A group of livestock farmers, artisan pork butchers and meat curers, supported by technical advisers, jointly took up the challenge of organising the revival of the Noir de Bigorre pig. In 1981 there were only thirty-four sows and two males left, amongst twenty livestock farmers, in the Hautes Pyrénées region. So the last pure breed pigs have survived, in their natural and historic home at the foot of the Central Pyrenees, where their existence has been confirmed since time immemorial.
Too fat, too slow and unsuitable for intensive farming conditions and industrial consumption standards, it did not fit in with the dominant economic model.