“Swine projects are excellent for 4-H members because pigs are trainable and young people can work with them easily.” From the 4-H Swine Handbook.

Welcome to the Benton County Fair. The open air barn is the size of a city block, heavy with the smell of sweet and sour straw, and noisy with a full chorus of animal arias. This is not the place where professional stockmen show off their expensive studs and breeders. It’s the 4-H barn, where school-age kids bring their animals for a competition based more on show-and-tell than fame-and-riches.

Stroll past pens of immaculately groomed sheep and freshly-shampooed cows, and you are witnessing the final product of a curriculum designed by state university faculty to “enhance positive youth development.” That’s the bureaucratic language that fails to describe an educational experience outside the classroom and outside the experience of most people, until they enter the 4-H barn.

4-H in the 21st century isn’t just about raising barnyard animals for show. Most clubs reflect the current interest of kids living in cities and suburbs, with curricula focused on computer programming, foreign cultures, or habitat restoration. But whether the final product is a website, a wetland, or a Hampshire hog, the purpose of the 4-H project is to teach lessons of responsibility, business management, and self-discovery.

Or at least, that’s the grown-ups’ version. But that’s not the answer you get when you ask Rob Taylor, a 21st-century teenager fully aware of You-Tube and Second Life, why he chose to join 4-H and raise pigs?

“I don’t know,” Rob says, “I just like pigs.”

Rob’s fondness for swine is not the storybook stuff celebrated in E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, where the beloved pig Wilbur is saved by the selfless friendship of a spider. “I like bacon,” Rob admits. “But I also like pigs before they get to be bacon.”

The pig has a long history with people, as both companion and meal. In early China, a small breed of pig was kept inside the home, fed on scraps from the table at no cost to the owner, matured in a year and thereafter produced a dozen piglets twice a year. The sow was coddled; her piglets were roasted. So ubiquitous was this arrangement in China, that it is hardly surprising that the Chinese words for “meat” and “pork” became synonymous.

Pigs secured a prominent position as one of twelve zodiac symbols in the Chinese calendar, occurring between the dog and the rat. Those people born in the Year of the Pig are said to be jovial, courageous, genial, and sincere. Snoop Dogg was born in a Year of the Pig (1971), as was Ronald Reagan (1911), Woody Allen (1935), and Weird Al Yankovic (1959). 

In 2007, San Francisco’s Chinatown celebrated the Lunar New Year in jovial, courageous anticipation of the Year of the Pig and the future rap stars and U.S. presidents it might bring forth. Pictures of cheerful, cherubic Porkies smiled from banners festooned along Grant Avenue and from every shop window.

Pigs have been so integral to Asian life that scientists are now using them to trace the spread of human settlement across the Pacific Ocean by tracing the genetic hoof print of the pigs that migrating people brought with them. An international team of archaeologists examining the DNA of pigs, both modern and ancient, have traced the origin of Polynesian swine to Vietnam, therefore pinpointing the origin of human movement across the Pacific. Apparently, from Vietnam, pigs and people radiated across southeast Asia and Polynesia, ending up, after many travels, in Rob Taylor’s back yard.

Rob was born in 1991, the Year of the Sheep, but he has the cherubic grin and genial good nature of someone born in the Pig years. Rob’s been raising pigs since the third grade, purchasing 50-pound weaner pigs and growing them into 260-pound market hogs in six months with his 4-H swine club in Oregon.

This year, Rob traveled 200 miles to a breeder and paid $250 dollars each for two pigs for his 4-H project. “That’s $200 more a piece than I’ve ever paid before,” Rob says, an investment he financed with money he earned after school cleaning cages at the local veterinarian’s office. The pigs, now two months old, are about the size of very chubby beagles, but they each will be bigger than a St. Bernard by August, when Rob will show them at the County Fair and auction them off to the highest bidder.