PORKERS have had a terrible press of late. There was the constantly escaping Norfolk herd which had an ASBO slapped on its owner and was branded “yob pigs”. Magistrates were told that the pigs’ “slippery” dung was a health hazard; that they spread disease to cows. Worse, they uprooted grass. (So they were supposed to strim it?)

Accuse the farmer who owned the herd by all means. but this endless pig-bashing is too much. Pigs are our friends. As The Grocer has just reported, our taste for this most wonderful of beasts has risen to a new high. Last year we consumed £500 millionof sausages — nearly 19,000 tonnes. Proper sausages — the ones with real meat — account for a third of the sausage market.

Bangers and mash is back. Smart restaurant menus are seldom without “Stilton sausages and herb-infused mash bathed in a pool of onion jus”. Those irritating vegetarians should be bathed in gravy as well. Roast pork and its crackling is one of life’s true joys.

But to enjoy it fully we should insist on the welfare of, and some respect for, the poor beasts we eat. If Tony Blair wanted to do rural Britain a favour — which he doesn’t — he would stop trying to save the foxy-woxy and start publicly to rubbish imported bacon and the Danes’ vile methods of pork production.

According to The Whole Hog, Lyall Watson’s love letter to the billion pigs we share this planet with, in some cultures porcines have god-like status. I don’t want to worship pigs, personally. But we owe them much. In the war we saved their bacon and they helped to save ours. Indeed the full story of how London’s small pig clubs helped to lick Hitler has yet to be written.

Pigs are to this day smeared with the sour apple sauce of calumny. They are still routinely called fascist, ignorant, stinking, filthy swine. Loud actors are hams. Supergrasses squeal. Fat people are lard buckets. All this despite the evidence — and I speak as the proud former owner of a pair of Gloucester Old Spots — that pigs are more amusing, intelligent and delicious than the idiot yellow labradors that populate British homes.

You can keep George Orwell and his Stalinist pigs in Animal Farm. Far better, surely, to take a leaf out of the book of Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth, who viewed with the gravest suspicion anyone who was “unsound on pigs”.