Themanfromnantucket - There Once Was A Man From Nantucket...

So a while back I posted a bunch of things that were for some cool people I’d talked to on tumblr. Somehow, one of them got stuck somewhere between uploaded and posted - sorry! For sisterhood, drawn here wearing the armor of Lady Sif (i.e. Norse goddess/marvel character)

History time!: England is extremely distracted by clever pigs

Not to be outdone in the animal witchery department, trained pigs caused almost as much of a hue and dry as Marocco did.  The original trained pig happened about a century after Marocco was such a hit, and he was raised and trained by one Samuel Bisset, an accomplished animal trainer and showman who made a handsome living in London.

Unfortunately, he decided to tour Dublin with the pig.  (This particular pig either didn’t have a name, or its name has been lost to history.)  Dublin was an unmitigated success right up until it was mitigated by Mr. Bisset being almost beaten to death by a cop when he tried to put on a show without proper permits.  Bisset did wind up dying shortly thereafter, on the road home, and the pig passed into the hands of one Mr. Nicholson.

Nicholson decamped to Nottingham in 1784 and then London, where he caused rather a sensation with the animal, because who doesn’t like the opportunity to make pork-product jokes?  Judging by the popular reaction, if such a person could be found in all of Britain, they might have stood a chance of having their own profitable street show just by standing around and not laughing at bacon jokes, or declining really plum opportunities to make sausage puns.

Seriously, though, people could not fucking shut up about the pig.

And if you’re thinking the 1780s was a slow decade for history, the American Revolution started in 1776, the French Revolution started in 1789, Australia was being colonized, etc.  Like, they were still at war with the Dutch or some shit when this all started.  The Empire and its immediate neighbors did, in fact, have better shit to worry about than what a pig thought about an audience-member’s hat.  Fuck all that, though, because the pig was really entertaining.

Contrary to what appeared to have merited the label of “popular opinion” at the time (Seriously, you guys, Transylvania was on fire, Catherine the Great was claiming Alaska in the name of Russia and Crimea in the name of Fuck the Turks, and Ben Franklin was trying to inflict the horror of Daylight Savings Time on the French, how did anybody have time to care about pigs?), the pig was unlikely to have been abused into his performance.  

Somebody (Robert Southey) had the presence of mind and the time on their hands to track down the late Mr. Bisset’s neighbors and inquire after the pig’s treatment.  One of them said he’d never seen the pig ill-treated, but that Bisset was fond of threatening to take away the pig’s waistcoat if he performed poorly.

So I guess all previous objection to finding the pig more interesting than India is hereby retracted, because pig in a waistcoat.

Much in the same way Marocco ushered in a wave of trained horses, the Learned Pig gave rise to a herd of similar trick-performing pigs.  One London circus had a mechanical pig imported from Italy, and another claimed to have a French pig, insert tasteless “oui” joke here.

In 1798, a guy named Pinchbeck turned up in New England with the American version.  He claimed to have already been given wondrous receptions in every “major town” (basically any place with more than one horse) in the Union and conned his way into an audience with the fucking president.

John Adams, who had better shit to do with his day.

This time, the accusations of demonic coitus, flirtation with the dark arts, and basic witchcraft were leveled on the other side of the pond.  Where the continent had more or less come to the conclusion that there’s a lot an animal will do to avoid being hit with a stick, the ex-colonies were of the opinion that animal training was the devil’s work, and that any pig displaying too much cleverness should be burned, just in case.  No word on whether or not the pig was to be served with a side of eggs and potatoes post-burning.

Not long after Pinchbeck was denying that his pig was a demon, a reincarnated person, or both, London was still failing to have invented television.  Consequently, it had nothing better to do when, in 1817, Nicholas Hoare began showing the one true learned pig, the chosen pig, the pig who would become more or less eponymous: Toby the Sapient Pig.

Toby quickly became the name for trained pigs.  Cockney rhyming slang was probably involved somewhere, because it’s responsible for all terrible things, ever.  Toby also had his own swag; Hoare sold copies of Toby’s autobiography after his performances.

And the whole obsession with trained pigs never really let up, because who the fuck knows, really.

Oh, right.  That’s why.

Poets, writers, philosophers, satirists, and general villains, having been given the slim excuse of a few pigs who could count, had spent the ensuing years producing a large pile of pig-related work.  This demonstrated the previously-unsuspected principle that there’s nothing that can’t be made funnier by a drawing of a pig in a cap and gown.

Above: See?

It must be said that trick-pigs were particularly versatile as an instrument of satire.  I can see the appeal of using them.  You can make fun of someone by portraying them as an educated pig, insinuating that they’re the sort of credulous asshole who’d find infinite amusement in watching an educated pig, or flatly stating that a carefully-trained pig would be better at their jobs and, moreover, less unpleasant to be around than they themselves are.

Some dudes went with the “Oh my god everything is doomed kids these days prefer Tobies to Shakespeares, everything is horrible.” Other dudes went with “William Pitt is a trained pig,” and left it at that.  A few dudes just said the pig should run for parliament, because they didn’t feel like taking it very far at all..  Still other dudes put up pretend advertisements for trained pigs who would, and I quote, "shew the most surprising Feats of Knowledge - He will (amongst many other curious Specimens of his Art) Explain many Passages in the Cavalry & other late Acts of Parliament - The like before never having been even attempted in these our realms!!!" 

That’s right.  Somebody got a learned pig so learned that they could explain what the fuck parliament was up to.

People wrote Learned Pig fanfic.  No, I’m serious.  They did this a lot.  I mean, dress it up however you want, that’s basically what people were doing.  You want to be perfectly honest about it, there’s not a really big difference between the hilarious bullshit going on with trained pigs and the fake twitter accounts that pop up for escaped cobras and Ikea monkeys and particularly expressive dogs.  When you take into account the fact that they couldn’t really just get too high one night and dick around on their phone—that none of the above was simply the result of somebody getting bored on the bus—it’s all the more impressive.

#and now i want a bath with baby chickens (tag by improbablepirate)

Here is a bath with baby chickens:

It’s a pretty cool shower curtain as is, but it’s better with backstory.

When I was in 8th grade, and my brother was in 5th we did a joint science fair project where we each studied part of the embryology and early development of chicks. To be honest, the projects were an excuse to hatch and raise chicks; it was awesome. When the eggs hatched, the chicks lived in the (empty) bathtub for a while, until we returned them to the farm where they would be used as breeders. As fate would have it, a few weeks later, I came across this very appropriate shower curtain.

This vet is in Melbourne, Florida. If I loved within 1,000 miles of this place, they would be taking care of my dog.