The pigs of Orwell's Animal Farm led the revolution. Eighty years on, the UK's pigs are in trouble

Visiting family can be stressful, but whenever I return to the farm where I grew up I know I’m going to get a warm welcome. Not from my parents, from Rhubarb the pig, our family pet, who jovially trots across the field to have a friendly scratch against my leg and plead for an apple or two. 

The eight-year-old Kunekune, a breed of micro pig, has been part of our lives since she was a piglet, and has brought nothing but joy. I’ll never forget seeing Rhubarb and her sister Raspberry, who sadly died, chase a pumpkin down a hill as they scuffled with each other to take the first bite, or the pulse of adrenaline and terror watching Rhubarb huff, puff, and eventually give birth to piglets one roasting hot July.  

A pig is a perfect pet. Rhubarb is loyal, intelligent and good fun. What more could you want? 

Historically, my family aren’t outliers in keeping a pig. During the Second World War even people in urban areas kept the curly tailed creatures and fed them on scraps as a way of boosting their rations. It’s no surprise that George Orwell chose pigs to be the main characters in Animal Farm. They were a staple of British life.  

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Orwell’s fable about a group of oppressed animals who take over their smallholding with disastrous consequences was published 80 years ago on 17 August 1945. While today’s world is completely different to the one Orwell was writing in, the book’s message still resonates thanks to its timeless warnings about leaders given unrestricted power and how easy it is to slide into authoritarianism. Perversely, the aspect that has become unrecognisable is the quaint English farm on which the story is set. 

Drive through the countryside and you’re unlikely to see family-run smallholdings home to a variety of animals as described by Orwell. Such farms have mostly been swallowed by larger, commercial operations; there are around 100,000 fewer farms in the UK today than there were in 1943, when Orwell was writing the book.  

Pig farming has seen one of the sharpest declines. The pink porkers are falling out of favour, at least on the dinner table. Domestic pig keeping has largely been consigned to history and pork consumption is declining as consumers turn to cheaper, easier to prepare alternatives like poultry – 2.46 million tonnes of chicken were eaten in the UK in 2024, an all-time record, while demand for pork declined. There’s also a growing number of people giving up meat altogether – more than three million vegetarians and vegans in the UK today, up from 100,000 in 1945.   

This trend adds to an already difficult set of circumstances for pig farmers. Like everyone in agriculture, they’re dealing with major structural problems including a shortage of workers and the introduction of inheritance tax on farms, but pig farming can be especially volatile. 

“Pig prices go up and down like yo-yos, so you can have a good year one year and the next year can be a complete disaster, and you never know when it’s going to happen,” explains Guy Kiddy, chair of the British Pig Association Conservation Committee.  

It’s because pig farming is a small industry here, compared with other types of livestock farming. There are 31 million sheep in the UK and just under five million pigs. It’s also brutally fast-paced. Cattle take years to get ready for slaughter, whereas pigs take weeks, so there’s a high turnover of animals. 

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“It’s not like you can walk away when selling pigs,” says Adrian Shute, a major pig farmer based in the South West. “With beef or sheep if you don’t want to sell them today you don’t sell them, you can hold onto them. Whereas they [meat processors, who sell pork to supermarkets] know we’ve got to shift whatever we produce every week. They know we’re stuck.” 

One area offering welcome relief is the export market. Our love of pig meat may be waning in Britain, but other places are seeing a surge in demand, especially in Asia. Pork is by far the most popular meat in China, with other nations including Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand also seeing demand grow rapidly.  

“We tend to eat a lot of the expensive meat, the loins, not much of the forequarter [cheaper cuts like the shoulder and neck],” says Shute. “They’ll export poor bits like the hocks and all that type of stuff, which is worth quite a lot.” 

“Quite a lot” is an understatement. China buys more than half the pig offal we export and is the second biggest recipient of pig exports overall, after the EU. Covid and Brexit wreaked havoc with exports to both regions, hammering farmers’ profits, but trade has largely recovered. 

Shute believes the industry is at a tipping point as welfare demands from supermarkets and processors are increasing, while they continue to push prices down. Many small farms will need to invest in building improvements to meet these requirements, but many don’t have the cash to do so. 

“There’s no money in the pot for that – it becomes very difficult,” says Shute. 

We all welcome improved animal welfare, so how can consumers support farmers through this transition? 

“We just want people eating more pig meat, which would drive the value up. And eat local. It helps us a lot if our small outlets are sold out, we need to keep them going. 

“Compared with beef, the pig has a better carbon footprint by miles. A beef bullock will take seven to eight tonnes of feed to make one tonne of protein; a pig will take two and a half to three tonnes. It’s twice as efficient.”   

There’s another reason to buy British too: tradition. The cunning and characterful pigs Orwell describes in Animal Farm have largely been replaced by homogeneous, pale pink commercial breeds like Large Whites.  

While this keeps prices down for shoppers – pedigree (purebred) British pigs are more expensive to keep – it’s meant that some of Britain’s oldest breeds have become extremely rare, with just hundreds of pedigree pigs from native breeds like Tamworths, Oxford Sandy and Blacks and British Saddlebacks left. 

“The whole industry changed in the 70s and 80s when it went from using purebred pigs to hybrid pigs reared by commercial pig breeding companies” explains Kiddy.  

As demand for pork peaked, British breeds were neglected and numbers dwindled. But a group of dedicated breeders are working to preserve British pigs by monitoring each breed’s numbers and freezing pig semen to prevent certain genetic lines from going extinct. 

“I’m in my late 60s now and I’ve always kept pigs. It’s a family tradition,” Kiddy continues. “My grandfather started our herd. It’s been going since 1944. We’re very keen to keep that going.” 

Beyond tradition, Kiddy believes it’s important to preserve rare breeds because of their personality. 

“We love them, they’re characters. There’s just something about them.” 

It’s affection for this charm and intelligence which has ensured that pigs remain a national obsession. Whether it’s the adventurous Babe, Winnie the Pooh’s lovable sidekick Piglet, or the sinister duo of Napoleon and Squealer in Animal Farm, porcine pals pepper pop culture. 

Earlier this year, the nation was gripped as Mummy Pig, star of long running children’s cartoon Peppa Pig, announced her pregnancy on Good Morning Britain, before turning the chimneys of London’s Battersea Power Station pink to announce Baby Pig’s gender. Elsewhere, M&S sells more than 18 million bags of Percy Pigs every year (no gelatine in these sweeties). Percy now has his own Instagram account with 125,000 followers.    

These loveable characters are inspiring more people to get pigs of their own, my family included. But not all pigs’ stories end as happily as Rhubarb’s. Many are bought by owners without the right knowledge or facilities, which can have disastrous consequences. 

“They’re so difficult to rehome because they’re big, heavy animals and not everybody has the right environment for them” says Jane Scott from the Curly Tails Pig Sanctuary in Milton Keynes, which has rescued over 80 pigs. 

“More often than not, if people need to rehome them there’s nowhere for them to go and they end up being put to sleep even if they’re perfectly healthy. 

“People don’t do an awful lot of research at times because they’re such endearing animals, and people buy them without thinking long term… then suddenly they’ve got 25 stone of pig in their lounge and they don’t know what to do!” 

According to Jaclyn Haggata, who runs the Pigs in the Wood sanctuary in Huddersfield, the reason people are so taken by pigs is because they’re not so different from us. 

“Deep down, when you look into their eyes you can see their wisdom, knowledge and a remarkably clever animal that will pre-empt your next move. They sense fear and feel pain like the rest of us. I always feel very privileged to gain the trust of a pig.” 

Jane Scott agrees. “Pigs are as intelligent as three-year-old children and have dreams and memories and grieve and do all the things that we do. That helps people to connect to them. We do lots of work with children with learning difficulties and their connection with the animals is greater than their connection with people. 

“When I had cancer, we had a pig that was blind. I was his first trust bond. When I was having treatment I smelt different, so he could hear my voice but I didn’t smell right, and it used to upset him so much that I couldn’t go near him. 

“Genetically they’re only a chromosome away. They’re very, very close to us.” 

Perhaps this why Orwell’s choice of pigs as the characters who emulate the wrongs of the humans in Animal Farm works so well: we understand each other on a deeper level than most of us realise. 

It’s certainly what Orwell concluded by the end of the book. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” 

A publishing revolution

Animal Farm, originally subtitled A Fairy Story, was published on 17 August 1945. Orwell’s account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, had sold poorly so he decided to use fiction to critique totalitarianism.

Orwell struggled to find a publisher at the time. Stalin’s Soviet Union was a vital ally – The Ministry of Information put several publishers off. And the manuscript was almost lost when a V-1 bomb destroyed Orwell’s flat in London.

The novella sold 250,000 copies in its first year. It has now sold over 11 million copies around the world and in 2016 it was ranked as the UK’s favourite book read in school.

In 2018, the Chinese government censored online posts about Animal Farm though it remains available in the communist country.

Animal Farm by George Orwell (Vintage, £8.99) is available to buy from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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