Sally Lunn
Uploaded January 2010

The Sally Lunn line can be traced back to 1934 when it was bred by George Fillingham of Syerston Hall near Newark. (George Fillingham, a dedicated and successful breeder also bred Royal Lustres, having bought Cookham  Royal Lustre 31 from Tom Copas. Fillingham won the Royal Show with Syerston Royal Lustre.) Other notable Sally Lunns were bred by Stephen D Player who founded the Whipling line of Sally Lunns with the purchase of Fillingham's Syerston Sally Lunn 8th.

The Peter Lad boar line, traces back to Sally Lunn through the Whipling Peter Lunn boars. Whipling Peter Lunn, a Royal Show Champion boar's name appears in the pedigree of every Royal Show Berkshire Champion from 1958 - 1970. Tom Copas used a Whipling Peter Lunn boar in his T Cookham herd to produce the first Peter Lad, Cookham Peter Lad.

From Peter le Bas in New Zealand:
"The attached photo shows the Sally Lunn sow arrived in 1961, my good friend and long time breeder Joe Fohn changed the Name to Connie in 1968. There is a lot of Connies still round and l would say NZ's most consistent show winners."

Dr. Schook is particularly eager to see if the many physiological and behavioural parallels between humans and pigs are reflected in our respective genomes. Pig hearts are like our hearts, he said, pigs metabolize drugs as we do, their teeth resemble our teeth, and their habits can, too. I look at the pig as a great animal model for human lifestyle diseases," he said. "Pigs like to lie around, they like to drink if given the chance, they smoke and watch TV."

Pigs have been a barnyard staple for at least 8,000 years, when they were domesticated from the wild boar in Asia and Europe. Domestication was easy given that they loved to root around in dump sites. Pigs were tireless composting machines. "They fed on our scraps", Dr. Byrne said. "Everything we produced, they turned into good meat". Pork is among the world's most popular meats; in many places, pigs are a valuable form of currency. "In parts of New Guinea, they're so important to villages that they're suckled by people," he said.

Of course, pigs aren't always handled so lovingly, and these researchers denounced factory farms. "I'm German and I love sausage, but I would never eat pork that isn't free range," Dr. Held said.

Even in domesticity, pigs have retained much of their foreboar's smarts. Dr. Byrne attributes pig intelligence to the same evolutionary pressures that prompted cleverness in primates: social life and food. Wild pigs live in long-term social groups, keeping track of one another as individuals, the better to protect against predation. They also root around for difficult food sources, requiring a dexterity of the snout not unlike the handiness of a monkey.

Because monkeys had been shown to use mirrors to locate food, Donald M. Broom of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues decided to check for a similar sort of so-called assessment awareness in pigs. They began by exposing seven 4-to-8-week-old pigs to five-hour stints with a mirror and recording their reactions. The pigs were fascinated, pointing their snouts toward the mirror, hesitating, vocalizing, edging closer, walking up and nuzzling the surface, looking at their image from different angles, looking behind the mirror. When the mirror was placed in their pen a day later, the glass-savvy pigs greeted it with a big ho-hum.

Next, the researchers put the mirror in the enclosure, along with a bowl of food that could not be directly seen but whose image was reflected in the mirror. They then compared the responses of the mirror-experienced pigs with a group of mirror-naive pigs. On spotting the virtual food in the mirror, the experienced pigs turned away and within an average of 23 seconds had found the food. But the naive pigs took the reflection for reality and sought in vain to find the bowl by rooting around behind the mirror. No doubt the poor frustrated little pigs couldn't wait to get home, crack open a beer and turn on the TV.

Thanks to Hilary Bruce, P.G.Wodehouse Society for drawing attention to this article.