World hog distribution is strongly affected by cultural and ecological factors. More than 40 percent of the world porcine inventory is in China, where density is among the highest anywhere: For every three people in China, there is one pig. Some of this swinish appeal is cultural preference, though much can be explained by lack of alternatives. Human population pressure in China does not permit the extravagance of devoting large areas of land to grazing herbivores. Swine in China long had a niche as scavengers, scatovores, and consumers of surplus food crops.
Europe, including Russia, has about 170 million pigs, and Denmark is the only country in the world that has more pigs than people. The United States and Canada together have about 70 million of the animals, which means roughly one pig for every four people. Brazil has about 32 million head. Pigs are more important on many Pacific Islands than their total number (less than 5 million) would suggest.
The Middle East, however, is one part of the world that is largely devoid of pigs. Those that are kept generally belong to non-Muslims (such as the Coptic Christian peasants in Egypt), but some marginalized Muslims may keep pigs secretly. In humid Southeast Asia, the Islamic injunction against pigs is somewhat more nuanced, and in Indonesia, Muslims are among those who consume the products of the more than 8 million swine in that country.
In India, where the Hindu majority views all flesh foods as unacceptable elements of the diet, there are only about 10 million pigs, and in non-Islamic Africa, pigs number only around 18 million, considerably less than one might expect. But there African swine fever has periodically wiped out pig populations.
Elsewhere, the Arctic and Subarctic have historically had few pigs for quite different reasons. Very short growing seasons do not provide sufficient feed to maintain them; moreover, piglets cannot survive extremely cold winters without proper protection. Thus, in Greenland, the Norse settlements between A. D. 986 and 1400 had cattle but no pigs.
World History
