Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508210007
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEVE KARK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I'd read a lot in the paper about folks keeping pigs as pets, and, for the life of me, I couldn't imagine why.
Anyway, I figured who'd be better qualified to answer my questions than the boys over at the livestock market?
Despite the sticky heat last Saturday, the place was bustling with activity. Two hours before the auction began, 90-year-old Clinton Foster backed his cattle truck up against a chute and stood at the side of his truck, prodding his cows through the wooden slats of the trailer.
My neighbor, Bob, a cattleman himself, told me that Foster used to be one of the major hog producers in the area. He made the proper introductions.
"Pigs, huh?" said Foster as he rubbed his chin. "Well, I haven't met one yet I'd care to spend much time with. Pigs is pigs. You take a pig and try to get him to go somewhere he doesn't want to go, he'll just go where he wants. Not like cows. They're easier to handle."
That seemed obvious enough to a greenhorn like me: Pigs are pig-headed after all. I suppose that's where the expression comes from. Foster went back to unloading his cows, and we went looking for more opinions.
Next we went to an office above the holding pens, where Glen Watson, a state livestock inspector, leaned back in a chair and shot the breeze with two men in bib overalls. All three did a little doubletake when I told them the reason for my visit. Then they gave it some serious thought.
"I'll tell you what," said Watson, "I can't see where a pig would be much worse than some of those big dogs people keep. I mean, a pig won't chew up a kid like one of those dogs have been known to do. They don't bark an' keep you up at night, and I hear they use 'em in England to sniff out mushrooms. And I've heard they've got these drug-sniffing hogs that're just as good as the dogs."
At this point Watson suggested that pigs don't get fleas as bad as dogs do, a point that was roundly debated by the other men in the room. In the end, Watson lost that one. All agreed, though, that pigs have their good and bad points.
For one thing, they decided, given half a chance, pigs will root around through the garden or tear up the flower beds, something a dog does only rarely.
Also, I was told that unlike dogs, there's no such thing as a watchpig. Pigs mostly squeal when they're hungry, they said, so they wouldn't be much good for that line of work.
Watson finished by saying, all things considered, the only good pig was a cooked pig. Nods on that one all around.
Outside, across the road, another group of men sat along a guardrail next to a pickup truck filled with melons for sale.
One of these men, J. L. Morris Jr., told me city folks see these trained pigs on television and they think that is what they are really like.
"They train this little pig to do one trick and folks think that is cute, but they don't think about what happens when that animal grows up and gets too big for the house," he said.
That's what happens when people keep these Vietnamese pigs as pets, said Morris.
To make his point, he told me about a 150-pound Vietnamese potbellied pig someone abandoned near his farm. "Nobody wanted it. That thing hung around for a month before we called the county to come out and get it."
Talking to those men, I got the feeling they felt that keeping pigs as pets was a little silly. On the other hand, as people who place a high value on individual freedoms, they weren't about to tell others how to live their lives.
One man seemed to sum it up for all: "If you want to sit in your own house and watch 'Hee-Haw' with your pig, it don't make no never mind to me."
Indeed.
Steve Kark is an instructor at Virginia Tech and a correspondent for The Roanoke Times' New River Valley bureau. He writes from his home in scenic Rye Hollow, in a remote part of Giles County south of Pearisburg.
by CNB