COUNTRY LIFE
Pigs and Pig Clubs
With a flourish of leaflets, the Minister for Agriculture urges us to revive the times when every cottager kept a pig. He recalls the enthusiastic days when there were not only pig clubs but also, I believe, gooseberry clubs. Since that time the word pig has lost none of its meaning, though the raspberry has largely replaced the gooseberry as a symbol, and I do not know whether the Small Pig Keepers' Council is quite tactful in supposing that the pig is likely to be an asset " to the social life of the countryside." Years of bureaucratic muddling have made the cottager and the allotment holder very wary of the pig. It will need all the resources of Ministerial propaganda to bring back into rural life that annual ceremony of pig-killing so vividly described in Jude the Obscure. Until recently a man who kept a pig could not regard a single chitterling of it as his own. This absurd situation is now ended—" the small pig-keeper may kill and cure his pig for his own family's consumption, provided he has had it for at least two months for fattening and he obtains a licence to slaughter, either directly or through his pig club, from the local Food Control Committee." He may also sell to a local retail butcher, in the market or to a bacon factory. A good deal of information, more especially on pig clubs, may be obtained from the Small Pig Keepers' Council, Victoria House, Southampton Row, W.C. and it is well to remember that in one year of the last war 400 pig clubs produced something like 4,000,000 lbs. of meat.
Previous page
