The Charlotte in Charlotte's Web is a large gray spider. But her best friend is Wilbur, a young, pink pig. I'm most excited about Freddy, a smart, poetic, sensitive and talking pig who was the star of my eleventh summer. That year I discovered the Freddy the Pig books in the West Portal Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and devoured them, one after another, all summer, sitting on our living room couch with a bright light at my left elbow and a picture window view of San Francisco at my feet. It was a great summer.
Pigs are very smart.
They find buried sewer pipes and root out truffles. Pigs love the finer things in life but happily ingest anything that smells. They are native to the Old World, like some of us people. A truly native swine would be the peccary, found in deserts and rain forests in the Americas. It was Columbus who first brought the Old World hog to America on his second voyage in 1493.