THE UBIQUITOUS PIG <i> By Marilyn Nissenson and Susan Jonas (Abrams: $34.95; 136 pp.) </i>

Lavishly illustrated, chock-full of anecdotes, sidebars and poetry, this is a paean to all things possibly pig-related; there’s even a riff on pig Latin which, as is duly noted, has absolutely nothing to do with pigs. Here is a hog-size book for hard-core pig fans--or nascent ones, who, according to authors Marilyn Nissenson and Susan Jonas, are everybody else.

Consider that only dogs outnumber pigs as domesticated animals. Last year, 10,000 American households claimed pet pigs. George Orwell wrote in “Animal Farm,” “The work of teaching and organizing the others naturally fell to the pigs, who were generally recognized as being the cleverest of animals.” In fact, a five-year research program at the University of Kentucky has confirmed that pigs are the most intelligentof all farm animals, even outperforming dogs. Winston Churchill once observed that dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals.

The oldest continuously operating social club in America, the Porcellian Club for Harvard men, originated as the not-quite-so-snooty-sounding Pig Club. Membership is for life and so exclusive that “It’s said that the greatest disappointment in the life of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” according to the authors, “was that he had to settle for membership in the slightly less patrician Fly Club.”

And yet pigs always have been associated with humanity’s most unattractive traits: gluttony, sloth, stubbornness and promiscuity. Go figure. Perhaps, as the anonymous professor opines in “The Ubiquitous Pig,” our love/hate affair with the pig is, er, rooted in the fact that “Man is more nearly like the pig than the pig wants to admit.”