In the Animal Folklore of the Isle of Man there is a notion that pigs have a tendency to grow fatter or leaner according as the moon is waxing or waning. A relation is also understood to exist between the age of the moon when the pig is killed and the degree to which its fat – in bacon form presumably – will run in the frying thereof.
Exactly how far pigs respect the calendar in these ways I am unable to say; but one of the race resident in Maughold which I had the privilege of studying during a couple of years on and off, certainly corroborated the first mentioned belief.
Having attained respectable proportions in the course of a short life, in a waning moon he began to dwindle until he was a mere anatomy of a pig, and observed an eclipse of the next moon by dying, without assistance.
(source: A Second Manx Scrapbook, WW Gill (1932); photograph)
