In front of me, in a living room on the outskirts of Budapest, Pilo sits plaintively on his hind legs like a dog. He wags his tail like a dog, and he enjoys his belly being rubbed like a dog. When asked sternly, and provided with a suitable cushion, he deigns to lie down like a dog. But Pilo is not a dog. He is a pig — a black-and-grey Minnesota mini-pig to be precise, if “mini-pig” can ever be a precise term for animals which can weigh as much as an adult human.
Since the age of two months, Pilo has been raised just as a pet dog would be. In a country where most other pigs would by now have ended up as smoked sausages, the four-year-old is settling in for the long haul. He wears a red dog harness and sleeps in a worn dog bed. His trotters slip across the laminate floor. His wet snout, two thousand times more sensitive than my nose, swivels towards my hands then my shoes.
