A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
truffle hog
A truffle hog is a pig that’s trained, or rather not trained, to find truffles. Sows locate them by smell without instruction and dig for them enthusiastically, which is a problem. A pig wants to eat what it finds and getting a ripe truffle away from several hundred pounds of determined pork is the difficult part of the operation. Dogs have replaced them almost everywhere.
Etymology
Simple compound. Truffles produce a scent that is also a boar pheromone, so a sow responds to a truffle as she would to a male, which is why she needs no training and why she is so hard to dissuade.
Notes
France banned pigs from commercial truffle grounds in the 1980s on the grounds that a rooting pig wrecks the mycelium and the following year’s crop as it digs. Dogs are trained on scent, work more precisely, and can be called off. Truffle covers the fungus and truffle fly the third method.