Acorn-eating pigs save ponies

Thursday, December 5, 2013

After a wet spring and a dry summer, there's a bumper crop of acorns in the Hampshire woodland on the southern coast of England. That's bad news for the region's famous New Forest ponies. In a Daily Mail article, top forest official Jonathan Gerelli said: 'The problem is that our ponies like the acorns but the acorns don't like them. If they eat them, they tend to start to bleed internally and die a horrible death."

But the acorns aren't poisonous to pigs, so every year in about mid-September local farmers let their pigs loose in the forest to save the ponies from themselves by eating the fallen acorns first. This practice is known as "pannage," and has been going on in the region since the 19th century, when some 6,000 pigs would forage. These days, the number is usually around 200, though the unusually high amount of acorns called for double the pigs this year. After about 60 days in the 70,000-acre forest, the pigs are rounded up and returned to their farms. As a side benefit, pannage fattens up the pigs for Christmas. BP