Ecology | Canadian Super Pigs: The Baconed Menace

Canadian Super Pig: The Origin Story

Like many a literary ‘super’ creature before it, the Canadian super pig owes its existence to a poorly thought-out scientific experiment that went rogue.

In the early 1980s, Canadian pork farmers, faced with dwindling profitability and mounting competition, devised a daring solution: the creation of a new breed of pig. The breeding programme was guided by two key objectives – it had to outsize existing domestic stocks to maximise meat yield, and it needed the resilience to withstand the punishing Arctic winters of the north.

After much deliberation, the plan was set in motion: European wild boars would be selectively bred with local swine varieties to achieve the perfect balance of size and hardiness. The program was hugely successful. 

By the 1980s, the first batches of the Canadian super pig had been rolled into farmers' pens and, over the following decade, steadily grew in number.

However, the good times weren’t to last forever and came to an abrupt end around 1998, as the market, due to a number of factors, plummeted. This created quite the pickle; Canadian farmers found themselves saddled with large drifts of pigs that were costly to maintain and no longer profitable to slaughter.

So, after a quick cost-benefit analysis, some decided it would be easier to release the oversized, specially bred hybrids into the Canadian wilderness, believing they’d simply die off. Instead, these specially adapted piggies thrived, multiplied, and are now rampaging all over North America.

So, What Are Their Superpowers?

Well, to paraphrase Mohammed Ali, they breed like a rabbit and build like a penguin. They are also hulk-heavy and hulk-strong, with some of the larger specimens tipping the scales at over 600 pounds – which, in English, is about 43 stone. 

None of this should come as a particular surprise, as these piggies were selectively bred to produce a lot of meat quickly. The penguin reference, however, might have raised your eyebrow.

And it should — because it's bizarre. In just three decades, these pigs have, entirely of their own volition, developed the ‘pigloo’ survival strategy, where they burrow under the snow and use vegetation to create shelters. 

Now, European wild boars aren’t known to nest below ground, so this discovery surprised people and might partially explain why the farmers’ expectations were so subverted.

The Baconed Menace: Spreading Plague & Ravaging Crops

As cool as these hulk-sized, hyper-intelligent piggies may seem, they do pose a significant and growing risk to agriculture and public health. 

In the U.S. alone, it's estimated that feral swine collectively cause $2.5 billion per year in crop damage. Thankfully, the typical feral swine roaming the U.S. aren’t Canadian super pigs – yet. For now, these oversized hybrids have only trickled across the border in small numbers into northern states. However, if they do establish themselves in the U.S., the annual cost is set to rise substantially. 

When it comes to diseases, you may wonder if they are any more infectious than other wild animals, like bears, and whether a simple wash of the hands after exiting nature would suffice.

Well, yes, they are, and no, it wouldn’t. That's because Canadian super pigs have been bred with domesticated animals and can consequently transmit pathogens to livestock and pets. And thanks to their close ancestral ties to humans, they carry a wider range of zoonotic diseases – illnesses that can cross the species barrier between animals and humans. 

The TLDR

Canadian super pigs are the unintended consequence of a poorly conceived selective breeding programme, released into the eco-system. This invasive species is on course to trigger an ecological and agro-economic crisis in the U.S. by the end of the decade.

Very little is being done to prevent this – perhaps because the current U.S. president is too busy trying to colonise Canadian cars and Greenland's ‘raw earth’. Or perhaps it's because the government agency responsible for the environment has fallen victim to the chainsaw precision of DOGE.  

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