I keep pigs, free range, rare breed pigs. I don’t find it contentious that some people don’t like them. We feed ours vegetable scraps from the veg. patch but their main diet is pig nuts bought from local farm suppliers. They live outdoors, are very clean, love a scratch, vie for attention. We breed our own so we have sows and a boar, the piglets are dispatched at around 6 months for fresh meat and 9 months for bacon and sausages. You cant beat a real sausage made from top quality, rare breed outdoor pigs. The bacon is superb and pork with crackling that really crackles and just a small amount of fat for flavour well, its unbeatable. Ours go to the abattoir where they are dispatched quickly and cleanly. Ours is a small, local abattoir, they don’t travel miles, they are unstressed when they arrive and stunned before killing. Cant say I agree with Fili except about the colditz fencing. Ours are sweet to the end. And sweeter still on the dinner plate. Ours to my knowledge have never pooed in their water, they have a dung patch which they use. They are keen to wash their muddy snouts in the water trough and then wont drink the water until its cleaned out and refreshed, whereupon the next one washes its snout, ad infinitum. You can kill them at home, but you cant then sell or trade the meat, even here in France (although not many people worry about that). Personally I prefer the abattoir, for the small inconvenience of having to trailer the pigs a few miles, its worth the lack of mess, the clean butchered meat, the quick skilled dispatch.
