Jane Croft has been a dog groomer, a soap maker, a chef, a taxi driver and an investment banker, but it was not until she began breeding miniature pigs that she found fame and fortune.

Two years after she resolved to breed tiny swine as household pets, she has celebrity clients, the rapt attention of news channels from New York to Tokyo and thousands of prospective buyers, all desperate to pay £700 for a small pig.

Next month Ms Croft and her little pigs will star in People magazine, one of America’s largest celebrity glossies. Driving through the Dorset countryside yesterday in her pig delivery van, she was in a state of high excitement. “People magazine! Can you believe it? An Essex girl breeding pigs!”

She has sold several hundred and her telephone is crackling, as it were, with fresh bids. This week came news that Victoria Beckham had purchased two as a Christmas present for her husband, David.

Ms Croft is coy about that — “I couldn’t possibly comment” — but the arrival of the Beckhams on the miniature-pig scene has helped to turn Ms Croft’s animals into a must-have accessory.

The RSPCA views the trend with caution. The charity has already expressed concern at a growing trend for amateur pig breeding, fuelled by the recession. Retailers, among them B&Q, have begun selling pigsties.

Yesterday a spokeswoman said: “Whilst I’m sure that the Beckhams ... will be extremely responsible with their pigs, we hope that this doesn’t lead to members of the public taking similar actions on a whim without having the appropriate space, facilities and care needed to keep these animals.”

Ms Croft says that she takes great care to vet new owners and sells only to people with sufficient space in their gardens. Her enterprise began two years ago in Dorset, where she was trying to set up a soap-selling business. She had bred pigs once before but became so attached to them that she could not bear to see them slaughtered. “I treated them like my ladies,” she said. This had limited her success as a commercial breeder.

If only there were a way to bring home the bacon without bringing home the bacon. The answer was to breed pigs for pets. She set off around the country “stockpiling” and cross-breeding the smallest that she could find to produce one that could fit through a catflap. A house pig.

She was not the first. Chris Murray, 59, a pig breeder from Devon, set out on the same journey 14 years earlier. “The smallest pigs are the pygmy pigs of India, but they have a rather long snout,” he said. “The Karen people of Indonesia also have small pigs living amongst them, but you can’t buy those.”

He turned to English pigs and bred ones the size of springer spaniels. “My aim is to breed the smallest pigs in the Western world. If I could get them down to the size of cocker spaniels, I would be cock-a-hoop.”

Mini-pigs can live into their late teens and he warns owners not to consider eating them. “They are not good eating,” he said. “Far too small. In any case, a pig is for life, not just for breakfast.”

Very Important Pets

• The first pekinese dog seen in this country was Looty, seized by the British troops from the Imperial Palace in China and given to Queen Victoria in April 1861

• US President Calvin Coolidge had a pygmy hippo

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• Chihuahuas have been popularised in Hollywood after Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were seen carrying them in their handbags

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