Dr Paul Allen

Israeli archaeologists have unearthed the complete skeleton of a piglet in a place and time where you wouldn’t expect to find pork remains: a Jerusalem home dating to the First Temple period. Obviously, not everybody obeys the scriptures, like today. The 2,700-year-old porcine remains were found crushed by large pottery vessels and a collapsed wall during excavations in the City of David, the original nucleus of ancient Jerusalem. The team of archaeologists behind the discovery reported their find in a study published in the June edition of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology. The find of swine adds to previous research showing that pork was occasionally on the menu for the ancient Israelites and that biblical taboos on this and other prohibited foods may only came to be observed centuries later, in the Second Temple period or were ignored. The animal’s skull clearly identifies it as a domestic pig, as opposed to a wild swine, and its presence indicates that pigs were raised for food ...

In 1878 Floyd Hatfield had a pig. Somehow this pig got a tiny bit of its ear bitten off or otherwise severed, or so Hatfield claimed. You see, on the other side of Tug Fork river in West Virginia lived a family called the McCoys. The McCoys notched their pigs’ ears in order to identify them. When Randolph McCoy saw the notched hog in a Hatfield sty, he accused Floyd Hatfield of swine theft. The matter soon escalated into a bitter lawsuit. Randolph McCoy took Floyd Hatfield to court over the issue, but the conflict was exacerbated because the local justice of the peace happened to be the honourable Judge Anderson Hatfield. He found no evidence that Floyd Hatfield had stolen the pig and ruled in favour of his kinsman. He wisely made his ruling based on the testimony of one Bill Staton, a relative of both families, and thus was seen to be impartial. The case was closed. Or was it? Two years later, Bill Staton was killed, supposedly in self-defence, by two McCoy brothers. Around that time ...