As illustrated in 1805 by John Landseer, father of the better known painter and sculptor Edwin Henry Landseer, Slut the Pig was a sort of real-life forerunner to Babe. Only instead of herding other animals, Slut helped her master kill other animals. And instead of winning a prize, she was slaughtered. Per the caption on the Flickr account that posted this image:
William Barker Daniel’s Rural Sports tells us that she was called Slut “in consequence of soiling herself in a Bog.” She lived wild but her “owner” taught her to act like a pointer dog and she accompanied him on his hunting expeditions and would point and retrieve as well as a dog. Slut was slaughtered when she was ten years old, which Daniel said was “animal murder.”Slut’s story is recounted in William Barker Daniel’s Rural Sports, Vol. Three.
The word slut, by the way, has never really meant implied outright filthiness so much as slovenliness, more metaphorical then literal. These, I feel, are distinctions children should be learning through literature.
“Now That’s Interesting,” previously:
- Alice Brady and her ganked Academy Award
- Grant Wood and the American erotic
- The aptly named Meta Carpenter and her affair with William Faulkner
- Ambrose Burnside, the first name in sideburns
- Rock Hudson and the beefcake factory
- The crazy-weird story of Madame Butterfly, M. Butterfly, Shi Pei Pu and the Weezer album Pinkerton
- Victoria Vetri, who predicted her own downfall in Rosemary’s Baby
- Louis Mountbatten, who painted the British naval fleet a rosy pink color in a misguided attempt to be sneaky
- Gertrude Sanford Legendre, who is just so freaking boss
- Gilles de Rais, one bad dude
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