Do pigs ever really eat cyclamens? There is certainly a long-standing traditiion that they do. In medieval times herbalists writing in Latin called the cyclamen panis porcinus, later translated in the 16th century into German saubrot and English sow-bread. The name continued in fairly common use well into the 19th century, and even today cyclamen enthusiasts like to speculate about the sow-bread name coming from Sicilian wild boars digging up cyclamen tubers to eat, and that sort of thing.
This year we have shared with our neighbours three Oxford Sandy & Black pigs - a classic foraging breed. They live in a small patch of woodland where they do indeed forage enthusiastically. They quickly found and have dug up the mature - even venerable - Cyclamen hederifolium tubers in their area. They play with them happily, but show no signs whatsoever of eating them - see photo below, taken this morning. What is true is that the dug-up de-rooted tubers, left on the ground by the pigs as they go on to find something more tasty, do look very like the small flat loaves of bread which have been baked in country areas since time immemorial.
I now believe that it's extremely unlikely that pigs, wild or just free-roaming, ever do or did eat cyclamens, which do after all contain poisonous alkaloids. I think it much more likely that, seeing or hearing about the dug-up tubers left behind by foraging pigs, those early herbalists gave the plant that sow-bread name because of the tubers' bread shape, and because they assumed that the pigs would have eaten them instead of just turning up their noses at them, as in fact they seem to do!
