When Jacqueline moves to south-west France with her husband, she embraces rural village life and buys two pigs to rear for slaughter. But as she gets to know the animals better, her English sentimentality threatens to get in the way and she begins to wonder if she can actually bring herself to kill them. This is a memoir about that fateful decision, but it's also about the ethics of meat eating in the modern age, and whether we should know, respect and even love the animals we eat. Threaded throughout is the story of the Sapient Pig, (who was something of a celebrity in late 18th-century England), and an elegy to a rural France whose life and traditions are slowly dying out. At its heart, this book is a love story, exploring the increasing attachment of the author for her particular pigs, and celebrating the enduring closeness of humans and pigs over the centuries.