Weeeell, I had two uncles who were both pig farmers and I spent far too much time mucking out the barrows when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Barrow is what pighouses are called in Zild. Mature males were boars. Mature females were gilts until they'd had a couple of litters and were then known as sows. Pigs between about six weeks and a year are the ones usually carted off to bring home the bacon, and they are known as weaners.
Although I must admit that weaner seemed to be a malleable term. It's also used to describe both young boars and sows between a year and two years which aren't going to be bred, at least at my rellies' farms.
[pig story - ignore if you wish!]
One of my uncles had a sow called Maud. She was a champion farrower, tending to have between eight and ten piglets at a time, and was also a good mother. This is not entirely commmon in the farmed pig world, where mum quite often lies down and reduces the household food bill by crushing a number of her offspring to death. Most pig farmers remove the young except for feeding time if they are kept in pens. The problem doesn't tend to be so bad if the pigs have the run of a paddock.
Maud was huge. I don't know what she weighed, but she was bigger than any of the breeding boars on the farm. She was bad-tempered with them, even when she was in heat, and they approached her with great caution when they were trying to do their bit for the propagation of the species. I fondly remember my younger cousin coming rushing in from outside one day yelling "Mum, mum, the boar's trying to murder Maud!". We all piled out to see what was happening, given the improbability of any boar on that farm wanting to fight big mamma. It turned out to be the piggy equivalent of the birds and the bees, with Maud in fine form, trying to bite her swain in half while he was furiously trying to do his duty. We all fell about laughing. We called her the Black Widow for a while, but she was really still just Maud.
Maud was like a pet dog and would follow my uncle around the farm. Being not very big himself, my uncle looked rather incongruous being followed around by this very, very large pig who would nuzzle his backside whenever he stopped, grunting contentedly. She loved being scratched between the ears and on the snout. If you tried to leave her in the paddock with a gate safely between you, she would simply trample part of the fence down to get to where ever she wanted to be. This included my aunt's garden, unfortunately. Maud developed a distinct liking for the flowers of roses, and would walk down the driveway nipping off the blooms and munching them with great relish. Needless to say, my aunt was not a happy camper when it came to Maud.
It all came to a head one night when my aunt and uncle were sitting watching TV. They heard a crash from the front of the house and the sound of breaking glass. Burglary was not unknown in the Fairfield area, so my uncle grabbed something heavy and went to investigate, only to find that Maud had simply lain down on the porch (as was her wont). But this time she'd managed to wedge part of her anatomy against the front door which gave up the ghost under her weighty, if tender, mercies ...
Maud wound up in a specially reinforced pen for the rest of her career. She screamed day and night for a couple of weeks, apparently, until she got used to the new arrangements. Can you imagine the noise?
The term "hog" is simply not used in Zild except in relation to slightly reorganised Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
