This Little Piggy Stayed Home

Never mind bringing home the bacon – for lots of Brits, it's already in the backyard.

The hot hobby these days is pig-rearing, with Brits keeping a porker or two in the backyard so that they know exactly where their meat is coming from.

"The number of customers buying our pigs and pig shelters for use in a town or city has risen by 40 percent in the past year," Linda McDonald-Brown, owner of Bidgiemire Pig Company, told the UK's Daily Mail.

The company's co-owner – McDonald-Brown's husband Graham – told the newspaper that in the past year "I have delivered substantially more arks [translation: pigpens] to people in urban environments, ranging from on the outskirts of cities right into the center."

The Bidgiemire Pig Company (and probably, the hobby of pig-raising itself) took off when TV chef Gordon Ramsay used the company's services to raise two pigs and then serve them for dinner. Now, pork-producing has become so widespread that British do-it-yourself chain B&Q recently began stocking pigpens (cost: about $450).

According to the Daily Mail, anyone wanting to ham it up can buy an eight-week-old piglet, fatten it up for about four months, and have a 130-lb. six-month-old pig -- the average age for slaughter. Of the 130 lbs., about 80 percent can be used.

"There's a saying that you can use everything apart from the squeak," Graham McDonald-Brown told the Daily Mail.

And that's no porker.

Photo courtesy susyr22 via Flickr.