The day was sweltering at Woodlawn Lake Park as we picked up litter. My clothes were soaked in sweat, it ran down my face in rivulets, and dripped from my nose onto the sun parched ground.
The saying for this when I was a kid was, “I’m sweating like a pig.”
There are an estimated 2.6 million feral pigs in Texas, according to the Houston Advanced Research Center. That’s a lot of sweat pouring onto the ground.
But anyone today will tell you, pigs don’t sweat. If that’s true, how can you “sweat like a pig”?
“The “problem” for swine is that, though they do have sweat glands (thus they do sweat), relative to their size, they do not have a lot of sweat glands,” Matt Newmann wrote in “Sweating Like a Pig: Swine Thermoregulation.”
If pigs don’t “sweat like a pig” where did the phrase come from?
It came from iron processing.
Joe Schwarcz in the article “Sweating like a pig” said, “The term is actually derived from the iron smelting process in which hot iron poured on sand cools and solidifies with the pieces resembling a sow and piglets. Hence "pig iron". As the iron cools, the surrounding air reaches its dew point, and beads of moisture form on the surface of the "pigs".”
Feral pigs may not use sweat to stay cool, but they do something like my daughters used to do when they were younger, they play in the mud and water.
“When it gets warmer outside, swine find cool water or mud to have a similar effect to them as sweating does to us,” said Newmann.
According to the Houston Advanced Research Center feral pigs cause an estimated $500 million of damage every year in Texas. Not only does their behavior have an economic impact it also affects the quality of our water.
You could choose to use a feral pigs method of staying cool if you chose. Finding some water such as a pool, lake, or river to relax in is a great way to cool down on a hot day. Wallowing in mud isn’t probably the way you want to cool down but if you want to try it go ahead.
Remember, the way we keep cool is sweating like a piece of cooling pig iron not like a feral pig. Find a cool pool, lake, or river and enjoy your warm days and don’t “sweat like a pig”.
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