thinking about minecraft piglins again because when am I not. I may not be posting about them but I sure am thinking about them!!
what if the reason piglins have hoglins in stables bastions is because certain breeds of hoglin have been domesticated but we as the player can't tell the difference, and while the piglins that take care of the hoglins can recognize you as a friend due to the gold you wear, their hoglins mainly identify their surroundings through smell and because the player doesn't smell like a piglin, the hoglins recognize you as a threat and try to get rid of you. this would lead to hoglins occupying a role as both a guard animal and a meat animal, and I imagine different breeds would act differently? like imagine you're a piglin and your bastion owns both smaller, more agile guard hogs for defense, and larger slower fatter hogs for meat
wild hoglins aren't domesticated or safe to be around, so when a party of piglins comes across a wild hoglin or, void forbid, a herd of them, the piglins tend to kill the wild hoglins to minimize the threat of returning along that route in the future
this ties into my personal headcanons about piglins having a rather complex society(much moreso than we see in the game) because it's interesting to me? like yeah I think they're doing farming and ranching; I just also think that would be a nightmare to represent in-game and people would accuse it of being "not minecraft-y" so it would never be added but it's fun to think about. additionally I think piglins likely have some sort of farming methods to both feed their animals as well as supplements to their own diets(I think they're omnivores with a preference for meat actually, given we see them hunting hoglins in-game but they're based off of pigs and pigs do eat plant matter. and also everything else but I digress)
there isn't necessarily a ton of evidence for this in-game but what I remember for this off the top of my head is that stables bastions have hoglins(the naming of stables bastions may actually also imply hoglins taking a role similar to oxen and similar animals; used to haul materials and/or ride perhaps?), and having a certain kind of animal in your place of living seems like something that would be at least somewhat domesticated. also, parties of piglins that spawn out and about will team up to hunt nearby hoglins and celebrate when they win. piglins also pick up any dropped meat from hoglins they kill, which is where I got the idea of them eating meat! they don't pick up the leather dropped from these hoglins, according to the good minecraft wiki(minecraft.wiki for anyone curious)
generally, yeah, I think piglins probably domesticated certain breeds of hoglin. I think the easiest to work into existing lore would be hoglins domesticated for their meat, and hoglins domesticated as beasts of burden like oxen(and used to haul materials like food or building materials around)
an interesting thing I found while fact-checking what I've said here is that minecraft dungeons also has hoglins(and I personally like what little can be dug out of minecraft dungeons because even though I'm pretty sure it isn't canon it's got a lot of interesting details that can be worked into canon really easily imo), and according to the wiki they're smaller than minecraft's hoglins and don't attack piglins. to me this seems like it *could* be taken as an example of a separate breed of hoglin bred for guard purposes which is fascinating to me! and I brought that up at the top before I saw that in the wiki so yeah in conclusion:hoglin breeds 👍










