Tourists love picturesque places — if a photo can do well on social media, you know that tourists are going to dig that attraction. However, at the New Forest National Park in southern England, tourists seem to love the pigs that roam the park, almost 600 of them. They seem to be so obsessed that they have befriended them and are constantly taking pictures with them.
Some of them took it to an extreme and took selfies with the phone near their snouts, while other park workers have also noticed the tourists leaping out of their cars and following the piglets down a busy road. While a few other tourists have taken a more respectful and gentle approach. The visitors have now been labelled the “piggy tourists”, a social crime that has annoyed people at the park as well as those in charge of animal welfare.
The reason there are so many pigs in the park is becuse of a yearly ritual called “pannage”, where the swine are released to eat up all the acorns and nuts that could otherwise be toxic to the park’s cattle and ponies.
This year’s pannage season began in September and is expected to go until January 2026 with a heavier-than-usual acorn crop, which means that there’s likely to be a larger horde of piggy tourists this time around. The piggies will be contributing to the park by doing their part, but why they have become celebrities still remains a mystery.