The Unusual Life of the Lanyu Miniature Pig

I say "once" because Taiwan's only local miniature pig-the Lanyu miniature pig, also known as the black small-eared pig-with its small, erect ears, lean body, short limbs, coarse black hair and tapered snout, weighing only 30 kilograms at six months (not one-third the size of your average domestic pig), has pretty much vanished from Lanyu.

Various crossbreeds have taken its place: ones with large ears, long tails and short snouts; ones with red neck hair; and ones that are too big to be called miniature.

What can we do for the Lanyu miniature pig before it completely vanishes?

Since April, the influenza A(H1N1) virus, a result of reassortment of genetic material from human and swine flu viruses, has infected over 30,000 people in more than 70 countries. Within two months, the World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert by three levels, from Phase 3, indicating sporadic individual infections, up to Phase 6, signifying widespread international infection. It's a solemn warning of the outbreak of a global pandemic.

In mid-June, Taoyuan International Airport was on full alert, with infrared heat sensors scanning each and every traveler passing through immigration in an effort to keep the new virus outside Taiwan. During the same timeframe, on the far side of the central mountains, a disease prevention drama of equal gravity was playing out at the Council of Agriculture's Animal Propagation Station in Beinan Township, Taitung County: each vehicle entering and leaving the premises had to be disinfected, and every employee going into the stockades had to wear protective clothing. All these measures were to conserve Taiwan's 39 remaining Lanyu miniature pigs.

Why are these small pigs, designated national treasures due to their shrinking numbers, no longer on their home island of Lanyu, but across the water on the main island of Taiwan?

"Are you looking at me? Come closer!" Piglets of breeds related to the Lanyu miniature pig display the pervading gaze of the Mona Lisa in their eyes. No matter where onlookers may stand, they can't escape the pigs' stares. Left to right: a Lanyu miniature pig, a spotty Lanyu pig, a Mitsai pig and four Langbin pigs.

Same Lanyu, different pigs

Back in 1897, two years after the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, anthropologist Ryuzo Torii became the first Japanese person to land on Lanyu (called Koto-sho at the time). He heard the local tribesmen using the word "yami" to address each other in their native tongue; this is the source of the tribe name Yami.

After a survey around the island lasting over two weeks, Torii and the Japanese soldiers who accompanied him noted down records about the Yami (also known as the Tao): "Socioeconomically, they live a primitive communal lifestyle based on barter, raising goats and chickens, and small wild pigs. Their crops include sweet potatoes, millet grown in dry fields, and taro and fruit grown in wet fields, with fish as their main staple." This was the first time the Lanyu miniature pig was described in writing.

But the Lanyu miniature pig enjoyed high status in Yami oral tradition for a much longer time. According to an oft-recited tale, a child once saw a small black animal on a path, suckling from its mother and crying out "ee-kikik." The child, puzzled, asked his grandfather what it was. "Go catch one, bring it back, and show it to me," said the grandfather. "Ah!" he said when he saw the child holding the little creature, "That is a kois.'' This is the origin of the Tao word for "pig."

DNA paternity testing technology didn't appear until the 1980s, so these written records and oral legends can't prove the numbers or genetic purity of early Lanyu miniature pigs. However, they fit roughly with the traits of the Lanyu miniature pig. How do we know this? In 1975, Lee Tang-yuang and Sung Yung-yi, professors of animal husbandry at National Taiwan University, searched Taiwan high and low to develop a commercialized breed of miniature pig, at last finding what they were looking for on the island of Lanyu. They then took one male and four female purebred Lanyu miniature pigs back to Taiwan and crossed them with white foreign landrace pigs, and successfully bred the small, black-haired and white-spotted Lee-Sung pig.

Since 1996, the Lanyu miniature pig and the Lee-Sung pig have been the only two miniature pig breeds from Taiwan to be registered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. And of these, the Lanyu miniature pig is the only pure local Taiwanese pig. But now what?

"Unfortunately there are no more pure-bred black small-eared pigs on Lanyu," remarks Hsieh Han-chung, an employee of the Lanyu Township Administration's Agriculture Section, on the current state of these pigs.

The 2005 Agricultural, Forestry, Fishery and Husbandry Census released by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics shows that none of the 445 households of Lanyu are engaged in animal husbandry. But in reality, per Hsieh's assessment, around 300 households maintain simple pig sheds, where the locals feed kitchen scraps to what they call "Lanyu black pigs," a hybrid of the Lanyu miniature pig, currently numbering around 1,500 island-wide.

How do these pigs differ in appearance from pure Lanyu miniature pigs? Chu Hsien-pin, chairperson of the Department of Livestock Technology at the Taitung Animal Propagation Station, remarks that though over 80% of the pigs seen wandering Lanyu's streets are black; they have, to varying degrees, broad ears, large snouts, white tails, hair color varying from black to red, and rings of white hair growing on their necks. They have already lost the heritable traits of the black small-eared pig.

Who changed the fate of these pigs? Over 80% of the population of Lanyu are Yami people, and it's generally accepted that their living conventions affect their principal means of economic activity and determine the way they raise livestock.

"No matter how many pigs or goats the Yami own, they rarely sell or trade them for other goods, instead keeping them for slaughter at festival time," says retired Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology research fellow Yu Guang-hong. To the Yami, "the economic value of livestock is far less than their sociocultural value."

"The Lanyu islanders don't engage in commerce: the pigs are not raised for sale, but chiefly for sacrifice," says Hsieh Han-chung, a local, who sums it up thus: "The reason why hybrid pigs have gradually replaced the pure ones is a problem of the islanders' attitude toward raising pigs."

That is to say, as long as they're fit for sacrifice, the Lanyu islanders don't care about the purity of the pigs' bloodline, especially when they've been interbreeding with pigs from other parts of Taiwan over the last couple decades. Hsieh tells us that Lanyu residents used to allow Lanyu miniature pigs to run free in the streets, but nowadays, despite keeping them in sheds, they are unable to control the pigs' reproductive activities. Moreover, estrus takes place an average of once every 21 days, and "Once estrus starts, the pigs, especially the males, charge outside their fences and run around wild before returning," says Hsieh. Sadly, over time, the Lanyu miniature pig's gene pool was diluted.

"Are you looking at me? Come closer!" Piglets of breeds related to the Lanyu miniature pig display the pervading gaze of the Mona Lisa in their eyes. No matter where onlookers may stand, they can't escape the pigs' stares. Left to right: a Lanyu miniature pig, a spotty Lanyu pig, a Mitsai pig and four Langbin pigs.

Mitsai, spotty pigs hit the scene

The small body size of the Lanyu miniature pig has drawn attention to its unique breed and bloodline. Scouring through historical documents, Chu Hsien-pin discovered that the US National Institutes of Health had determined in the early 1970s that the miniature pigs of Lanyu were well suited as lab animals, based on Seventh Fleet intelligence reports. In light of the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, the US had informed the Council for Agricultural Planning and Development (the predecessor of the Council of Agriculture) of this fact, and urged Taiwan's government to work to protect this species of miniature pig.

At the recommendation of the US, the CAPD enacted the Miniature Pig Breeding Plan in 1980, introducing 20 Lanyu miniature pigs (four males and 16 females, a 1:4 ratio) to the Taitung Animal Propagation Station, to be raised in isolation on the mountain slopes of Beinan Township.

Four years later, following the rapid disappearance of these pigs from Lanyu, the Council of Agriculture named the Lanyu miniature pig a protected breed. By then, the number of pigs in the Taitung station had risen to 15 males and 45 females: these were "generation zero" of this protected breed. Random breeding techniques were used: they were allowed to breed freely, averaging two litters a year for each sow, with about six to eight piglets per litter.

After the population of this protected group was stabilized, the Council of Agriculture went on to develop varieties of this pig with altered appearances through selective breeding. These varieties would become fad pets.

The first to be developed was the Mitsai pig, with brown-and-white stripes on the sides like a pumpkin. They certainly resemble hybridized Lanyu miniature pigs, but their altered appearance and size comes from having half their bloodline come from large, reddish-brown-haired Duroc pigs imported from the US in 1960.

Over a decade ago, when the Mitsai pig hit the market, a shopping rush erupted in entertainment venues all over Taiwan. But don't be fooled by the word "mini" used in the ads. Chen Kuen-jaw, manager of the Taitung Animal Propagation Station, tells us with a smile that a five-month-old miniature pig might weigh just 30 kg, but by the time it's a year old it will have grown to between 75 and 90 kg, outweighing your average man, and certainly not "mini."

The second pig to hit the scene was the spotty Lanyu pig. In 1993, Animal Propagation Station workers found that certain pure-black Lanyu miniature pigs had subdominant spottedness genes, but that they don't look different from other Lanyu miniature pig. According to the laws of heredity, the offspring of a pair of black pigs with spotted genes have a 25% chance of being spotted, with white spots appearing on 11 body parts including the face, ears, neck, belly, back and forelegs. Later, personnel at the Taiwan Livestock Research Institute (TLRI) selected the spotted piglets and carried out forced full-sib mating-what in human terms would be called incest. "Though this sounds cruel," says TLRI worker Chang Chih-wei, "it's to purify the spottedness genes and stabilize their genetic expression."

In 2003, the spotty Lanyu pig and Mitsai pig were officially coded Lanyu 100 and Lanyu 50 respectively and registered with the Council of Agriculture as new breeds of Taiwanese miniature pigs, to be marketed as pet pigs and as attractions at recreational farms.

Nevertheless, as breeding technicians were celebrating the success of these new breeds, they were sobered by a sudden turn of events. After 16 years of free breeding on the mountain slopes, it was found upon investigation that some pigs had jumped the fences at an unknown time, disappearing without a trace.

Also disturbing to the TLRI was that the Lanyu breed's gene pool had been tainted. The institute discovered that a Formosan wild boar had invaded the stockades. An investigation showed less-than-reassuring results: some newborn piglets had noticeable brown and black stripes on their bodies, apparently the descendants of a Lanyu miniature pig and a Formosan wild boar. Chu Hsien-pin says that to ensure the purity of the protected pigs' lineage, all the crossbreeds had to be sold from the facility, or else put to sleep.

"In 2004, we decided to relocate the pig sheds, and our work to protect the breed required us to rely on techniques from molecular biology," says Chu, who has taken on this grand mission. "We switched from random breeding to selective breeding." TLRI personnel weeded out old and sick pigs, leaving behind a select group of five males and 25 females, and converted the old sheds into ones specially made for this group of Lanyu miniature pigs. Then sheds were divided into sections according to function, including a breeding section, a gestation section, a birthing section and a nursing section.

Besides sheltering the protected genuine Lanyu miniature pig, this place is also subleased as a residence for 27 spotty Lanyu pigs and 27 Mitsai pigs. Furthermore, there are also some new residents called Langbin pigs: these are a close relative of the spotty Lanyu pig, which though having entirely white bodies, scholars don't classify as albinos. Their whiteness is from a recessive whiteness gene discovered by the TLRI within the spotty Lanyu pig's subdominant spottedness genes. Station director Chen Kuen-jaw says that Langbin pigs are a secret weapon for which they will soon apply for registration as a new breed of Lanyu miniature pig.

Each afternoon around 4:00, Chu Hsien-pin (center), director of the Department of Livestock Technology at the Taitung Animal Propagation Station, leads an inspection tour of the pig sheds to make sure the protected Lanyu miniature pigs are receiving adequate "room service."

Pigs are greater than humans

"All men are enemies. All animals are comrades," exhorts the white boar Old Major in George Orwell's fable Animal Farm, reminding the other animals of their cruel fate of enslavement by man. But in the sheds of the Lanyu miniature pigs, humans and animals have traded places. This quotation should be changed to: "All pigs are nobles. All humans are serfs."

For example, every day at 8:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., TLRI workers schlep buckets of feed into the sheds. Instantly, the keen-nosed pigs jockey for position and surge forward, their tusked mouths drooling. The specially designed feed filling the troughs is rich with cornmeal, fishmeal, vitamins and minerals. Some feed has extra calcium and choline added to prevent osteoporosis and maintain joint flexibility.

On top of this, each Wednesday afternoon a veterinarian comes to disinfect them, as well as ensure they're immunized against ailments such as foot-and-mouth disease, swine fever, pseudo-rabies, mycoplasma pneumonia and atrophic rhinitis.

And if that weren't enough, the sheds are surrounded by insect netting to isolate them from blood-sucking horseflies. Also, "Piglets hate cold while adult pigs hate heat. We turn on fans in the summertime to make sure the indoor temperature is lower than outside," says resident veterinarian Chen Chung-kun.

In the birthing section, we see a Lanyu sow lying in a clean corral. "This morning she gave birth to nine piglets," says Chang Chih-wei, a TLRI staff member who checks in on the pigs often. He points to two spotted and seven black piglets suckling from their mother. One black piglet still has the fetal membranes stuck to its body.

In the next stockade is a Mitsai sow that gave birth the day before, with seven sleeping piglets by her side, their bodies covered with orange fuzz.

"In five months, when their hair turns light yellow and they reach 30 kg, they can be sold for lab use," says Chang Chih-wei. No matter what special favors are laden upon Lanyu miniature pigs and Mitsai pigs, it's still difficult for them to evade the doom of being sold.

For instance, in Stockade No. 5, 10 temporarily residing Lanyu miniature pigs and spotty Lanyu pigs stand and lie around haphazardly, oblivious that they've been ordered by National Cheng Kung University Hospital in Tainan, and that they'll arrive there in about two weeks, their future life uncertain.

"Even a fake sow ain't bad!" An excited male Lanyu miniature pig props himself upon a breeding mount for a gratifying session of semen collection.

Biomedical pioneers

A truck trundles slowly down from what the Puyuma call Mt. Alibai. As it rolls along a bumpy gravel section, the sound of oinking can be heard as the truck is jostled. These piglets, numbering over 10, will be transferred at the Taitung train station, placed into pet containers, and divided into two groups. One will be sent to the National Defense Medical Center in Taipei; the other's destination is Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Kaohsiung.

After undergoing the quarantine procedure in the hospital, they are placed into 25°C temperature-controlled rooms. Here they enjoy free room and board, with someone coming in regularly to clean up. The hospital even pipes in soft music each day to keep them calm.

Developing lab animals for biomedical purposes is a serious responsibility taken on by the Taitung Animal Propagation Station in 1980 aside its directive to protect endangered breeds. "The body and organ sizes of pigs are closer to humans than those of small mammals like rats and rabbits, and they're subject to fewer ethical problems than primates like monkeys and apes," says Chu Hsien-pin, pointing out the main reasons why the Lanyu mini pig breeds have become a prime choice as lab animals. Five-month-old, 25-kg, pure black Lanyu miniature pigs are especially favored by biomedical researchers.

In 2003, orders from major hospitals and research institutes around Taiwan increased briskly after the spotty Lanyu pig and Mitsai pig were recognized as official breeds. The 300 pigs sold in 2008, for instance, were about thrice the number sold in 2004. The Chang Gung Hospital group alone purchased 107 of them.

National Taiwan University Hospital last year also bought 32 from the Taitung Animal Propagation Station. Ko Shen-jen, head of the Large Animal Unit of the NTU Laboratory Animal Management Committee, tells us that small lab animals like mice, hamsters and guinea pigs are used mostly for cellular and genetic research, and much of the time only blood needs to be drawn. But some experiments require researchers to closely observe physiological reactions in animals, and in such cases large animals have to be used.

"It can be a real pain to anesthetize a 300-kg hog; a 30-kg miniature pig is much easier," Ko laughs.

Generally, it's the Lanyu miniature pig that wins the favor of surgical researchers when testing, say, cardiac and cosmetic surgeries, and it is especially valuable for observing whether there are rejection reactions in organ and tissue transplants.

For instance, the Lanyu miniature pig helped with a face transplant experiment conducted at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Kaohsiung in 2008: after the transplant, the black pig had a white face and the spotted pig had a black face. Though these two miniature pigs died five weeks after surgery from tissue rejection, these experiments show promise for skin grafts for victims of car accidents and burns.

In April this year, the same Chang Gung team published another lab result: leg tissue regeneration through autotransplantation. The rear left leg of a black Lanyu miniature pig was inserted into its own flesh, into which mesenchymal stem cells, which can differentiate into various tissue cells and boost autoimmune function, were injected, to observe whether it could resist rejection. This time, the pig lived bravely for nearly a year after surgery.

In the end, these lab pigs, having been sacrificed for humanity, are treated as medical waste, sent to the incinerator by workers. This may well be unsettling to pig-lovers.

"Are you looking at me? Come closer!" Piglets of breeds related to the Lanyu miniature pig display the pervading gaze of the Mona Lisa in their eyes. No matter where onlookers may stand, they can't escape the pigs' stares. Left to right: a Lanyu miniature pig, a spotty Lanyu pig, a Mitsai pig and four Langbin pigs.

A new dawn for native pigs

It has been over three decades since the discerning eyes of Americans noticed for the first time the merits of the Lanyu miniature pig, inspiring Taiwan to protect the breed and execute selective breeding plans. Now the French have learned of the advantages of the Lanyu miniature pig, wishing to introduce the variety to Paris. Chu Hsien-pin reveals that France is actively collecting miniature pig breeds from around the world, with plans to conduct research into diabetes prevention and nutritional research.

Since 2005, scientists from France's National Institute for Agricultural Research have repeatedly expressed to the Livestock Research Institute their wish to import this breed. But given that Taiwan is still prone to porcine foot-and-mouth disease, such requests have been shelved by the Council of Agriculture. Wang Cheng-taung, then director of the TLRI, insisted that the case warranted prudent discussion.

More recently, the French have been engaged in e-mail correspondence in hopes that Taiwan will reconsider these exports. Wang, now deputy minister of the Council of Agriculture, holds to the standpoint that local species shouldn't be rashly exported. "Even for cases involving major international biomedical cooperation, we must carry out broad, full and detailed discussion."

Nobody could have foreseen a century ago that the Lanyu miniature pig, which left such an impression upon the Japanese, would end up disappearing from Lanyu, that its lineage, as well as related breeds, would continue on the main island of Taiwan, and that the small, black purebred varieties would draw such international attention.

As animals for commerce and labs, these pigs are unlikely to live out their natural lifespans of over 20 years. However, if the ancestors of the Lanyu miniature pig are looking down from heaven, seeing their numbers steadily increase and the food and protection they receive, they will surely let out a gratified cry of "ee-kikik-kikik"!

"Are you looking at me? Come closer!" Piglets of breeds related to the Lanyu miniature pig display the pervading gaze of the Mona Lisa in their eyes. No matter where onlookers may stand, they can't escape the pigs' stares. Left to right: a Lanyu miniature pig, a spotty Lanyu pig, a Mitsai pig and four Langbin pigs.

"I'm hungry!" A newborn spotty Lanyu pig presses itself against the face of its mother, a black Lanyu miniature pig, as it searches for that wellspring of life-its mother's nipple.