why did piggy banks become popular? Why were pigs used instead of other animals or figures?
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Not sure on the history of it, you can read wikipedia for that im sure.
But for pigs i imagine it had to do with the shape? For a coin-bank you want something big and capable of holding a fair amount, and a rounded shape is beneficial for many reasons. Size of interior, no corners to become structural weakpoints, naturally balances as coins slide to the bottom with no corners to get stuck on, etc.
So when you start with a round shape and think of animals… pig comes up quickly. Cant really do a tiger lol, wouldn’t look right. Everyone knows pigs, cartoony pigs look cute, it appeals to kids both boys and girls. Elephant could have been another obvious choice but pigs are more common in most of the world.
Then, once it catches popularity and enters the zeitgeist, people copy and that keeps compounding until it’s ubiquitous.
So hundreds of years ago, like pre-1500s. Metal was expensive. Most household objects, vases, containers, cups etc, were made from a type of clay called “Pygg”. Households usually had a container like a cup or bowl, that they would drop extra coins in to save. It became a “pygg bank”. Eventually people stopped using pygg to make things, but the name persisted.
Eventually, because of the play on words, they started making the banks in the shape of pigs.
It is true, google that shit.
Edit: Due to some pedantic malcontents, I will state that this based on oral tradition/cultural lore. This is most often accepted as the historical reason.
A real pig was a way that families used little bits of waste/extra to create value. There are other proverbs and terms that refer to this. Most recently, the “pig slaughter scam” in which a likely victim is cultivated, “fattened up,” to give a big payout. The scammer develops the victim, builds them up so they really believe in the scammer and will put a lot of money into an “investment” or something similar.
In a non-criminal context, a poor working class family could create a little extra, some pork for the winter, by being careful with their meal scraps and looking after the pig. In lieu of an actual pig, you could save your extra pennies in a change bank and when it’s full, slaughter it like you would a pig in November and get the payout.
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Pigs and pig raising was a source of money for family farms. (chickens also) Prolific, able to eat almost anything, and easy to turn into actual cash money.
Piggy banks are very common in Germany. The oldest suspected piggy bank was found in Thuringia and dates to the 13th century. It did not have coins in it, so there’s no proof that it was used to collect coins.
[https://www.thueringer-allgemeine.de/leben/vermischtes/article219654573/Deutschlands-aeltestes-Sparschwein-ruht-im-Weimarer-Depot.html](https://www.thueringer-allgemeine.de/leben/vermischtes/article219654573/Deutschlands-aeltestes-Sparschwein-ruht-im-Weimarer-Depot.html)
Pigs have always been a symbol of luck, wealth, frugality and utility. There are many sayings in German that refer to pigs. “Schwein gehabt” (literally having pig) means someone was very lucky. “sauwohl fuehlen” (literally feeling well like a sow) means being very content and happy.
A family with a pig was able to feed table scraps to the pig or had it forage in the woods. Once slaughtered, almost the whole animal was used for meat, sausage, head cheese, leather, bristles,… Having a pig was related to relative wealth and the animal a symbol of good luck.
Ancient China also used containers called pumane made from clay. The most common animal shapes were cat, dragon, and pig.
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The pig was considered the saving bank of the farmer. The farmer would keep a piglet and feed them (basically) garbage. As the pig gained weight it became more valuable until the time when it was killed and butchered and the meat either used or sold.
You’re meant to fill up a piggy bank completely with change before you break it to spend the money…
Similarly, one is meant to wait until a pig is fully-grown and fattened up before harvesting for its meat.
https://bahoukas.com/pygg-pots-to-piggy-banks/
“Pygg is an orange colored clay commonly used during the Middle Ages as a cheap material for pots to store money, called pygg pots or pygg jars. There is dispute as to whether “pygg” was simply a dialectal variant of “pig.” By the 18th century, the term “pig jar” had evolved to “pig bank”. “
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