The Snake Pigs

Some people have an uncanny ability to find "trouble". I seem to be one of them.

One day in the early fall of 1998, after enduring a noise in it for years,I took my TV to town for repair. I had driven by this TV repair shop for years, right in the middle of town. As I pulled in I looked up at the sign and it said "baby pot bellied pigs for sale". I couldn't believe it. At a TV store?

I needed more pigs like I needed a hole in the head. But there they were on the sign. And I knew without looking that their housing would be dreadful.

As I walked into the shop I found myself face to face (through a glass enclosure) with the biggest damn snake in history! (Well, it looked that way to me). It didn't take a lot of thought to realize why there were pigs being raised here.

Sometimes it is best to think before you speak. This wasn't one of those times. If I had tried to plan a "rescue" speech to use on the owner of this business I couldn't have. My story and his were just too far apart to find a meeting ground. So I just started talking about a hundred miles an hour about giving pigs a place to live away from the city and ran on and on and on until he couldn't take any more and agreed that pigs in the city weren't a good plan and yes he would sell me the whole family except for the white one who he was going to eat. No, I said, I will take all of them, ALL of them. Suddenly he realized that it really was out of his hands somehow, just because he owned them didn't give him control after this crazy woman entered his life. OK. All of them. So for the first time I bought the freedom of a family of pigs.

So we went to the back of the building and I saw the family for the first time. Father, mother, "Uncle", and 4 young pigs. Housed in a barren pen with only a TV dish tipped against a fence as shelter. And the part that haunts me still….a stock watering tank for water. A tank 2 feet off the ground, that only adult pigs, on their hind legs, could reach. And only if it was filled to the top. I looked at the deadened eyes, uncaring, long past fear or curiosity and was nearly sick. The mother pig, skin hanging in folds along her sides, was still producing enough milk to keep the babies alive, though they would have been weaned under normal circumstances. She knew they had to have that milk.

I brought the pigs home, had the boys all neutered, aborted the already pregnant again mother and set them free.

And every time I see them in the water, drinking, swimming, blowing bubbles or just pushing their nose around in it, I fell incredibly lucky to have stumbled on these pigs that day.

So meet Billy (father),

Becky Lynn (mother),

, Sophia & Olga,

J

Jeremy & Butch

And

"Uncle" Lasat

Oh, and the TV? It died.