Before I start this review, I must again thank @Kenc and the folks at Toymany for gifting me this set as a review sample for the Blog!
The set we are looking at today consists of eight figures of domestic pigs. There are four sculpts: 1) sow, standing; 2) boar, sitting; 3) piglet, resting; and 4) piglet, standing.
Today it is my great pleasure to share one of my holy grail figures with the blog, the 2014 Schleich pot-bellied pig. This figure was retired in 2018, one year before this blog was launched and I got into extant animal toys. I don’t know how it came across my radar but for a couple years now I’ve been looking at eBay listings for it, in the hopes that I could find one for a decent price.
The figure we’re looking at today is not one that I deliberately added to my own collection, it was one that was given to my barely one year old daughter while visiting some relatives. They handed her the pig to play with and then insisted she should keep it. Well, she’s too young for this sort of toy, so it has been sitting on my shelf until she reaches the recommended “3 years and up” age.
The common warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) is a species of pig (family Suidae) that occurs in sub-Saharan Africa. Aside from the wild boar it is the most familiar of the wild pig species. It is also common, with a large range that covers grasslands, savannas, and forests. Warthogs are the only pigs adapted to live as grazers in open habitats and the bulk of their diet is made up of grasses.
The Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, known locally as the Lon I, or simply I, pig, is a traditional Vietnamese breed of domestic pic. It originates from the southern Red River Delta in the Nam Định Provence of northern Vietnam. It was originally bred for meat.
Europe is a continent consisting of the westernmost peninsulas of Eurasia. It is said to be separated from Asia by a variety of natural features including the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, Ural River, and the Caspian and Black seas, among others. Truthfully though, the boarders between Europe and Asia, geological or manmade, are arbitrary.
Today we’re looking at your classic pink pig (Sus scrofa domesticus), what must be one of the most common toy animals you can think of. But, and I hate to say it, this is some pig. And that’s the second Charlotte’s Web reference I’ve made in too short an amount of time.
The Berkshire pig (Sus scrofa domesticus) is an English breed that originates from county Berkshire. The breed dates back to the 1600’s and is said to be the breed fed upon by General Oliver Cromwell and his troops whilst camping in the Thames valley. Those Berkshires were quite different from the modern breed, however.
Although they look very much like pigs, and are sometimes called New World pigs, peccaries aka javelinas belong to their own distinct family, Tayassuidae. Pigs belong to the family Suidae and about 30 million years of evolution separates the two families that together make up the Suina clade. While all true pig species hail from the Old World, all extant peccary species come from the Americas, although the family originally evolved in Europe.
An adaptable, intelligent animal, the wild boar (Sus scrofa) was already a successful species long before it was domesticated and transplanted around the world by humans in the form of the domestic pig (S. scrofa domesticus). Naturally, they range across Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, where they thrive in a variety of habitats.
When you think of domesticated farm animals, one of the first to be thought of is the pig (Sus scrofa domesticus), the delightful omnivore of the farm. There is something quite charming about the pig, maybe because it eats anything like we seem to, hence the expression “as greedy as a pig” (yes, that is from “Snatch”).
I do not know why it took me so long to get the charismatic little Schleich warthogs. So here are the Schleich Wild Life common warthogs, Phacochoerus africanus (Gmelin, 1788). Item numbers are 14611 (boar) and 14613 (sow). The piglet has been featured in another blogpost by animaltoyforum and has the item number 14612.
