If pigs have no sweat glands, why do we say "Sweating like a pig"?

yes,phillydreamer...this is an insult to the pig....i have read that pigs are one of the most intelligent animals even smarter than the smartest dogs...a pig expression i heard a lot growing up was, "happy as a pig in the sunshine"...my granny was particularly fond of that one...or one of our preachers used to use the exclamation"hogwash" to convey his disdain of things..his sermons were peppered with that word!

I know!....go figureMy grandmother always came up with these sayings....wives tales. Like one that still is on my mind.I am trying to figure out what this means: When it was raining and the sun was shining she'd say,"The devil is beating his wife."Huh? What in the world does that mean

There are few expressions that don't make any sense to me... What's with the "grease monkey"? Are monkeys really all that greasy? If you eat a solid food & drink a liquid, what about chunky soup? Do you eat the chunky part of the soup & dink the rest? Speaking of food, typically when I say "I had spaghetti for dinner", that means I ate spaghetti... What about the expression, can't have your cake & eat it, too. If you apply same rules as in food, if you had a cake, didn't you already eat it? So basically the expression goes something like, "you can't eat your cake & eat it, too"? How about "hot as hell out there"? How do you know? Ever been there? People say "pin number". Doesn't pin stand for "personal identification number"? So people are being redundant for no reason, "personal identification number number"? Not to sound disgusting but here's one... If you get sick & stuff comes out of your mouth, you are throwing up... When you get sick & get diareah, why isn't it called throwing down?

Wow, that is such an awesome point! I'm going to have to tell a few people about that since it's so clever! You're right about that...I don't know where the saying came from. The other day, my boyfriend's uncle said, "It's hot enough to breed sheep in here!" I was wondering how that made any sense either, LOL but it was still cute! I think people just relate sweat to being messy, and messiness to pigs...Which is also odd because I could sure as heck think of a lot more messier animals than pigs!

I couldnt help but laugh but you are right. I think manys perception of pigs are they are dirty, and stink.

Perhaps this phrase is misused, PhillyDreamer? Perhaps it originally referred to people who were not working and, therefore, not perspiring. Just like how the phrase, "Eating like a bird," is usually misused to say that people aren't eating much, when in fact, a bird has to eat a tremendous mount of food daily (in proportion to its body weight) because flying takes so much energy.

oh yes now i am wondering too..

I never knew that pigs didnt have sweat glands.I think we say sweating like a big to show our disgust.Being really sweaty isnt very nice so we show that we think this is horrible by saying we are like an animal that widely connsidred to be smelly,horrible and disgusting.Most people consider pigs to be dirty and two if the worlds major religions beleive it is wrong to eat them because god said they were unclean.In fact they are pretty clean animald they are one of the few that sleep in a different area to where they go to the toilet.One reason they are probably considered unclean is because the roll around in mud but thats only because the mud helps their fair and hairless skin from burning.

It's a figure of speech, so it's not really that pigs do sweat. I guess it's because pigs give off a foul odor and when you're "sweating like a pig" it could mean you're sweating so much to the point of giving off a foul odor. There are many phrases like those and they're not not be taken literlly.

The thing that is difficult if not completely impossible to realize without living abroad Firstly pigs are very clean animals when left to their own devices without human influence so they would have no need to sweat even if they could. The pig roles in mud during the summer as a way of controlling external parasites such as ticks/flies etc. The terminology comes from the outdated custom of keeping pigs in "sweat boxes".These where brick buildings that contained a high concentration of pigs fed on swill .It was based on the idea that by keeping each other warm they would use less energy on heating and thus grow quicker,which to a degree they did but their welfare was abysmal and the practise was banned before the war