Scramble Squares - Pigs

Pigs were domesticated in China about 5,000 years ago. They are intelligent animals which, when allowed to root around wild in their natural habitat, are really quite tidy creatures. Today’s domestic pig was derived from the European wild boar, a cloven hoofed animal which grows to 3 feet high at the shoulder, weighs approximately 350 pounds and whose lower canine teeth form tusks 8 to 9 inches long.

In the late 1800s, the city of Cincinnati, Ohio became known as the center of United States pork production and earned the nickname, “Porkopolis.” Cincinnati slaughtered or packed 85,000 hogs in 1833, but by 1853, the number of hogs slaughtered, packed and shipped from Cincinnati on the Ohio River had grown to 608,457. After Cincinnati’s pork processing production had declined in the 20th Century, the city’s past reputation as “Porkopolis” was memorialized to celebrate Cincinnati’s bicentennial in 1988 by a riverfront sculpture by Andrew Leicester, incorporating four flying pigs in Bicentennial Commons above the Cincinnati Gateway. Leicester said that his flying pigs represented “the angelic spirits” of all of the pigs that had been slaughtered for the prosperity of the city.