Mulefoot Hogs - Uncommon and Hardy

When I was a child, I was somewhat confused about swine.  Were they cloven-hoofed animal?  Or did they have a single hoof, more like a horse or mule?  I had trouble keeping it straight, but it wasn’t until I was old enough to have children of my own that I understood the source of that confusion.  You see, I grew up in the country near Louisiana, Missouri, which happens to be the general locale of what was for many years the last surviving herd of Mulefoot Hogs. 

Mulefoot.  That’s single-toed – syndactyle is the technical term for that trait.

No wonder I was confused.  For a while, I even lived just down the road for a while from that herd of Mulefoots, and from time to time, I got a pretty good look at some of them.  Since we didn’t raise hogs ourselves, the mental image I carried around with me was of the hogs on farms nearby.  So those odd-for-swine feet seemed perfectly normal to me.  

These medium-sized mostly black pigs once were quite popular in the Mississippi Valley during the late 1800s.  They had medium flop ears, a soft short hair coat, gently dispositions, thrived on a high forage diet, and weighed 400-600 pounds at two years of age.  They fattened easily, and were considered high quality “ham hogs,” and were also valuable for bacon and lard production.  The 1916 book Swine in America, author F.D. Coburn indicated Mulefoots could be found in Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, across the southwest, and in some parts of Mexico.  Records for 1910 showed 235 breeders in 22 states.  (In southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, they also were known as “Ozark pigs.”)  There were three separate registries, then, and one breeder’s brochure called them the “coming hog of America.”  

Unfortunately for the Mulefoot, times changed.  Farmers demanded greater efficiency, and the public’s tastes switched to leaner, faster-growing types.  Mulefoots, like many other old breeds, fell into disfavor.  None of the herd books from the three registries survives, unfortunately, and by the early 90s, the breed appeared headed for extinction as well.  

Which brings us to the Mulefoots down the road from my childhood home. . . R.M. Holliday of Louisiana, Missouri, maintained a remnant population of Mulefoots for nearly 40 years.