Pig

The pig draws the clearest dietary boundary in world religion. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 prohibit it because it has a cloven hoof but does not chew the cud, and the Quran prohibits it likewise, so that abstention from pork became a durable marker of Jewish and Muslim identity. Against that, the agricultural societies of China, Europe and the Pacific made the pig a central food and an emblem of prosperity and fertility, precisely because it converts scraps to meat so efficiently. Greek religion used the pig as the sacrificial animal of Demeter's mysteries at Eleusis. The Egyptian association of the pig with the disruptive god Set is attested but complicated by evidence that pigs were widely raised and eaten.

Chinese popular literature gives the pig its own trickster-adjacent character in Zhu Bajie, Pigsy, one of the pilgrims accompanying the monk Xuanzang in the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West alongside Sun Wukong the Monkey King; greedy, lazy and lecherous but ultimately loyal, Zhu Bajie is a comic figure whose faults are pig-associated gluttony and appetite rather than any of the positive prosperity symbolism the animal carries in the zodiac and in folk custom. The pig's wild ancestor, the wild boar, is now one of the most widely distributed large mammals on Earth, and feral pigs descended from escaped domestic stock have become a serious invasive species across the Americas and Australia, a modern ecological problem unconnected to either the biblical prohibition or the East Asian reverence recorded above.

The pig, or boar, is the twelfth and last sign of the Chinese zodiac, closing the cycle. As a birth-sign it is read for honesty, generosity, diligence and good-natured tolerance, and it is strongly associated with prosperity and material comfort, a wholly positive reputation in the Chinese scheme, where the pig in the household was a sign of wealth, the very character for family showing a pig under a roof. It is associated with the late-evening hours and, in the elemental scheme, with water. That the abundance-animal of one half of the world is the forbidden animal of the other is one of the sharper illustrations of how differently traditions read the same creature.

Hawaiian tradition gives the pig its own demigod, Kamapuaa, a shape-shifting figure who could take fully human or fully porcine form and who appears in the mythology as both a formidable warrior and a trickster suitor of the fire goddess Pele; roasted pig remains the central offering of the traditional luau feast, and the animal's ceremonial importance in Hawaii and across wider Polynesia is entirely independent of the East Asian traditions recorded elsewhere in this pair of articles. Independent of any symbolism, pigs rank among the most cognitively capable domestic animals studied, with problem-solving and object-recognition abilities comparable to dogs and even some primates in controlled tests, a modern finding that sits easily alongside the wholly positive, prosperity-linked reading Chinese tradition already gives the animal.