Country intro
Household pig sniffs air in farm.
Humans have spent centuries living with pigs. Possibly before humans decided to settle down into an agricultural lifestyle, the pig made its home with us. Today, the domesticated version of the wild European boar has hundreds of varieties. Because of this variety, some scientists even considered the domesticated pig to be its own species (Sus domesticus). Yet, we’ll simply take the traditional approach in this treatment, defining the domestic pig as a subspecies of the wild boar: Sus scrofus domesticus.
The domestic pig is a large, domesticated, even-toed ungulate that traces its ancestry to the wild boar; it is considered a subspecies of the wild boar or a distinct species in its own right. Their head and body length ranges from 0.9 to 1.8 m and adults can weigh between 50 and 350 kg.
