He was a clever swine, alright.
If you've found yourself browsing the galleries of the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, you may have stumbled on a handbill extolling the remarkable virtues of 'Toby, the Sapient Pig'.
Here was a sagacious swine who could (if you believed the hype) spell, read, play cards, tell the time and — impressive for a human being let alone a pig — guess anyone's age, and even read their thoughts.
This pig must've been one in a billion. Except that Toby wasn't the first of these clever creatures; in fact he was just part of a porky phenomenon of the time.
While the V&A's poster dates to 1817, there was already a 'Learned Pig' touring Britain, and causing a stir from the 1780s. This 'entertaining and sagacious animal', claimed the contemporary spiel...
...casts accounts by means of Typographical cards, in the same manner as a Printer composes, and by the same method sets down any capital or Surname, reckons the number of People present, tells by evoking on a Gentleman's Watch in company what is the Hour and Minutes; he likewise tells any Lady's Thoughts in company, and distinguishes all sorts of colours.
Initially trained by one Samuel Bisset, the Learned Pig acquired a new owner in a Mr Nicholson following Bisset's death. Nicholson was quite the Doctor Dolittle; a piece from the Derby Mercury in 1790 claimed he'd taught a turtle to fetch and carry, got a hare to beat a drum, and instructed a couple of turkeys how to perform a country dance.
The public was fascinated in particular with Nicholson's pig; the renowned lexicographer Samuel Johnson heard about it, saying "the pigs are a race unjustly calumniated. Pig has, it seems, not been wanting to man, but man to pig. We do not allow time for his education, we kill him at a year old."* Learned Pig-themed cartoons were churned out by the press, including one skewering Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger as a half-PM-half-pig hybrid. Charming.
Nicholson's 'Learned Pig' eventually died (probably in 1788) but had set a trend. The United States got its own 'Pig of Knowledge', who ended up being introduced to President John Adams, no less. Meanwhile, the Brits got Toby the Sapient Pig — "in colour the most beautiful of his race, in symmetry the most perfect, and in temper the most docile" — who could also apparently tell what cards people had chosen (like a magician), point out where the sun rose and set, tell the time and 'discover a person's thoughts'. "He is the only scholar of his race ever known," lied the sales patter, ignoring the Learned Pig that'd come before Toby. Still, Toby made the likes of Percy and Peppa look conspicuously untalented.
Toby, of course, didn't actually know his 12 times table, and couldn't read minds. In 1805, William Frederick Pinchbeck published a reveal-all on how he'd trained the American Pig of Knowledge (partly to quell suggestions that animal cruelty was being carried out), using persuasion such as food and stern intonation to get the animal to pick the cards he wanted him to. Yet well after these tricks of the trade has been spilled, Toby continued to bring home the bacon, publishing his 'autobiography' — The life and adventures of Toby, the sapient pig: with his opinions on men and manners' (now available on Amazon believe it or not), and performing in London between 1817-23. The handbill in the Young V&A promotes regular appearances at the Royal Promenade Rooms, in the Spring Gardens (better known to us as Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens).
It's difficult to know how many of these pigs there actually were (you'd imagine those running the shows might've had a few piggies in the bank), but 'Toby' became the de facto name for the clever swines, and although the novelty of their performances gradually wore off, the concept of a scholarly swine continued to capture the imagination of everyone from Mary Wollstonecraft to Charles Dickens, who mentions the passing of a learned pig in his 1837-8 Mudfog Papers:
The disorder of the learned pig was originally a severe cold, which, being aggravated by excessive trough indulgence, finally settled upon the lungs, and terminated in a general decay of the constitution. A melancholy instance of a presentiment entertained by the animal of his approaching dissolution, was recorded. After gratifying a numerous and fashionable company with his performances, in which no falling off whatever was visible, he fixed his eyes on the biographer, and, turning to the watch which lay on the floor, and on which he was accustomed to point out the hour, deliberately passed his snout twice round the dial. In precisely four-and-twenty hours from that time he had ceased to exist!
This fascination continued through the years; the Tiger Lillies' 2003 album The Gorey End, features a song called The Learned Pig:
And although the concept of hanging off the every grunt of a sapient pig may seem risible, of course, our obsession with 'learned' animals has never quite abated — anyone remember Paul the Octopus, who 'predicted' results during the 2010 World Cup?
*The Learned Pig came to London just after Johnson died, acknowledged by this poem:
Though Johnson, learned Bear, is gone,
Let us no longer mourn our loss,
For lo, a learned Hog is come,
And wisdom grunts at Charing Cross.
