anything the unifying substance of that pesky abstraction, the South. Long
before the mule, hogs were the icons and factotums of southern being.
Meanwhile, swine have ever been interesting and not unproblematic
creatures. Stigmatized as filthy at least as long as they have been regu-
larly confined, pigs are not necessarily so. Since they cool themselves by
sweating through their nostrils, not pores in their skin, swine trapped in
hot pens will wallow in mud to protect themselves. Their natural habi-
tat is the shady forest, where they are comfortable and (relatively) clean,
and where feral hogs’ strong, long legs propel them toward food and other
pleasures at surprising speed. Their snouts, ending with tough, cartilagi-
nous rooters, are perfect for disturbing even compacted soils. The range (or
wild or feral) hogs of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries bore
scant resemblance to swine bred and confined during the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The first of these new hogs, many of them engi-
neered in the Miami Valley of Ohio—most famously one called the Poland-
China—were enormous creatures, slow-moving on relatively small trotters,
their tusks removed for their own and humans’ safety. Much more recently,
in obeisance to a weight-conscious market, hogs have become slimmer
and leaner but still only remotely resemble the ‘‘razorbacks’’ of old. These
were (as the nickname suggests) high-backed animals, tall on legs not only
long and swift but capable of jumping fences. They were quite hairy, with
snouts longer than contemporary pigs’, tougher rooting instruments, and
long and menacing tusks. Gordon Grice, biographer of predators, not only
counts swine critical among the causes of the extinction of the dodo in
Mauritius about years ago but claims an angry adult boar might actu-
ally amputate a man’s arm with his tusk.^6
Often thought vegetarian, swine are actually vigorously omnivorous.
Dodos, flightless birds related to doves, which had never encountered
predators, were easy pickings for the hogs Europeans deposited on Mau-
ritius and thousands of other islands and mainlands over the centuries.
Hogs will also take frogs, lizards, and snakes—even rattlesnakes. Grice
watched a litter of piglets devour a road-killed skunk thrown among them.
More famously, everywhere farmers have confined hogs, there are stories
of the elderly farmer who went to feed his pigs and did not return. His wife
searches the pen but finds only his bloody hat. The unfortunate man had
suffered a stroke or heart attack, fell helpless among his rooting property,
and was eaten, dead or alive. The legend, which persists in our era, extends
a good (although hypothesized) explanation for the prohibition of pork-
eating in the holy texts of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, namely, that in the