THE PIG’S PATERNITY In New Haven in 1642, a sow gave birth to a piglet with one large eye and no hair on its entire body. The belief prevailed then that sex between species could produce offspring. The weird animal went before the magistrates, who decided the piglet looked like a servant named George Spencer. Spencer worked on the farm where the piglet’s sow lived, and he had one deformed eye himself. Spencer confessed to having sex with the sow, then recanted. He confessed again, and recanted again. Finally he went to trial, where he received a guilty verdict. Turning to Biblical law, Leviticus 20:15, the pig was to be killed in Spencer’s presence, and Spencer was to be hanged. On April 8, 1642, the terrible sentence was carried out on both pig and man. ”These were people who shared the belief system of the time,” Blue said. “It should make us sober about our limitations today.”