a pun on the word pygg, a type of clay commonly used to produce household items in the 18th Century.
- Pig iron is so named because the molten newly-smelted iron was once poured into molds resembling rows of suckling pigs.
- A type of barrel called a "hog's head" appears often in the writings of Mark Twain.
- A "hogshead" is a large volume of liquid. The term is also a colloquial reference to the gearbox for the "drive" wheels of automobiles, especially for large transport trucks, particularly those used in the Pulpwood industry of the Southeastern United States.
"Oink" is the usual way that the grunting of a pig is represented in the English language. As with other examples of onomatopoeia or imitative sounds, other cultures "hear" the pig's grunts differently and represent them in their own ways. Some of the equivalents of "oink" in other European and Asian languages are as follows:
Note the similarities between the renderings in related languages, such as röh, röhh and röf in Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, respectively, or chrum and khryu in Polish and Russian. This reflects shared linguistic heritages – Finno-Ugric and Slavic respectively, for the examples quoted above – and suggests an old origin for many of the renderings. However, the English word "oink" is fairly recent. The earliest use cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1969 although such words often have an older, unrecorded history. Grunt, relating specifically to the sound a pig makes, goes as far back as the 700s CE. Spanish could use much the same representation as English, rendering it as "¡oink!" ("oinq" using more popular writing form), but it usually suffers sound-translation becoming "oing" make the sound larger and wetter. This may be a borrowing from English.
[edit] Cultural references to pigs
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As an animal living closely with the people, pigs were and are frequently referenced in human culture.
[edit] Pigs in religion
- In ancient Egypt pigs were associated with Set, the rival to the sun god Horus. When Set fell into disfavor with the Egyptians swineherds were forbidden to enter temples.
- In Hinduism the god Visnu took the form of a boar in order to save the earth from a demon who had dragged it to the bottom of the sea.
- In ancient Greece, a sow was an appropriate sacrifice to Demeter and had been her favorite animal since she had been the Great Goddess of archaic times. Initiates at the Eleusinian Mysteries began by sacrificing a pig.
- The pig is one of the 12-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar. Believers in Chinese astrology associate each animal with certain personality traits. See: Pig (Zodiac).
- The dietary laws of Judaism (Kashrut, adj. Kosher) and Islam (Halal) forbid the eating of flesh of swine or pork in any form, considering the pig to be an unclean animal (see taboo food and drink).
- In Christianity pigs are associated with Saint Anthony, the patron saint of swineherds.
[edit] Environmental impacts
Domestic pigs which escaped from farms or were allowed to forage in the wild, and in some cases wild boars which were introduced as prey for hunting, have given rise to large populations of feral pigs in North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and other areas where pigs are not native. Accidental or deliberate releases of pigs into countries or environments where they are an alien species have caused extensive environmental change. Their omnivorous diet, aggressive behaviour and their feeding method of rooting in the ground all combine to severely alter ecosystems unused to pigs. Pigs will even eat small animals and destroy nests of ground nesting birds. [4] The Invasive Species Specialist Group lists feral pigs as one of the world's 100 worst invasive species and says about them:[5]
Feral pigs like other introduced mammals are major drivers of extinction and ecosystem change. They have been introduced into many parts of the world, and will damage crops and home gardens as well as potentially spreading disease. They uproot large areas of land, eliminating native vegetation and spreading weeds. This results in habitat alteration, a change in plant succession and composition and a decrease in native fauna dependent on the original habitat.
[edit] Health issues
Pigs harbour a range of parasites and diseases that can be easily transmitted to humans. These include trichinosis, cysticercosis, and brucellosis. Very commonly, pigs are also known to host large concentrations of parasitic ascarid worms in their digestive tract. The presence of these diseases and parasites is one of the main reasons why pork meat should always be well cooked or cured before eating.
Pigs are extremely susceptible to pneumonia, usually caused by weather. Pigs have small lungs; for this reason, bronchitis or pneumonia can kill a pig quickly.
Pigs can be aggressive and pig-induced injuries are relatively common in areas where pigs are reared or where they form part of the wild or feral fauna.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
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