Left side ham is more tender?

Because pigs scratch themselves with their right leg.

Other than from unattested cooking/food websites. . .

A) Do pigs indeed scratch themselves more with their right side, and
B) Is the left side ham actually more tender as a result?

On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. What does the pig do if its left side itches?

What sounds slightly more plausible is that pigs lie on their right sides more. They seem to have a preference for lying on their sides rather than with their feet folded up underneath them the way cows usually do. And animals do exhibit side preferences. That might, in fact, lead to them needing to scratch their right sides more, I suppose. I’m still not buying it without a fair amount of confirmation, though.

I am not sure why scratching, or not, would make any difference anyway. Maybe it’s because they tend to fall on that side when they land.

This is interesting. I’ve heard that humans and polar bears are the only species to exibit a decided preference for one side of the body , but this may well be folklore.

From my own experience: out of two cats (one aged 15, the other 3) both are southpaws. This is pretty constant.

I read that cats have a slight tendency towards being left handed, but poking around on google I found conflicting information. Some sites basically agreed with what I had read before, giving statistics like 40% left handed, 40% right handed, and 20% ambidextrous. Other sites cite one particular study that gave right handed a slight preference, with 50% right, 40% left, and 10% ambidextrous. No matter whose numbers you use, lefties are far more common in cats than in humans. Your cats aren’t unusual.

Many sites also said that gender matters, with females being more likely to be righties and males more likely to be lefties. Some sites said that the gender difference disappears if the cats are spayed/neutered at a young age.

No idea about pigs. I couldn’t find any reliable cites for them.

I remember seeing that on an old western show when I was growing up. The cowboy (can’t remember which show) asked for a steak from the left side, and explained that the left side was more tender. Everyone in the room laughed.

It’s been a long time since I handled pigs, but for what my memory is worth, they don’t exhibit any left-right-preference. They don’t use their feet much at all - they do everything by snout, which makes it awfully hard for the bystander to tell whether they’re left- or right hoofed (is that the right term? The Swedish word for the foot is klöv!)
They’re very friendly animals though, and I think they are at least as intelligent as dogs!

Glad to hear that!

Ignotus, for some reason the English word for the foot of a pig is “trotter”. Which is weird.

I’m a (very small-scale) pig farmer, and my experience is that they tend to scratch themselves against objects rather than using their feet. I have a large granite boulder in the pasture that I think they will eventually have polished to a high gloss with all the scratching they do.

Horses often develop a preference for motor laterality, somewhat akin to “handedness.” Part of training a horse is schooling them to ensure they’re equally comfortable working in a straight line and on either rein, that is, in clockwise or anticlockwise circles. They also often display lead preference, that is, individual preference to canter leading left or right - the hind leg last to leave the ground before the moment of suspension. This is an important aspect of balanced riding, as a horse leading on the inside leg is better balanced when riding circles, less likely to stumble or fall.

This reminds me of the story of the daughter who questioned her mother’s instructions on how to cook the ham.

*Young mother was preparing the baked ham for Easter dinner and was explaining to her daughter that you always cut the end of the ham shank off before putting it in the roasting dish. The daughter asked, “Momma, why do you cut the end off.” The mother says, “I don’t know, my mother taught me this is the way to make the ham taste the best. I’ll call grandma and ask her.”

So later that day, the woman calls her mother and asks, “Mom, why do we cut the shank off the ham before cooking it?” Her mother, says, “That’s how my mother taught me to cook the ham. I’m going to see her this afternoon at the nursing home, I’ll ask her.”

That afternoon, the grandmother asks the great-grandmother, “Mother, why do we always cut the shank off the ham before cooking it. It always tastes great, but we wanted to know what the reason was.” The great grandmother laughs and says, “Honey, we cut the shank off because the baking dish I had when you were growing up was to small to hold the whole ham!”*

Even if true, I can’t see how this would affect the ham, anyway.

Scratching is done to affect the nerves in or just under the skin. Then there’s a layer of fat (especially in pigs) and the muscles under that. It’s the muscles that make up the meat that is the ham we eat. Pigs don’t scratch hard enough to effect the muscles inside the body, so I don’t see how they would affect the ham.

And besides, how would frequent scratching make the ham more tender? Wouldn’t frequent scratching or poking be an irritant that would just tend to make the meat tougher?

A more definitive cite.

I couldn’t remember where I had read about cat-handedness (pawness?) originally. It was probably that.