Doctor John Webb tried to put it nicely. "I am afraid you will not be meeting any pigs today," he explained. "The reason is simply that you are too dirty."
The 5,000 pigs at his breeding establishment in Lincolnshire are to be protected at all costs from disease-laden humans. They are the potential mothers and fathers of the superpigs of the future. Without being power-hosed I would have endangered their health and wrecked their Blups.
Webb is one of the country's leading geneticists and he is perfecting his pigs' Blups (best linear unbiased predictions) to find the animals that best satisfy the public's appetite for leaner meat.
Each week he feeds details of every pig's weight, eating habits, conception rate and family background into a computer to produce a single figure for the genetic merit of each animal.
"We are not out to make megapigs or humanised pigs but better pigs," says Webb. But here he and his fellow scientists are caught in a dilemma partly of their own making. After 20 years of aiming to please the Jack Spratts of the nation by creating leaner, fast-growing pigs, they are working on a casualty of their success: taste. Just as the pursuit of leanness has reached state-of-the-art perfection, pork-tasting trials suggest that juiciness and tenderness may have been sacrificed along the way.
When Webb's company, Cotswold Pig Development, tested 1,000 pigs for three supermarket chains, a trained taste panel found the leaner the meat was, the poorer the taste. "Unfavourable genetic influence" was blamed for 5 per cent of the problem, but the rest on how a pig was looked after, slaughtered, processed and cooked. "I am sorry to say that a lot depends on what the housewife does with it when she gets it home," says Webb.
Most supermarkets are at some time afflicted with pigmeat that is unedifyingly known in the business as PSE pale, soft and exudated. "It is a galloping problem we have to deal with," says Webb. "We have the technology but we do not yet know why greater yield tends to make for poorer quality."
As director of genetics at Cotswold, Webb will be among the first to find out. In his former role as principal scientific officer at the Animal Breeding Research Organisation (now the Institute for Animal Physiology and Genetics Research) at Edinburgh, Webb became an expert on the halothane gene, a naturally occurring gene in pigs that affects the quality of their meat.
If a slaughtered pig has two copies of the gene (one from its mother and one from its father), it will develop PSE. But if it carries only one copy (from one parent), its meat will be lean without suffering from PSE.
The halothane gene makes pigs susceptible to stress and stress means poor meat. "Pigs cannot stand aggravation," says Webb. "One reason why people don't as a rule mistreat their pigs is because if they do the pigs simply don't perform. They give poor quality. It is both easy and profitable to make a pig happy. A happy pig converts its food efficiently and will spend a lot of its time sleeping."
For a boffin, Webb is on remarkably close terms with his pig family. "I love pigs, I must say. I even got into genetics through pigs. When I was 12, I became so keen on pig-keeping that my father bought me two pedigree Wessex saddlebacks and I built up quite a little herd. It nearly broke my heart when I had to sell them.
"When I go into the units here I say to myself: You are a businessman now. This will take half an hour. Three hours later I am still in there scratching ears. Yes, pigs do smile, and I am convinced they can talk. If they get to know you, they'll come and have a chat about things."
Webb does not eat pork. "It is irrational, I know, but I cannot bear eating my friends, the pigs. I had to overcome something very basic to bring myself to see them slaughtered."
For a scientist of Webb's sensibilities, there are several cheering developments both in the British pig industry and in genetics.
He has helped design a hardy new breed of pig for the growing number of farmers - about 15 per cent - who have switched to the cheaper and kinder way of keeping sows outdoors instead of in intensive sheds. (Piglets are still fattened inside, but the sows live and have their litters in the open.)
"The trend is away from super-intensive pig-rearing to semi-intensive," says Webb. "The happiness of a pig in a straw yard is something to behold."
Webb forecasts that in five years new techniques in biotechnology will make it possible to create pig clones, to determine the sex of an entire litter of pigs and to freeze genetically improved pig embryos and insert them non-surgically into surrogate sows.
"It will allow us to move genes round the world cheaply and with less risk of disease. It will also mean that live animals do not have to travel. I will know that the pig population I establish, say, in Australia, is healthy right from day one.
"This is a very dynamic time for genetic improvement," says Webb. "Biotechnology, rather than bringing a new set of evils, will bring a new set of tools to help geneticists meet society's expectations of animal welfare, human health and quality."
