Huffed and Puffed As They Tore the House Down

As recently told in “This Little Pig Went Poo Poo Poo All the Way Home” (June 7, 2015), Jo-Ann and I found ourselves transplanted from the quaint little city of New Bedford, MA, the former Whaling Capital of New England, with cobblestone streets, corner coffee shops and jacket and reservations required restaurants to a small farm amidst the corn fields of rural New Madison, OH where Vint’s Family Diner not only did not require jackets nor reservations but lacked even a requirment that the coveralls and Carharts, favored by many of its patrons, be particularly clean after a day of working the fields.

Embracing the idea of becoming hobby farmers ourselves, we decided, with very little thought as to the consequences of such an action, to fill our lives with farm animals. 

Pigs, as it turns out, truly are not the animal with which the novice “farmer” should begin their trek into country living but Jo-Ann and I seldom have the good sense to do things in anything even remotely resembling a logical order.

So, after passing the adoption approval process of The Potbellied Pig Rescue Association of Ohio (PPRAO), by the hair of my chinny chin chin, and attending intensive hands-on, down in the mud training at The Potbellied Pig Sanctuary of Virginia, we found ourselves sharing our home with three old sows, Hannah, Misty and Minnie.

We were under strict orders, by the aforementioned PPRAO, to house our piggies indoors, under threat of repossession of our little darlings if we failed to adhere to that or any of the other requirements of the binding document that I had signed, which numbered somewhere between 10 and 942 pages.  As the contractual agreement spans back more than a decade, time has dulled my memory as to the exact number of sheets in the agreement but it does seem that I put my John Hancock on an amount far closer to the latter than to the former.

I had been duly warned that the scallywag sows that now graced our lives and inhabited our home maintained a strict pecking order and that they would regularly test my authority and position within the herd.

Dogs, of course, do the same but on a much less grand scale.  With enough self-awareness to accept that I could easily be toppled from the Alpha spot, I have, therefore, opted for Chihuahuas and Chinese Cresteds so that I might have a fighting chance.    

Further, while dogs welcome us into their packs, those three pigs, it seemed, did not so much view themselves as guests in our home as they regarded Jo-Ann and me as interlopers within their herd.

In exchange for begrudgingly enduring our presence, the hogs extended to us the privilege of feeding them, and doing so often, as well as rubbing their bellies upon their demand.  Failure to do either in a timely manner resulted in high pitched pig screams more ominous than the wailing of a banshee.

When one pig began her vocal protests at having been slighted in some perceived manner, the others suddenly seemed to realize that they, too, were hungry or in need of a belly rub and joined in the deafening cacophony. 

Remaining inside a house with screeching hogs while maintaining one’s sanity is not an easy task, so we either had to flee the confines of our home or submit to the pigs’ unified will.

Alas, with barns on every corner rather than trendy coffee shops, we had no place to flee.

In spite of giving in to their demands more often than not, I did attempt, with limited success, to exert my dominance as Boss Hog, as I had been trained to do during my days at The Pig Academy. 

I was instructed, as one method to gain dominance, to regularly shove them away from their food and challenge them as they tried to return so that they would respect my authority and learn to submit to my will. 

I think the same is true in prison chow halls, where, I suspect, my best efforts would prove equally unsuccessful.

I did attempt the shoving technique, but those pig headed little porkers refused to accept that I actually outranked even the lowest member of the herd.  

In spite of my pushes, grimacing face and chest thumping, those pigs would begin barking at me, start chomping their teeth in what I had been told at Pig School was a sign of aggression and imminent attack and, with hair standing up all down the crest of their back, charge at me.

I, with a natural tendency to avoid conflict and with my own hair standing up in fear, would quickly move aside and allow them to return to their troughs, inconvenienced but unconvinced by my domineering efforts. 

In addition to the turmoil brought upon me by continually fighting for rank with my chubby little housemates, Jo-Ann was reaching her own limit with the messiness and chaos that the pigs were creating inside our home.

I had been assured by Newton’s Mom and other converts to a Pig Parent Identity that pigs were smarter than dogs.  Those same folks also told me that pig poop was odorless. 

Likewise, Farmer Brown, the commercial hog farmer from next door, also informed us that his pigs' poop did not stink, as if saying it made it so, when he came over on his first scouting visit to ensure that we were not going to be the type of city folks who move to the country and then file a lawsuit against the farming community because they contributed to the country smelling like the country.

I am neither an animal behaviorist nor an olfactory expert but my entire life has been shared with dogs and I do possess a sense of smell so can, therefore, raise my right hand and do so solemnly swear that I found neither of those claims to be even remotely true.

The pig’s natural love for cleanliness, as declared by the minions at the Pig Sanctuary, also rang far less true than the fact that a sty is synonymous with both horrifically messy abodes and pig pens.

In the vein of "Even a broken clock is right twice per day", I do concede that pigs will, in fact, use a litter box, as we had been promised by the same pig folks who had lead us astray in so many other areas. 

Hogs actually do seem to prefer to keep their bodily discharges confined to one area and they willingly accepted that the litter box provided was the appropriate area for their business- and their business was booming.

There is really no excuse for my not having grasped the obvious fact that a pig litter box would need to be much, MUCH larger than one for a spry little kitten; nevertheless the large size of the pan still caught me off guard.

Such a specifically made, and enormous, pig litter box was provided as an integral part of my pig parenting kit (survival gear) from The Sanctuary.  The thing was, literally, larger than our kitchen table. 

In order to accommodate the Pig Privy, we had to place our “extra” furniture into the garage. 

Who, though, truly needs a sofa in their living room?

When it came to potty time, the girls were a cohesive herd; if one had to pee, all had to pee.  It seemed there was always a line waiting to go, not unlike human females in that regard.

The problem, however, was not so much their willingness to use the box as their mostly unsuccessful aim at hitting the mark, not unlike human males in that regard.

The piggies would center themselves in that box and, with gusto, shoot somewhere between one gallon and 50 gallons, again time has dulled my reality but my memory leans towards the latter, of urine straight behind them with such force that it easily cleared the box’s edge by several inches before hitting and running down the wall. 

Immediately upon finishing her gushing bladder blast, piggy one would then squat, fill the box with piggy poo and leap, such as a pig is able to leap, out to make room for the next  pig in the hierarchy to hop in, stand squarely in the poo of Pig One, shoot her stream onto the wall and leap out to track the poo across the rug and make room for piggy three to jump in and repeat the process.

Any effort to halt or interrupt the ritual was met with such protests from the screeching sows that I found it far easier to simply sink down onto what was left of the space that once held our couch and retreat to my happy place, which most definitely did not include swine, where I waited for them to finish so that the clean up could begin.

Jo-Ann, meanwhile, had grown weary of having what had once been a couch's space filled, instead, with a litter box, a mop and pail and me, sitting cross legged, rocking in place while humming in monotone with my eyes and mind closed to the reality that was life with pigs. 

Barely beyond the first week of human and pig communal living, she was empty of any further toleration for such a mess and constant chaos inside the house. 

Reminding her of The Contract, which carried her signature of agreement on not a single page of the lengthy legal obligation that threatened me with everything short of reopening Alcatraz for my personal incarceration if the demands were not met, was about as successful as was my assertion to the pig herd that I was in charge.

In an attempt to show my dominance, I rose from the floor and attempted to shove aside her demands that those pigs be moved, immediately if not sooner, to the barn. 

As seemed to be the response of every female in my house to my attempts to take charge, she began barking, chomping her teeth and her hair raised in true razorback fashion.  I feared her imminent charge even more than that of the three hogs combined.

I determined if The Potbellied Pig Rescue Association of Ohio, in general, and Newton’s Mom, in particular, wanted to challenge Jo-Ann on the breach of contract, they could do so at their own peril. 

So it was that, amidst the huffing and the puffing that nearly tore our house down, those Three Little Pigs found themselves in a pig house built of wood and filled with straw so that I could continue to live in the one made of bricks.
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Coming Next Week:

“In A Pig’s Eye!”