When someone comes into my house it doesn’t take long for them to ask, “Who’s the pig fanatic?” or “What’s with all the pigs?” I estimate that there’s 200 different pig-themed items around the house. I have pig-themed art, tools, books, clothing, kitchen utensils, mugs, table settings, banks, flower planters, wind-chimes, refrigerator magnets, and figurines. If you reach for a flashlight, it’s shaped like a pig. If you lift off the shower cap from the wall it was hanging on a pig head. I have pig slippers and a costume rubber pig nose. I have dozens of pig-themed bracelets and pins. I have pig-shaped corn cob holders. If you are in a public area of my house, there are pig things watching you.
I never intended to collect pigs. In my early teens my family went on a vacation to London. We visited the British Museum, we went to the tower of London, we watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but we also went to a county fair on the outskirts of the city. I loved the fair because it was so green, and the horses were so beautiful, and they had these pink piglets of the breed later featured in the movie “Babe.” These tiny porkers were reminiscent of my childhood favorites, Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web” and Piglet from the “Winnie-the-Pooh” series. When we returned to California my brother asked me what I liked best about London. I mentioned that I liked the country fair and I showed him photographs of the pigs and he said sarcastically, “You went to London, England and what you liked were the pigs?!”
For my next birthday he gave me a pig candle with a card that said, “Since you like pigs so much!” There were about thirteen of my high school friends watching me open presents and read cards and they all burst out with, “Oh! You like pigs! You should have told us.” At my next birthday party, everything I got for a present was shaped like or decorated with pigs. The following Christmas, people had noticed I had a shelf of “pig things” and I started to get more presents for my “pig collection.” By the time I went to college, the collection was out of control and since I showed up in my dorm room with pig pens and a Miss Piggy calendar and a pig keychain, I had no hope of coming off as anything but a swinophile, an oinkologist, or a pigmaniac.
For a long time I wasn’t sure I wanted to be associated with a creature typically thought of as dirty, gluttonous, and destined for slaughter. But along with collecting pigs, I started to learn about them. Pigs are the fourth smartest non-human animals on earth after primates, dolphins, and elephants. Pigs can be obsessive about rooting things out using their extremely sensitive noses whether the object of their search is a truffle or a landmine. Pigs can swim. Pigs enjoy music. Pigs are curious and play with toys. Pigs are sensitive and expressive – if they’re happy their tails curl tight; if they are sad or sick, their tails go limp and straight. Pigs are typically covered with mud not because they lack a sense of hygiene but because they wallow in mud to cool their sensitive skin and protect themselves from parasites, much as we might slather on sunscreen or bug repellant. You cannot be “sweating like a pig” because pigs don’t sweat. Pigs, unlike a lot of animals, prefer to defecate away from where they eat and live. Pigs are omnivores but they do not overeat. They are simply “made to be meaty” when they are healthy. The more I knew about pigs, the more akin to them I felt.
But it was at the Kern County Fair one year that I truly bonded with the nature of swine. It was pig judging time and I was sitting in the stands watching 4-H kids move their hogs around before the judge. Vision and cooperation are not a hog’s strong points so to get the beasts to turn the swineherds had to use wide boards with a handle. The pig would plod along and then the youth would plant this board down directly in their path, and make a corner out of it with another board, putting up impassable walls in front of the boar or sow and leaving them only one direction to turn (swine do not go in reverse well). So, resignedly, the porcine creature would turn and waddle in the direction indicated, while its handler ran around it and set up the barriers to turn it in the next direction they wanted their prize porker to go. And then it dawned on me: that’s how God sometimes has to direct me. I get so fixated on going forward that the only way for Him to divert me in a different direction is to put up these barriers, these hardships, these disasters, these losses in my life so that when faced with “dead ends” ahead and to the side I blunder on in the only direction left open to me. I’m one of God’s pigs. Smart, social, curious but built for practicality, not for style. I require spiritual whacking with a cane (“thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me”) or “direction by limited options” to get me where God wants me to be.
Pig anatomy is similar to humans in the arrangement of their internal organs. Nearly every part of a pig can be used for some pharmaceutical purpose which is why we have pig insulin, pig thyroxin, and pig heart valves inside lots of humans today. Not to mention the delicious array of pork products (the other white meat) digesting inside a large portion of the population. I had the most delicious bacon-wrapped dates at my niece’s wedding and was told by the caterers they were called “baby fingers.” Is it any wonder that the oldest known domesticated farm animal was the pig?
What perversity on our part has allowed us to make the term “pig” an insult? Sir Winston Churchill once said, “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Harry Truman was quoted as saying, “No man should be allowed to be President who does not understand hogs.” So whether God knew I was a piggy at heart and allowed the pig collection to develop around me or whether being surrounded by pigs has influenced my approach to life is hard to say. But I do hope the Mama Pig Cookie Jar holding two piglets survives me. It’s where I’ve told the kids to stash my ashes.
I never intended to collect pigs. In my early teens my family went on a vacation to London. We visited the British Museum, we went to the tower of London, we watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but we also went to a county fair on the outskirts of the city. I loved the fair because it was so green, and the horses were so beautiful, and they had these pink piglets of the breed later featured in the movie “Babe.” These tiny porkers were reminiscent of my childhood favorites, Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web” and Piglet from the “Winnie-the-Pooh” series. When we returned to California my brother asked me what I liked best about London. I mentioned that I liked the country fair and I showed him photographs of the pigs and he said sarcastically, “You went to London, England and what you liked were the pigs?!”
For my next birthday he gave me a pig candle with a card that said, “Since you like pigs so much!” There were about thirteen of my high school friends watching me open presents and read cards and they all burst out with, “Oh! You like pigs! You should have told us.” At my next birthday party, everything I got for a present was shaped like or decorated with pigs. The following Christmas, people had noticed I had a shelf of “pig things” and I started to get more presents for my “pig collection.” By the time I went to college, the collection was out of control and since I showed up in my dorm room with pig pens and a Miss Piggy calendar and a pig keychain, I had no hope of coming off as anything but a swinophile, an oinkologist, or a pigmaniac.
For a long time I wasn’t sure I wanted to be associated with a creature typically thought of as dirty, gluttonous, and destined for slaughter. But along with collecting pigs, I started to learn about them. Pigs are the fourth smartest non-human animals on earth after primates, dolphins, and elephants. Pigs can be obsessive about rooting things out using their extremely sensitive noses whether the object of their search is a truffle or a landmine. Pigs can swim. Pigs enjoy music. Pigs are curious and play with toys. Pigs are sensitive and expressive – if they’re happy their tails curl tight; if they are sad or sick, their tails go limp and straight. Pigs are typically covered with mud not because they lack a sense of hygiene but because they wallow in mud to cool their sensitive skin and protect themselves from parasites, much as we might slather on sunscreen or bug repellant. You cannot be “sweating like a pig” because pigs don’t sweat. Pigs, unlike a lot of animals, prefer to defecate away from where they eat and live. Pigs are omnivores but they do not overeat. They are simply “made to be meaty” when they are healthy. The more I knew about pigs, the more akin to them I felt.
But it was at the Kern County Fair one year that I truly bonded with the nature of swine. It was pig judging time and I was sitting in the stands watching 4-H kids move their hogs around before the judge. Vision and cooperation are not a hog’s strong points so to get the beasts to turn the swineherds had to use wide boards with a handle. The pig would plod along and then the youth would plant this board down directly in their path, and make a corner out of it with another board, putting up impassable walls in front of the boar or sow and leaving them only one direction to turn (swine do not go in reverse well). So, resignedly, the porcine creature would turn and waddle in the direction indicated, while its handler ran around it and set up the barriers to turn it in the next direction they wanted their prize porker to go. And then it dawned on me: that’s how God sometimes has to direct me. I get so fixated on going forward that the only way for Him to divert me in a different direction is to put up these barriers, these hardships, these disasters, these losses in my life so that when faced with “dead ends” ahead and to the side I blunder on in the only direction left open to me. I’m one of God’s pigs. Smart, social, curious but built for practicality, not for style. I require spiritual whacking with a cane (“thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me”) or “direction by limited options” to get me where God wants me to be.
Pig anatomy is similar to humans in the arrangement of their internal organs. Nearly every part of a pig can be used for some pharmaceutical purpose which is why we have pig insulin, pig thyroxin, and pig heart valves inside lots of humans today. Not to mention the delicious array of pork products (the other white meat) digesting inside a large portion of the population. I had the most delicious bacon-wrapped dates at my niece’s wedding and was told by the caterers they were called “baby fingers.” Is it any wonder that the oldest known domesticated farm animal was the pig?
What perversity on our part has allowed us to make the term “pig” an insult? Sir Winston Churchill once said, “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Harry Truman was quoted as saying, “No man should be allowed to be President who does not understand hogs.” So whether God knew I was a piggy at heart and allowed the pig collection to develop around me or whether being surrounded by pigs has influenced my approach to life is hard to say. But I do hope the Mama Pig Cookie Jar holding two piglets survives me. It’s where I’ve told the kids to stash my ashes.
I love your pig story! See, maybe collecting pigs isn't a bad thing. Plus they're fun to look for.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you could always amend that you like to collect, say, cows. Then everybody could get your pigs AND cows! And there'd be no room left in your house! :-)