A study by British advertising agency Joshua has concluded that animals are more reliable than celebrities for endorsing products. "Animals don't come with any baggage and they don't get photographed staggering out of a bar drunk the week after your campaign has launched", the Daily Telegraph quotes Joshua managing director Nick Spindler as saying. Spindler did not, of course, refer to the incident where celebrity cricketer Shane Warne was snapped cigarette in mouth, just days after he had appeared in an endorsement for a no-smoking campaign. Dogs, adds Spindler, are the most successful when it comes to selling goods. Focus groups with more than 600 people found dogs to be the most popular, followed by cats, pigs, horses, lions and chimpanzees. The other species in the Brit top 10 are cows, penguins, dolphins and elephants. Cats are seen as being selfish and cruel, and pigs as having charm and character. "We found Britons have an almost ludicrous affinity for pigs. If you go into almost any home in the country, they are there - in figurines, pictures or just piggybanks", Spindler says. 

But, then, pigs have always had a certain bucolic charm for Brits, whether in fact or fiction. A central character - pun intended - in humorist P G Wodehouse's stories set in the ancestral home of Lord Ernsworth was the Empress of Blandings, winner of the silver medal for being the fattest pig in Shropshire for successive years. The only rival was the Pride of Matchingham, reared by Ernsworth's rotund neighbour Tubby Parsloe. The human interest may have lurched from crisis to crisis. Youthful nieces may have succumbed to the charms of impoverished artists and been banished to Blandings Castle under the watchful eye of Ernsworth's sister Lady Constance Keeble. Their heartbroken beaux may have sneaked into Blandings Castle disguised as gardeners and been unmasked while kissing the object of their affection behind the shrubbery However, amidst all this human drama, the pigs - especially the Empress - lent the required solidity to the plot by letting nothing upset their daily routine of keeping body and soul together by eating everything in the trough.