The Mysteries of Pig Beach Island, Bahamas
If you’ve read our article on the snake island near brazil or the haunted doll island near Mexico, then you know Hell truly does exist on Earth but there’s also an island of adorable swimming pigs, so that’s good.
This is honestly the best thing I’ve seen all week
But this island, known as Big Major Cay, located in Exuma, a district of the Bahamas and unofficially known as Pig Beach has its own mysteries. One of its mysteries hasn’t been solved but luckily the other more deadly mystery has been solved.
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The Origins of the Swimming Pigs of Exuma
Before you go thinking that Big Major Cay is a huge island inhabited by hundreds of thousands of feral pigs, it’s actually quite the opposite. The island is one of 360 small islands on the Exuma archipelago and is about a mile (1.6 KM) wide and about a mile and a half (2.4 KM) in length and is uninhabited besides about 50 pigs.
Unsurprisingly Pig Beach is a huge tourist destination and when people see a dozen pigs swimming around a beach, one of their first questions tends to be “where did they come from?” And that is where our first mystery lies because no one really knows how these pigs just randomly appeared one day.
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“I mean, I can take a guess.”
There are a couple of legends surrounding the arrival of the pigs but since Big Major Cay has always been an uninhabited island, there aren’t any first-hand accounts. Apart from how they got there, there’s also a question of when the pigs got there. No one really knows when they trotted onto the island but some guesses go as far back as the 17th century.
Pirates and Sailors
Probably one of the more widespread origins of the pigs attributes their arrival to pirates. We know that pirates were big fans of the Caribbean and it turns out they were huge fans of pigs, mainly the eating them part.
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Based on historical documents we know that pirates traveled around with pigs like they were takeout and would dump them on random islands so they could return later to eat them. The locations of the pigs would be marked on maps so that when the pirates weren’t busy attacking ships, they could take a break and hunt some pigs.
“Gold? No, no, the treasure is a delicious pig barbeque”
The legends say that this is exactly what happened at Pig Beach, some pirates just dumped some pigs there and never returned. Another version of this legend says a pirate ship crashed nearby or was destroyed by the weather but the pigs survived and swam to the island.
What throws some doubt into this legend is the fact that there are only a few dozen pigs on the island today. Typically a pig can give birth to around 7-10 piglets per litter with 2 litters per year.
If the pigs truly had been dumped several hundred years ago and lived this long, you would think there would be a lot more of them or they would have died out since it’s not their natural habitat.
Apparently, someone else had this thought because another version of the legend says it was actually sailors in the 1950s who dumped the pigs there to eat later. I couldn’t find a version of this legend that specifies why sailors did this but the legend says the pigs survived by eating food dumped by passing ships.
Capitalism and Celebrities
A few of the more plausible explanations for the pig appearances blame it on celebrities and businessmen. An often-cited origin for the pigs says celebrities who lived on the nearby islands in the 1990s owned the pigs but disliked the smell of the animals.
Some versions of the stories say it wasn’t celebrities but just regular people, specifically a man named Wayde Nixon, who lived on a nearby island and kept the pigs for food.
Celebrities or not, these people decided the best thing to do was drop the pigs off on the island and just pick them up whenever they were hungry. This seems more plausible compared to pirates and sailors since the nearest island to Pig Beach is Staniel Cay just ten minutes away and with a population of over a hundred.
In a similar vein to that version, some sources claim Wayde, or others, dropped the pigs off in the 1990s in a failed attempt to start a farm in case the Y2K apocalypse or the Gulf war resulted in food shortages.
One of the fears of the Y2K bug was that the computers would cause a nuclear apocalypse so I’m not sure how keeping pigs on a small island above ground would have provided safe food.
“Sure the radiation will kill us but the pigs should be fine… right?”
The other plausible theory for Pig beach is just that some businessmen needed a way to increase tourism to the area and decided to add the pigs to the island. There’s not much more information to that theory yet it’s plausible since visiting the pigs is a huge tourist attraction for the Exuma islands.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how the pigs got there. They enjoy a pretty good life, living on the beach, eating food brought by hundreds of tourists throughout the year, and swimming in the ocean without any worries… that is until half of them died in 2017.
What Killed the Pigs
In late February 2017, the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism announced 7-8 pigs were found dead on the beach with no apparent cause of death. This was a pretty big deal because, at the time, there were only about 15 pigs on the island and they had now been Thanos’d.
At first, it was thought that maybe the pigs accidentally ate something poisonous from the surrounding area but the blame quickly shifted onto tourists. It turns out that over the years the pigs had learned where their bread is buttered and when they spot the boats of tourists arriving, they swim out to greet them.
Since there were no restrictions in place or any guidance, people happily gave the pigs treats in the form of any food or drinks they had on hand. As tourism increased in the area specifically to hang out with the pigs, people brought more and more different foods with some even giving pigs beer and rum in an attempt to “playfully” get them drunk.
The Ministry of Tourism quickly put a ban on tourists feeding the pigs and started the process of putting someone on patrol on the island. These measures prevented tourists from trying to have a cocktail party with their favorite swimming swine, although the pigs might not have been too happy with their forced AA meetings.
“But why is all the rum gone?”
Despite this ban, it still wasn’t confirmed that the pigs died from eating tainted foods or alcohol. People had their theories ranging from disease, poison, and a recent freshwater drought that affected the area.
A few weeks after the deaths, the Bahamas Humane Society released its findings after performing some autopsies. The deaths were caused by a combination of things but not alcohol. The veterinarians found large amounts of sand inside the stomachs of the dead pigs and realized the pigs were accidentally eating sand.
With the huge influx of tourists, more and more people were throwing small treats onto the beach for the pigs. The pigs were more than happy to gobble up the food but this also meant they were ingesting sand.
Add to that the pig's overreliance on tourist’s foods, making them less adept at foraging for food in the nearby forests, plus the freshwater drought and you have a recipe for death.
“Some recipes shouldn’t be cooked….”
With the tourists basically in the clear, the ban was lifted but not without a few changes made to how the islands work. Volunteers offered to make signs, check on freshwater levels, and help inform tourists about what they should feed the pigs; this includes vegetables, fruits, and bread.
A designated area was also put in place for feeding the pigs, this way they avoid having their snack with a side of sand. Finally, a warden was put on the island to watch over the pigs during high tourism times and prevent the tragic deaths from reoccurring.
In the years since it’s clear the measures have worked as the population of pigs has increased to around 50 and tourists are still invited to travel to Pig Beach island for a swim.
Quick Facts
Since the popularity of Pig Beach has taken off, others have taken advantage of this and added pigs to some of the other islands to increase tourism
A pig once had a litter that resulted in 22 piglets, that’s currently the largest known litter to date. Typically a pig’s pregnancy will last 3 months, 3 weeks, and a few days.
A Sow is an adult female pig, Boar is an adult male, a Gilt is a young female pig, and Barrow is a castrated male pig
