Essex Pig

The Essex is a breed of domestic pig that originated in the English county of Essex, most likely descended from selective breeding of local pigs. In its traditional form it was a smallish pig with pricked ears and a black body marked by a broad band of white sheeting across the shoulders. Breeders improved the Old Essex in the mid-nineteenth century by crossing it with imported Neapolitan pigs, and by 1840 the improved Essex was winning top prizes at the Royal Agricultural Society show in Cambridge. It stayed locally popular into the mid-1950s, then declined sharply after a 1955 government report urged farmers to concentrate on just three breeds, the Welsh, the Landrace and the Large White, to compete internationally; the Essex was declared extinct in 1967 when its stud book merged into the newly formed British Saddleback. A farmer named John Croshaw nonetheless kept a pure Essex herd registered under the British Saddleback name, preserving the bloodline and making a later separate re-creation of the Essex breed possible.