Remember micro pigs? In 2009 The Guardian ran a non-ironic article titled “which miniature animals make good pets” and earnestly advised purchasing not one pygmy goat, but two (lest the first feel lonely – duh). George Clooney and Victoria Beckham flaunted their £700 hogs. Paris Hilton kept hers in a handbag.
The craze for mini animals (largely pigs, but also goats, foxes and seahorses) is being revived by Tiktok and Youtube where influencers swan around with mini piglets, pygmy goats, tiny horses and more. Miniature animals are “smaller, more practical, take up less space and eat less” reads a starry-eyed recent headline in French newspaper Le Monde, suggesting keeping small pets counts as contributing to net zero ambitions.
Alison Fontan is one such ‘goatfluencer’ selling mini goats on her website – though “my goats are not pain au chocolat,” she notes, insightfully. In Japan, micro pig cafes are ten a penny. They advertise cuddles with micro pigs over a cappuccino.
Where did these pygmy creatures come from? Well, not Noah’s Ark, that’s for sure. They were first developed in the 1940s for medical research. And, arguably, the lab is where they should have stayed. Ninety per cent of micro pigs get abandoned, according to the Life with Pigs Farm Animal Sanctuary. That’s a lot of excess hog.
Why? Well, partly due to the dishonesty of pig dealers. A lot of the mini critter you may have your eye on are not quite what they seem. “Unscrupulous people tend to breed the runts of the litter to try to decrease the size of the pig,” warns Kevin Kersley, a breeder of small, but not micro-sized, pigs. That’s left a lot of pet owners with a full grown hog and not a lot they can do about it – except ditch it. Or, for the more committed, ferry it around in a taxi (read: a Scot who bought a pig advertised as “micro” now drives him around in a hackney cab after he grew to 125kgs). Animal welfare advocates, unsurprisingly, are alarmed.