"People think it's weird and a novelty, but they're really sweet and really smart animals, " says Timm Chiusano, who keeps two potbellied pigs on the ground floor of his three-story brownstone in Brooklyn.

WSJ: Pigs May Fly Before Finding a Legal Home in the City

Now Norwich-based Hillside Animal Sanctuary wants Bertie to join its other famous escapees - including the Tamworth Two, pigs Butch and Sundance who went on the run in a wood near Tamworth in the English midlands.

BBC: Bertie the bull campaign hots up

Before Taylor went to Bethlehem, a team of seventy-five men loaded ninety-two-pound pigs of iron onto rail cars at a rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day.

NEWYORKER: Not So Fast

The scientists mixed it with the VEGF and injected the combination into the hearts of two groups of test animals, rats and pigs, in which they had induced heart attacks. (Pig hearts bear significant similarities to human ones.) In both cases, instead of being washed away, the VEGF stayed on the lattice and slowly got released over several weeks.

WSJ: Nanotechnology Holds Promise for Heart Patients

The 900 students arriving in Boston this summer for their two-year course were told they would be guinea pigs.

ECONOMIST: Harvard Business School reinvents its MBA course

This belief rests on two (contradictory) pillars: first, that parasites adapted to pigs would have a hard time adapting to humans, and, second, that because pigs and people have lived together for so long, any parasites likely to switch have already done so.

ECONOMIST: Pigged out

These include a case of two puppies buried alive by their owner and another in which more than 30 rabbits and guinea pigs were found living among dead animals and slurry in a hutch.

BBC: RSPCA animal cruelty convictions up by a third in 2012