Getting High on the Hog

By Michael Demarest

The once lowly porker is becoming a popular mascot

In Japan and China, this is the Year of the Dog. In the U.S., it looks suspiciously like the Year of the Hog. Suddenly, for old and young alike, Sus domestica, the farmyard pig, seems to be displacing the cat as a national object of whimsy, affection, satire and extravagant punnery. From the Hog Wild! store in Boston's Faneuil Hall Market Place to three Hogography gift shops in Arkansas to the Hogs & Kisses emporium in San Francisco, retailers' shelves are packed with greeting cards, books, posters, clothes, games, stuffed toys, jewelry, office accessories (oink-wells), bumper stickers (HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR PIG TODAY?) and sundry objets d'art celebrating hogritude. Says Charlotte Iwata at Homeworks in Santa Monica, Calif.: "Cats were in for a long time. Then there was a rush for penguins and polar bears. Alligators came and went, thank God. Unicorns still have a small contingent. But pigs are in the lead." Bill Zwecker, owner of a Chicago gift shop, Animal Accents, agrees: "Pigs, like owls, will be a long-term thing."

Much as Miss Piggy might like to claim that moi is responsible, the porker boom began long before the Muppets' superstar made her bow. Miss P., sniffs Lucinda Vardey, co-author of the anthology of pig lore, Pigs: A Troughful of Treasures (Macmillan; $14.95), "has done a lot for pig relations, but she is not a true pig. She is purely human and has very few pig qualities." Vardey's collaborator, Sarah Bowman, feels that the pig boomlet has ancient roots. "The love of pigs is an inborn thing," she says. "I have always thought that wallowing was a nice quality."

The fever can strike anyone, anywhere. Betty Talmadge, ex-wife of Georgia's former Senator Herman Talmadge--and author of an excellent cookbook, How to Cook a Pig--has been acquiring porcine memorabilia for seven years. Chicago's Charles Braverman, a commodities trader in pork bellies, owns, among other items, a $2,000 brass pig dinner bell, a $2,400 pig ashtray and a 100-lb. lead pig, which adorns the front of his house. David Mercer, 36, a former lawyer who started Boston's Hog Wild! in 1978, mails the Hogalog catalogue advertising his "Pork Avenue Collection" to 30,000 subscribers at $1 apiece.

The rapidly growing mound of pig literature includes a racy paperback cartoon book called Pigs in Love (Clarkson N. Potter; $3.95), about Porkov and Daisy, whose amours are described as "an adult love story for pigs and sows everywhere." The author-artist, Revilo (real name: Oliver Christiansen), was originally commissioned to do a cat book but found felines "too aloof." Says he:

"Pigs really know how to live. That's why I started drawing them instead of people." Another successful volume is The Pig-Out Diet Book, published (at $2.95) by the Bacon Printing Co. and written by two New England doctors, Bernhoff Dahl and David Fingard. The book prescribes a regimen of no breakfast, no lunch, but a "pig out" dinner; it has sold some 16,000 copies.

Greeting and invitation cards are by far the most pervasive form of pigophilia. The most extensive collection is the Pig Line from the American Postcard Co., depicting preening porkers photographed in human clothing and human situations; to date they have sold 3 million. Leading characters include the Easter Pig, the Ballerina Pig and, this summer, Calvin Swine (in designer jeans).

Sus, artiodactyl and omnivorous, has not always been so popular. In many languages, the pig is associated with greed, stupidity, fascism and filth. Still, there is no disagreement among experts that the beast has been maligned. The boar was once regarded as a symbol of strength, the sow as the embodiment of fertility. Writers as varied as Shelley ("blessed as nightingales on myrtle sprigs") and Dr. Johnson

("Pigs are a race unjustly calumniated") have hymned the species.

As for their current vogue, William Hedgepeth argues in The Hog Book: "Perhaps, say some, the hog artfully mirrors the pathos of the country itself: huge, heroic, maladroit, and always straining toward some elusive dream beneath yet another clod of dirt."

So where does that leave people who love country ham and charcuterie and cracklin's as well as Miss Piggy and Piglet and Wilbur? Not to worry. Say Pig Lovers Vardey and Bowman: "You need not feel guilty about eating sausages or bacon. The ultimate expression of your affinity may be to eat your pig." --By Michael Demarest. Reported by Frances Fiorino/New York and Lisa Towle/Boston, with other bureaus

With reporting by Frances Fiorino, Lisa Towle

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