A slim book on a weighty topic, “Lesser Beasts” is the most fascinating history of pigs you’ll ever read.

Don’t say you won’t read a history of pigs. That just proves what author Mark Essig knows: Swine are automatically loathed – slandered as unclean, undisciplined, unloved.

“The anxiety about pigs starts with their omnivorous appetite,” he writes.

“In addition to acorns and rice hulls, pigs happily devour that which most disgusts us – rotting garbage, feces, carrion, even human corpses. Of all the animals commonly eaten by humans, the pig is the only one that will return the favor.”

Intrigued yet? Consider these bits of pig history:

• Medieval French courts tried and convicted wayward pigs, as if a publicly lynched animal would send other beasts a message not to get carried away licking food crumbs off little children.

• Hungry, free-ranging colonial pigs helped drive American Indians east by ravaging their crops. They also competed with Indian women, waiting for low tides in order to dig for clams.

• Efficient pork-packing plants set the stage for Henry Ford’s assembly lines.

• A pig’s snout is almost like an elephant’s trunk, “a miraculous fifth limb that allows the pig to react to its world in ways unknown to other hoofed mammals” (like rooting without moving its head). The pig is the most intelligent, and the most abused, farm animal.

• In 19th century America, hogs were driven to market like cattle or sheep. Pig drives actually were bigger and went on longer than the fabled cattle drives. A “swineherd,” however, doesn’t have the same romantic ring as “cowboy” or “shepherd.”

The lesser-known pig drives, in fact, are what intrigued Essig, who grew up in St. Louis but now lives in Asheville, N.C. Asheville even has a sculpture of pigs, a historical marker of local hog drives. Can you herd a pig, the author wondered. With a doctorate in history, Essig knew how to find out.

Research into swine impressed him with the animals’ versatility, their ability to live in woods, under outhouses, in backyards. A Spanish explorer could drop a few pigs off on a Caribbean island and a couple years later there would be pork meals available for the next ship of explorers.

Essig found, though, that the popularity of pork has waxed and waned. And when it’s scorned, political or social reasons may be to blame: The wealthy view pork as a food for poor people.

“It’s a food resource that poor people could keep on their own,” he says, talking by phone from Asheville. “In the American South,” he writes, “the landless poor ran their hogs in the woods. And even in the heart of Victorian cities, pigs scavenged the streets and wound up on the dinner tables of the poor.”

Essig quotes Edmund Burke, who warned that if democracy prevailed “learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”

“As the wealthy saw it,” Essig writes, “both the poor and their pigs bred quickly, lived in filth, and threatened the social order.”

Pigs, in fact, are extremely clever. And although they have no sweat glands and seek water and mud to cool off, they actually prefer not to sleep in excrement. “They don’t wallow in their own waste if they are in a big enough place,” Essig says.

But most pigs today are housed no better than caged hens, with no room to even turn around. “Hogs in confinement endure a litany of horrors,” he writes. Essig says he knows too much about these barbaric conditions to be comfortable buying supermarket pork. He does occasionally buy pork at local farmers markets.

Which leads to his explanations about why followers of some religions do not eat pork. Essig’s chapters on pork eating are complex, but here’s a short summary: Jews were told that to remain clean for God, they could eat animals that chewed their cud (and thus are vegetarian). Pigs, omnivores, do not chew cud and were considered unclean because they will eat meat with blood. Men who ate unclean flesh would contaminate the temple.

But many people in the arid Near East didn’t raise or eat pigs anyway, so “you might say that Jewish leaders banned something that didn’t need banning,” Essig writes. (The Jewish ban would influence the pork prohibition in another Abrahamic Near East religion, Islam.)

The ban didn’t became a major signifier of Jewish identity, however, until pork-eating Greeks conquered the Persian Empire, including Palestine, about 333 BC. Later, when Romans conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC, the rulers’ pork feasts helped reinforce divisions between Jews and Romans: “One people defined itself by rejecting pork, the other by embracing it. … Between them, Jews and Romans set the terms that would define the pig throughout the history of the West,” Essig writes.

He found so much to write about pig history that Essig concentrates on the Western world. But the Chinese love pork, so perhaps another author will pursue “Lesser Beasts in the Far East.”

For Essig, who is also the author of “Edison and the Electric Chair,” he’s not sure what his next project will be. But he’s reading more about animals, including another beast that domesticated itself and also has been both loved and vilified: the dog.

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