Discuss perdurabel's answer to: I read a short story on

Straight away, two or three possible explanations come to mind: firstly - the singular "is" or "was" is often used when talking about a whole group, like in "fish is biting"; secondly - many dialects and colloquial speech forms tend to use the third person "is" for all persons, this is common in all Germanic languages some of which have lost all personal flexation of the verb; thirdly - the writer may have meant the two words "pigs", in which case the word is a singular! What the writer intended, can only be deduced from the context!