I’VE ALWAYS been interested in animals. As a child, I was lucky: we had lots of dogs (no cats — father didn’t like them), and I was allowed to keep rabbits and guinea pigs and mice and budgerigars and tortoises. A female tortoise once laid an egg, and I kept it wrapped in blankets in the airing-cupboard for ages, waiting for it to hatch. I didn’t realise you have to have a male tortoise too.

Later, after the Second World War, I stopped being a soldier and became what I’d always wanted to be — a farmer. I farmed for 20 years and at the end of that time I became a failed farmer. I think I was quite a good stockman and looked after my animals properly, but I know I was a hopeless businessman. Words I love, but I’m useless with figures. When I bought things, I always paid more than anyone else. When I sold things, it was always for less than other people got. All the same, those farming years were very happy ones. I was a dairy farmer, so cows — you might think — were the most important of my animals. But they weren’t. Pigs were.

There was a wood on my farm, on land that had once been used for open-cast mining so that it was very upsy-downsy and no good for anything. Except pigs. Most of the trees were oaks and oaks bear acorns, which pigs love. More, there were two brick-built Nissen huts in the woods, where the Home Guard had stored their equipment during the war, and these made lovely houses for the pigs to shelter in, though they liked to sleep out in good weather. When a pregnant sow neared her time, she would make a huge nest of sticks and grass and bracken, always choosing a sheltered place, and in this nest she would farrow. My ten sows were all Saddlebacks, but my boar was a Large White. His registered name was Field Marshall Something-Or-Other, so I called him Monty, after the victor of Alamein.

Monty loved to be scratched between his two great ears and would sit down like a huge dog to receive this treat. As he sat in front of me, we would look into each other’s eyes and I would think what an intelligent, knowing fellow he was. As I talked to him, he seemed to understand everything that I said, and I knew that the noises he made in reply were happy and friendly ones. I’ve always been sure in my own mind that pigs are clever, cleverer than other farmyard creatures, and indeed more than most animals. Since Monty’s days, American scientists have carried out tests to establish the level of a pig’s intelligence. Because pigs have no opposable finger and thumb like us, these tests took the form of requiring a pig to press certain levers or buttons with its snout. The results were astonishing. I think I’m right in saying that in some tests pigs scored much higher than dogs and even than chimpanzees.

I write books for children, often about animals. I try to make the animals behave as they do in real life, whether they’re pigs (which they often are) or dogs or cats or ducks or hedgehogs or mice or whatever, but I’m allowed to empower them to speak. I can put words in their mouths. Mostly, you won’t be surprised to hear, the pigs say (and do) the cleverest things. What a shame that people’s references to the pig are always so censorious. Lazy, dirty, smelly, fat, greedy, ugly — none of these epithets is quite true in my judgment, except perhaps greedy.

As to dirty, pigs are scrupulous in their attention to cleanliness. I converted an old barn into four large pigsties. At the back of each sty was a dung-passage, which the pigs always used meticulously, never soiling their living quarters. As to the pigs’ place in people’s lives, everyone knows that old saw about every part of a pig being of use to us, except the squeal. I’m no vegetarian. I’m deeply grateful to pigs for all the good food we get from them. I just hope that each has had a happy life and a merciful death. I once wrote a book called All Pigs are Beautiful. Beauty, I know, is in the eye of the beholder, but this beholder really believes that statement.

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