"Pigs, they tend to wiggle while they walk." -Pavement

It was a snowy day in February when we acquired our two little piggies.  We drove all the way to the Key Peninsula to retrieve them.  The family that bred them had the parents on site along with several other piglets and sows from the previous year.  The boar must have been 700 pounds and the mama sow not far behind that.  They were the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

The piglets were kept apart from the adult pigs.  There were three red and two pinks.  The lady who bred the pigs got into the pen with her son in order to try to catch the pigs.  The pen was filled with muck and the smell of poop was powerful.  I thought to myself, "How could these people have such a dirty and dung filled pen?  It might be alright for other people's pigs to live that way but not mine."  Boy was I wrong about that.

The mother and son cornered a piglet but it escaped.  At one point, the son dove for the pig linebacker style, landing violently in the mud.  Eventually, the pigs were caught and dropped into a dog carrier where they proceed to squeal bloody murder the entire hour ride home.  By the time we released them into their pen, they had crapped themselves big time and laying in their filth.

This was our introduction to pig rearing.

Eventually, we grew to love Lenny and Squiggy.  We fed them all of our kitchen scraps including chicken bones and rancid coconut milk.  We rotated their pen every week or so and the pigs rooted up our vegetable patch and manured it.  They saved us a lot of work breaking up the sod.  Not only that, the plants grown in the former pen areas are markedly bigger than those grown in non-pigged areas.

It has been amazing to see how these beasts have grown.  They were twenty-five pounds when we got them and by the time they are slaughtered, they should be well over two-hundred.  Lenny is longer and the boss pig but Squiggy is wider and stockier.  I know that you shouldn't have a favorite pig but Squiggy is by far the better pig.  He has a kind disposition that is quite charming.  It's not that I have serious animus towards Lenny, it's just that Lenny, has on occasion tried to mount Squiggy, who happens to be his brother.

Lenny, would be pig f-er.