You Bought a Pig?!

Yes, we bought a pig and kept it in the backyard in Southern California along with our chicken coop.  For our one year anniversary, Andrew and I went to San Diego for the weekend.  We saw Blake Shelton in concert, hung out in San Diego, and bought a pig.  Before we went home that Sunday morning, we drove to a little farm in the outskirts of San Diego.  When we got there, we were expecting to find these tiny little pigs that you could hold.  At least I was.  Andrew might tell you differently.  Anyway, the lady brought us to where the pigs were kept and said, “Well, you might have a hard time catching them.  We haven’t really handled them at all, so they aren’t tame.” Uhhh how were we supposed to respond to this?  Andrew immediately said, “No problem.” While I was over there thinking, “No problem?! Are you out of your mind?!” Next thing I know, Andrew is in the pen chasing the piglets around.  By the time he finally caught the one we wanted, his jeans and t-shirt were covered in mud.  I could not stop laughing standing there watching him “mud wrestle” these pigs.  Clearly, I wasn’t going to be able to cuddle him the whole way home like I had planned, so the lady let us have a milk crate to put him in and we drove home.

When we got home, Andrew’s dad thought we were absolutely nuts.  First chickens and now a pig in the backyard of a home in the suburbs of Southern California. If our friends didn’t think we were nuts after the chickens, they for sure thought we were insane now, especially because he wasn’t tame!  We bought a wild pig that would not even let you pet it.  The first mistake we made was not building the pig pen before we brought him home.  Andrew quickly built a makeshift pig pen and we sat out there for hours trying to get Duke to warm up to us.

Andrew is a lot better with animals than I am. He is patient and can read them.  If they let me pet them, then I instantly want to pick them up and we’re quickly back at square one.  Sooo naturally, Duke warmed up to Andrew a lot quicker than he did to me.  One of our favorite things was to feed him bananas because he was so cute when he ate.   Before too long, Duke loved to be petted and would follow Andrew around the backyard.  He also tried to befriend the chickens but they didn’t want anything to do with him.

Since the chickens didn’t want anything to do with him, Andrew and I started to think maybe he was lonely.  One day, we went to the feed store to pick up some chicken feed and we started talking to the lady working there about Duke.  The lady behind us in line quickly chimed in and asked if we were looking for another one.  We said, “Well we do think our pig might be a little lonely.”  She told us that she had this mini pig that weighed 30 pounds, he was really friendly, and needed a home because she didn’t have the time.  Oh and did I mention it was supposedly from the same breeder as Kim Kardashian’s pig.  We decided to go pick up Sampson and get Duke a friend.

When we got to this lady’s house and saw Sampson he was not even close to a mini pig.  He was an 80lb wart hog.  She also told us that he had no problem being walked on a leash.  That hog dragged me around the yard until we finally got him in the truck.  When we got him home, he squealed way louder than Duke ever did.  His squeals were blood curdling.  Andrew’s dad  came out of the house in a panic.  He was not a fan of Sampson and did not believe for one second he was a mini pig.  When we introduced him to Duke, he instantly started bullying him and tried to bite him a couple of times.  Duke was young and cute and just wanted to be friends and here was this massive wart hog that did not want anything to do with him.  So, we ended up putting him back in the truck fifteen minutes later and bringing him back to his home, but this time he was in a crate and we were not going to try to put him back on the leash.  His crate was so heavy we had to put it in a wheel barrow to bring him back to his pen.  When we got back to the house, we went to tell Andrew’s dad that we returned Sampson.  We found him sitting in his room in the dark with the tv and lights off, still traumatized by the hog.

Obviously, we decided it would be best if Duke didn’t have a friend and it all worked out because not too long after that we decided we were going to get married and move to Arkansas, which meant we had to find a new home for Duke.  We were really sad but knew that we would have to rent when we first moved out there and it was already hard enough trying to find a rental that would except two hundred pound labs.  Luckily, this family in the town next to us adopted Duke and he became best friends with their bulldog.  Latest we’ve heard is he has become the neighborhood ham.

Moral of the story: Just like people don’t just give away good dogs, they don’t give away good pigs, unless his name is Duke and they can’t take him with them when they move.