Was the children's show Peppa Pig based on a science experiment where a couple injected pig DNA into their daughter? No, that's not true: There is no evidence that this is a real story or that Peppa Pig originated from it. This claim was first posted on TikTok in 2021 as a joke. Lead Stories could not find any police or news reports of this event happening.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on June 20, 2023, with the following caption, "#usefulfacts #creepyfacts #jamesknows." The video opened with a voiceover:
Did you know that Peppa Pig was based on a terrifying true story?
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok.com screenshot taken on Wed Jun 28 15:26:18 2023 UTC)
The video claims that in 1952, a couple living on a farm injected pig DNA into their daughter named Peppa because they had the power to do so. This supposedly the inspiration for the animated children's show Peppa Pig. The video does not tell viewers where this farm was located or the name of the parents.
According to the video, a "villager" called the police to stop the parents, but Lead Stories could not find a police report or news story of this event happening on Google News, which indexes thousands of credible sources of information.
In 2021, a TikTok creator posted this story without revealing why the parents conducted the experiment on their daughter. Before the climax of the story, a clip of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's verse in the rap song, "Face Off" by Tech N9ne pops up, a version of a rickroll prank. We reached out to the creator of the TikTok, @ruthbellpan, to ask if this Peppa Pig lore was a joke she made up or if she had seen it somewhere before. We will update this article when we receive a relevant response.
We have also contacted Hasbro, the parent company of Peppa Pig, about this claim and will update this article when we get a response.
Peppa Pig has a theme park in Paulton's Park, which is located in the United Kingdom. The Paulton's Park website says that the creators of Peppa Pig wanted to make an animated series for children that had "clear and concise story lines" with "a main character who was a girl" that did not fall into the already present stories of princesses and ballerinas. There is no evidence on that website that the creators based their animations on a story about a girl who was injected with pig DNA.
Another Lead Stories fact check about a children's show can be found here.
