Pig–Hoo-o-o-o-ey
Last year in Wiltshire I met a Tamworth. This year at my club Tamworth sausages were on the menu. As you know, the best way to ensure the survival of a rare breed is to eat it.
But the Tamworth is no more a rare breed than I am. Actually younger sons of Irish Peers may be a rarer breed and I needn’t have gone to Wiltshire – I have found a rarer breed – a rara porcus – on my doorstep in Gunnersbury Park.
If you are proud of your lawn you’d best think twice before having a Kunekune pig to maintain it. (Kunekune means short and fat in Māori.) This is Pepper. Salt is in the distance, top right, if you have good eyesight. They are lovely little pigs with an astonishing memory – I can’t remember how I know that – and they are definitely rare. The BBC takes up the story.
The charity that runs Gunnersbury Park has introduced two Kunekune pigs, Salt and Pepper, to help keep the grass short and maintain shrubs. Livestock, including alpacas, cattle and sheep, used to be kept on the site some 200 years ago. David Bowler, chief executive of Gunnersbury Museum and Park Development Trust, said conservation grazing was “a really sensible way of managing land” – although introducing pigs at first seemed like a “wacky idea”. Mr Bowler said Salt and Pepper had been living within the Capel Manor College campus, at the Gunnersbury Park site, for 10 years. “The stuff that they’re eating, to be honest is stuff like brambles and scrub, which wouldn’t be particularly attractive to sheep if we say, let sheep loose on a big old field munching on grass”.
I don’t suppose you have seen a Kunekune pig before, neither had Bertie. He was very vocal (Beagle baritone) but Pepper didn’t turn a bristle.