Page:The Hog.djvu/91

89. The pure Chinese hog is too delicate and susceptible of cold ever to become a really profitable animal in this country; it is difficult to rear, and the sows are not good nurses; but one or two judicious crosses have in a manner naturalized it.

This breed will fatten readily, and on a comparatively small quantity of food; and the flesh is exceedingly delicate, but does not make good bacon, and is often too fat and oily to be generally esteemed as pork. They are chiefly kept by those who rear sucking-pigs for the market, as they make excellent roasters at three weeks or a month old. Some authors point out five, some seven varieties of the Chinese breed, but these are doubtless the results of different crosses with our native kinds; among these are black, white, black and white, spotted, and blue and white, or sandy. Many valuable crosses have been made with these animals; for the prevalent fault of the old English breeds having been coarseness of flesh, unwieldiness of form, and want of aptitude to fatten, an admixture of the Chinese breed has materially corrected these defects. Most of our smaller breeds are more or less indebted to the Asiatic swine for their present compactness of form, the readiness with which they fatten on a small quantity of food, and their early maturity; but these advantages are not considered by some persons as sufficiently great to compensate for the diminution in size, the increased delicacy of the animals, and the decrease of number in the litters. The best cross is between the Berkshire and the Chinese,

Here the hog is, in the fullest sense of the word, a domesticated animal. The Irish pig is born in the warmest nook of his master's cabin, reared among the children, and often far better fed and more carefully tended than the ragged urchins who play around him, for the peasant will half starve himself and children in order to have more food for his pig; and while the former have only potatoes, and few enough of them, the porker frequently gets not only a good meal of potatoes, but some porridge, or bran, or refuse vegetables in addition. He is in fact the chief person in the household; on him the poor man reckons for the payment of his rent or the purchase of the necessaries of life. Swine abound in all parts of Ireland; scarcely a peasant's cot but numbers a pig among the family; and the roads, lanes, and fields in the neighborhood of every village, and the suburbs of every large town, are infested with a grunting multitude. Until lately, however, notwithstanding the value set on these animals, the real Irish pig was a huge, gaunt, long-legged, slab-sided, roach-backed, coarse-boned, grisly brute; with large flapping ears which almost wholly shrouded the face; of a dirty white, or black and white color with harsh coarse hair, and bristles that almost