Diggers

Each year the calloused, potato-masher snouts of pigs probe the earth of southern France, bring up $15,000,000 worth of truffles for the omelets, canapes, sauces, poultry dressings of world gourmets. No ordinary packing house pigs are these animals. They are usually as well trained, as highly esteemed as good quail dogs or fox hounds.

Unleashed in an oak grove where truffles (warted, globular fungus growths) are found, they race madly about, start digging furiously under the admiring eyes of their owners. Once the swine discover the fungus, a few inches under the ground, the keeper must be alert and ready, unless he has an unusually fine animal. When keeper spies truffle, he slaps the pig on the snout with a rod, seizes the truffle, rewards the pig with a few acorns.

While many peasants thus employ their own pigs for the digging, others subscribe to the new commercialism and turn the work over to owners of herds of digging pigs. Last week these herdowners began their annual tour of Perigord, Carcassone, Florae, great truffle centres all, to make bookings for their pigs for the five-month period beginning in November.

Well-trained truffle pigs will lift the truffles, of which they are passionately fond, to the surface, leave them untouched while they grunt for their acorns. Young pigs get their first truffle-training from their mothers, beginning at the age of one month.

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