The Good Good Pig Read online

  Some pigs are so smart that people have been known to flock from miles around to witness their wisdom. In the late 1700s, a Scottish shoemaker trained a black pig, touted as the “Pig of Knowledge,” to perform amazing acts onstage. The pig, said his manager, could spell, tell time, solve math problems, read flash cards, and even read people’s minds—spelling out his findings by pointing to letters with his snout. He probably achieved this feat in the same manner as Clever Hans, a horse who actually couldn’t solve math problems as advertised, but who could read exceptionally subtle and, in fact, subconscious cues from his beloved owner to give the correct answers. The pig performed in England (often along with a rabbit who beat a drum and a turtle who was trained to fetch), and when he died, his obituary made the Daily Universal Register, the daily newspaper of record at the time. The obit claimed this pig had earned more money than any other performer—human or animal—living at the time. In 1797, another Pig of Knowledge appeared on the American stage, and thus began a rage for porcine performers. Pigs toured the country in acrobatic troupes and circuses; they exhibited their brilliance at taverns and wagon stands. They lifted handbells with their mouths to play “Home Sweet Home”; striking wands on the xylophone, they beat out the tunes for “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “God Save the Queen.”

  But the porcine intellect shines most brilliantly when applied to pigs’ own projects. In her book Animals in Translation, autistic savant Temple Grandin, a woman who has applied her considerable talents to the design of humane slaughterhouses, writes of pigs on large farms who are fed one at a time inside small, electronically controlled feeding pens. These pigs wear collars with electronic tags read by a scanner, which in turn opens a gate and then closes it so no other pigs can get in. Once inside the pen, the pig has to put its head close to the trough, where another electronic scanner reads the ID and dispenses the food. A number of pigs have figured out this system, she reports. When they find a loose collar lying on the ground, they pick it up and carry it over to the pen and use it to get inside—just like a person uses an electronic pass at a tollbooth or a token to enter the subway.

  But equally astonishing is the behavior of the pigs who hadn’t figured out the scanning system. These pigs, as the author put it, develop “superstitions” about the feeding trough. They act like baseball players, who are known to perform all sorts of gyrations for good luck before going to bat or throwing a pitch. Some of the pigs “walk over to the feeder and go inside when the door opens, then approach the feed trough and start doing some purposeful behavior like repeatedly stomping their feet on the ground. Obviously,” Grandin concludes, “they had food delivered a couple of times when they happened to be stomping their feet, and they’d concluded it was the foot stomping that got them food.” To link correlations as cause and effect (even incorrectly, as is the case with much of medicine) is considered a very sophisticated intellectual ability—one that many scientists would prefer to claim animals don’t possess.

  But those of us who pay attention to animals know better. The New England writer Noel Perrin (best known for his wonderful First Person Rural and its sequels) once had a gifted pig whose intelligence found release in art. Perrin had built a low pig house for the animal to provide shade in an outdoor pen, and as a special touch had covered it in shingles. On the first day he presented the structure to the pig, Perrin returned to the pig house in the afternoon to find that the pig had pulled off every one of the shingles. He had carried them some distance away from the house and carefully arranged them on the ground in a pattern that the pig apparently found aesthetically pleasing.

  But in Christopher Hogwood’s case, it appeared his great talent was not for art but for exploration.

  On the phone, at the post office, in the Cash Market, we would get reports of his travels around town. He’d been to visit the family across the street. He’d gone around the corner by the old railroad trestle and visited the beavers at Moose Brook. He traveled to the state highway to see the folks who owned the Cash Market and lived around the corner. Sometimes people would be out jogging or walking their dogs, find our pig along the road, and bring him back to his pen—and we wouldn’t find out until days later.

  What was remarkable was not how far he traveled—he never seemed to go more than a quarter mile from our house—but how many people he met, and the indelible impression he always made. Unlike me, Christopher was a naturally gregarious soul who made friends easily. On his jaunts, he became an ambassador of our barnyard. I enjoyed his reflected popularity. Even when he caused trouble, people almost invariably liked him.

  One misty morning in early fall, Christopher managed to delay our local representative to the New Hampshire legislature on her way to the statehouse in Concord. Eleanor Amidon, the stately part-time organist for our church, was halfway down her long dirt driveway in her car when a pair of tall, hairy ears hove into view. Looking over the hood of her station wagon, she realized her driveway was blocked by a black-and-white spotted pig.

  She was not intimidated—her father had once tried farming pigs in North Leominster, Massachusetts, though he switched back to cattle when he realized how easily pigs escaped. But Eleanor was a lady of a certain age, dressed in her navy blue blazer, blue pumps, and nylons, and about to be late for an appointment. She did what any reasonable, well-dressed professional woman does when confronted with a problem pig: she backed up the car and yelled for her husband.

  Dick Amidon, recently retired from his post as chief of staff for the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, was as well known in town as his wife. He was moderator of our annual town meeting, the spring gathering at which all our registered voters mass at the firehouse to vote on every cent to be spent that year on town business, and he was also moderator at our Congregational church. Dick was now earning a living as a private consultant, working out of their home—and thus dressed to deal with a pig. As he came out the door, Chris moved out of the driveway and advanced toward his goal: the Amidons’ lettuce garden.

  Of their several gardens, the Amidons’ lettuce patch is the one closest to the house—strategically placed so that Eleanor and Dick could enjoy their fresh-picked produce within seconds of plucking it from the ground. Christopher Hogwood apparently had the same idea. When I came up the driveway looking for him, I found Dick with his arms wrapped around the pig’s head, trying to steer him away from the lettuce. Chris was grumbling at him loudly.

  “You’ve got to be careful with pigs, you know,” Dick told me later. “They can be pretty fierce. But not Christopher. There’s not a vicious bone in his body.”

  Many animals, understandably, bite you if you stand between them and food. Christopher wanted that lettuce. I was very impressed that under these circumstances, Christopher was not even trying to bite my neighbor.

  So was Dick. “You know, I thought about it later, Sy, and it dawned on me why he and I got along so well,” he mused. Dick and Eleanor used to be quite active in the Republican party, but Dick later switched his allegiance to the Libertarians. “If there’s ever been an example of a Libertarian pig, that’s Christopher,” he said. “He’s his own person, he doesn’t want overregulation—all the things that Libertarians look for. He’s a free spirit.”

  That he was. One time Howard looked out the upstairs window from the spare bedroom he uses as his office. “Ah, there goes so-and-so,” he thought, noting a passing jogger. “There goes such-and-such in her car…. There goes Chris.”

  Wait! Chris?

  We both ran outside.

  EARLY IN OUR CAREERS AS SWINEHERDS, WE THOUGHT ABOUT building a fence for our pig. But fencing swine is notoriously difficult—a fence must be very strong indeed to keep a pig from pushing it down or excavating beneath it. But again, Gretchen came to our rescue. She had just the thing. She showed up one day with a small section of electric mesh fencing, eighty feet of it, just as a demo. “This,” she promised confidently, “will solve all your problems.”

  Unlike the stra
nd or two of electric wire used to fence horses, electric mesh ensures the pig can’t dig under or leap over the fencing, she said. Pigs quickly learn to respect the boundaries from the first electric shock they receive on touching it. Because the fencing is so easy to set up, it’s also easy to expand the pigpen and move it around to afford fresh pasture whenever needed.

  “Will it hurt him?” I asked dubiously. “I don’t want to even try it if it might hurt him.”

  “No,” she assured me as she set up the fence to form a little corral outside the barn. “It won’t hurt him at all. He’ll touch it with his nose and get a tiny shock, and he’ll back off right away.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’ll figure it out immediately,” Gretchen said as she set up the electric charger. “I’ve never known an animal not to. Don’t worry. You’ll see. Watch.”

  She plugged the extension cord into the socket. I opened Christopher’s gate and stepped over the three-foot-tall fencing to the other side.

  Chris ran right over to greet us, hit the electric fence with his sensitive nose, and shrieked in pain.

  He did not stop shrieking. Nor did he back off. He pushed harder and harder at the fence, using his too-big spotted head as a battering ram against the pain. His screams undulated in frequency, in time with the pulse of the current: “Ree! Ree! Ree!…Ree! Ree! Ree!”

  I joined in immediately. “Stop! Stop! Stop!…Pull the Plug!” For those few seconds—which felt to me like many minutes—Chris and I could have drowned out a jackhammer. The neighbors must have decided that an ax murderer in our yard was butchering us both.

  Gretchen unplugged the extension cord. Chris was fine, if a bit dazed, but I was a wreck.

  “Oh, dear,” said Gretchen, “I guess that’s not going to work after all.”

  Some species simply cannot walk backward—nine-banded armadillos, for example, can hop backward but not walk. But this is not the case with pigs. Nor was Chris’s reaction due to a failure of intellect. But what had happened gave me an important insight into the emotional life of this strange little barrel-shaped, cloven-hoofed creature who had transformed us from a couple to a family.

  Now I understood what it means to be pig headed.

  Christopher Hogwood was a creature of his convictions. When he wanted something, he went, well, whole hog. And what he wanted—whether it was us, or beer, or simply freedom—was on the other side of that fence.

  I KNOW THE ALLURE OF THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE. I ONCE spent six months in a state of almost perfect freedom, on the other side of the world, living in a condition that Howard considered “feral.”

  After I graduated from college and had worked for five years at the Courier-News, my father gave me the gift of a ticket to Australia. I decided to join an Earthwatch expedition—becoming a paying layman working with scientists—assisting with a Chicago Zoological Society study of the habitat of the rare southern hairy-nosed wombat in the scrub desert of South Australia. I loved it so much that the principal investigator, biologist Pamela Parker, offered me a chance to conduct my own studies there. She couldn’t pay me or cover my airfare, but she would let me eat for free. I quit my newspaper job and moved to a tent in the outback.

  When I arrived, I didn’t know what I would study. But one day, as I was alone collecting plant samples for another researcher, I looked up and saw three flightless, four-foot-tall, ostrichlike birds curiously approaching me, less than fifteen yards away. Emus. It was love at first sight.

  They could have killed me. With their strong legs, emus can run forty miles an hour and sever fencing wire with a single kick. But incredibly—even though they are more closely related to dinosaurs than to people, even though I had nothing to offer them—these giant birds tolerated my company. They let me follow them. I was able to find them day after day, eventually walking beside them at a distance of only a few feet, recording their every move. No one had ever done this before.

  Each observation was a revelation: each choice of berry or seed, each posture of their black periscope necks, each time one combed a feather through its beak to preen. I tried to see the outback through the emus’ mahogany eyes, their vision forty times more acute than my own. I felt my senses come alive. Soon I was so hooked I didn’t even want to leave the emus long enough to take the weekly trip to shower at the nearest town.

  I had gone wild, and I am sure I looked it. So that the birds would recognize me, I made a point of wearing the same clothes every day: my father’s Army jacket, the shirt I’d slept in, my blue jeans, a red bandana. There were no mirrors in camp, and I forgot to brush my hair for so long that I developed a giant mat in the back like you’d find in the fur of a stray dog. But as I wandered through the emus’ stark desert world with my runny nose and filthy clothes and matted hair, I felt whole, even beautiful, for the first time in my life.

  Not that I wasn’t sometimes lonely. I was acutely aware that Howard, the ferrets and the lovebirds, my parents, and my friends were halfway around the world. My day was their night, and my winter their summer. We even slept beneath different stars. But, far away from everything I knew, I felt cleansed and open. I was hungry to fill my emptied soul with the dramas of this new place: its parched orange soil, its thorny acacias, and the lives of the alien creatures with whom I had fallen deeply and passionately in love.

  When I left the emus, I wept for days. This was the story of my life: I was always leaving. Unlike Howard, who had lived in the same house on Long Island since the day his parents brought him home from Huntington Hospital, I didn’t know what it was like to belong to one place. I had not even been born in this country, but in Germany, where my father was stationed at Frankfurt. The longest my family had stayed anywhere was Quarters 225, Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York—a house my parents didn’t own—for just over four years. Even after my father retired from the military, we kept moving—New Jersey, Virginia, then back to Jersey again—as he shifted jobs in the shipping business. No wonder all my childhood pets had never been bigger than Molly, the Scottish terrier with whom I grew up like a sister. Everyone had to be portable. Never had I been rooted enough to commit to a really large animal.

  I loved travel, I loved exploring, and I loved wildness. But now, in Hancock, with a pig in the barn, I would find the other piece of my heart’s lifelong yearning: home.

  HOWARD AND I GAVE UP ON THE FENCE FOR CHRISTOPHER. Instead, we fitted him with a harness devised for a small dog—which we later traded for one for a medium dog and then one for a large dog. We hooked him up to a tether at the edge of the woods in back of what was once a chicken shack and now a little studio. We called the area the Pig Plateau. Tied to an ash tree, stretching twenty feet long, the tether afforded Christopher access to both shade and sun, grass and brush. The location even featured a nice mud wallow in a seep from Moose Brook. Here, Christopher could root to his heart’s content. The whole area quickly came to resemble Vietnam after the Tet offensive.

  Chris seemed to like the tether arrangement. He liked his yard. He also liked wrapping the rope around a tree in such a way as to create the precise combination of pressure and tension that would release the metal clasp from his harness and allow him to run free.

  LOOSE PIGS WERE SOMETHING ALL AMERICANS KNEW ABOUT A couple of hundred years ago, and not just in the country. New York’s financial district was named for the long, permanent wall erected in 1652 to restrict the travels of lower Manhattan’s free-roaming hogs, along which Wall Street was later built. Loose swine were once a part of every American city. Pigs grew fat for the dinner table while cleaning public spaces of garbage. Pretty much everyone liked it until the pigs got bossy and began to crowd people off the sidewalks.

  In the early days of our village, “for many years the settlers permitted their swine to run at large,” reports The History of Hancock, New Hampshire, 1764–1889. “That the swine of those days had unusual privileges granted them, the following incident in the life of Moses Dennis, Sr., will show,” writes the au
thor William Willis Hayward. “It was his duty one year to serve the notices of the annual training. In the discharge of it, as he was entering one of the log cabins, which being without windows was somewhat dark, he suddenly found himself most unceremoniously caught up and carried out backwards, and as unceremoniously set down. He was so taken by surprise that at first he could not comprehend the meaning of his strange reception. He soon discovered that a hog in the house had been frightened by his entrance and in his haste to escape, ran between his legs (which were very short ones), caught him up and deposited him as before stated.”

  By 1786, though, things changed. That year, an important new office was instituted in our village: the post of hog reeve. At that time, just about every settlement of any size had at least one hog reeve—a sort of sheriff whose duty it was to capture and corral troublemaking hogs. Ten years later, Hancock, with a human population of just over six hundred, needed no fewer than six hog reeves to keep local pigs under control.

  Alas, by the time Christopher arrived in Hancock, the office of hog reeve had long since been retired. But, happily, we had Ed Coughlan. Ed was our police chief. For eleven years, he was Hancock’s only full-time cop.

  Ed was well suited to the task. He was a local guy—he had worked as a small-equipment operator for the state highway department, and raised a family in town with his pretty, blue-eyed wife. With his boyish straight brown bangs, soulful blue eyes, and gentle, modest manner, he had none of the “Step aside, I’m in charge here” brusqueness that police academies seemed to train for. True, he’d had to go to the police academy in Concord for twelve weeks once he was promoted to chief—but most of the job, he said, was “just plain common sense. I have plenty of that,” he told me one day. “I just don’t have any other kind.”