Meat · Breed · Short entry
Mangalica
A curly-haired, fat-type pig from Hungary, the country's dominant breed from the mid-nineteenth century until after the Second World War. It nearly disappeared in the 1970s, when it could not compete with modern white breeds. Three colour varieties survive, blond, swallow-bellied and red, all maintained as a protected native breed.
A gift of pigs in 1833
A 2003 review by Egerszegi and colleagues traces the Mangalica to crosses of the old Hungarian Alföldi, Szalonta and Bakony pigs with the Serbian Šumadija pig. The first Šumadija stock, nine sows and two boars, reached Kisjenő in Hungary in 1833 as a gift from the Serbian Prince Miloš to Archduke József, and more breeding animals followed from Serbia. The authors note that the name Mangalica appears in writings before 1833, so the Serbian pigs standardised an existing fat-type population rather than founding a new one.
Early descriptions name white and black types; later authors list five colours. Only the blond, swallow-bellied and red survive. The review says the blond type was the predominant one, the swallow-bellied arose from mating black and blond animals, and the red came from blond sows and Szalonta boars in the second half of the nineteenth century. Estate herds grazed pasture and oak-beech forest all year, tended by herdsmen.
Conservation
The Mangalica could not match commercial white breeds for growth, feed conversion, litter size or lean meat, and its products fell out of favour after the Second World War. National programmes to preserve its gene pool began in 1976. According to Hungary's food chain safety office (NÉBIH), the breed has been maintained with state support since 1976 in designated herds, and the breeders' association founded in 1995 runs the breeding programme. On 31 December 2018, 9,123 Mangalica sows were registered in 165 herds: about 5,700 blond, 1,345 swallow-bellied and 2,076 red.
How it connects
Breed
- similar Iberian pig
