Not so long ago there were local British pigs of every size, colour and shape. Over the centuries different localities had developed their own tastes in what their pigs should look like - often coloured pigs in the Midlands, black ones in the southern counties and white ones in the north - and every county had its own 'breed'. But as urban populations exploded and needed to be fed from the countryside, pig breeders became selective and scientific, concentrating on productivity. Today most of those colourful old local breeds have disappeared; now only three of four highly commercial breeds and a handful of rare breeds remain of that once splendid diversity. This book describes these breeds and how they developed; it also looks at some of the evocatively named extinct pigs and at foreign breeds now being imported and becoming part of the British pig.

Val Porter has written about thirty books, many of them about livestock and other animals, about running a smallholding, and about rural life past and present, including three major books comprehensively describing the world's breeds of pigs, cattle and goats. She has been a member of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust for many years; the title of her book Practical Rare Breeds is self-explanatory and, jointly with Lawrence Alderson, she has written the history of the RBST.