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Life lessons learned in the Pig Incident

SOME of you, raised in the city or its surroundings and jaded by the monotony of office work, no doubt dream of one day leaving the trappings of urban life behind and retiring to the country - maybe even of running a small farm.

SOME of you, raised in the city or its surroundings and jaded by the monotony of office work, no doubt dream of one day leaving the trappings of urban life behind and retiring to the country - maybe even of running a small farm. This column is intended to shatter those dreams specifically as they relate to pigs.

Until I was 18 years old, my understanding of rural life was based almost exclusively on what I'd learnt in children's books: On a working farm, all the animals are friends; they smile more or less constantly; they have interesting textures similar to felt; and none of them, on the surface at least, wants you dead.

I was forced to revisit this understanding shortly after I left my home, when my mother, presumably seeking a ready substitute for her son, decided to invest in pigs.

Unlike the fuzzy do-gooders I remembered from storybooks, which were pink and friendly and smaller than a car, the pigs my mother invested in were of a breed called Tamworths, and looked like they had been bred by orcs.

I've been accused on occasion of exaggeration, so I'm going to venture for a moment here in to fact. The boar, called Nuff - named for the last sound you would hear if it ever caught you - was fully eight feet in length, four feet in height and 800 pounds. Nuff also had sizeable, functional tusks, giving it the overall appearance of a short-tempered forklift, except with longer hair and beadier, more murderous eyes.

It wasn't an animal one would easily associate with breakfast meats. There's something about watching a creature the size of four linebackers grafted together standing in filth and tearing apart a full-grown tree to find larva that makes eating it seem like a low priority.

Anyway, to the point.

One summer day after my first year away, my mother and I arrived at the house to find it had been burgled. Or at least we assumed it had been burgled until we noticed certain telltale signs - evidence of a violent dislike of houseplants, an unusually high interest in dry dog food and a propensity for leaving pig droppings on the floor - that were atypical of thieves.

One of the pigs, we decided, must have somehow broken out of its enclosure, had itself a time in the house and then taken off. The result was messy, but it didn't seem like an espeically serious problem - until, that is, I made my way down the hallway to check the rest of the house.

The spare room was fine, it seemed, but the door to the master bedroom wouldn't move. I tried a second time, and was surprised and dismayed to hear a sound on the other side very similar to a medium-sized dinosaur asking a question:

"Ghrarrr?" it asked. I recognized that voice. "Nuff," I said.

Before I go into what happened next, a note on animal

intelligence:

It's widely accepted that pigs are smart, and although I'll concede they're reasonably astute for something made of ham, by human standards, they're not especially on the ball. Given that all of their mental activity - thoughts, aspirations, a curious disprespect for houseplants - are packed into a space the size of a doughnut hole, they can do some impressive things, but none would really attract the same praise coming from a member of our species ("Our son found and ate a bucket of kitchen waste. I think he's going to be a surgeon."). Even relatively simple activites can be beyond them - such as, it turns out, getting out of a bedroom in a normal, reasonable way.

Seeing that the door opened inwards, I tried reasoning with Nuff, suggesting it move backwards to give the door room to open. The pig made it clear that it disagreed with this approach.

Instead, it chose to rip not only the door but the doorframe out of the wall and charge like a shrieking pork freight train into the main body of the house where, lacking any better plan, it set to going berserk.

It was hands down the scariest thing I've ever seen an 800-pound pig do in a living room.

Eventually, tiring of the movement and apparently satisfied that the houseplants had again been appropriately subdued, Nuff came to a standstill and got going on a few minutes of glaring. The job now was to get it out.

Here's a curious fact about pigs and front steps: It turns out they can only go up them, as going down would break their legs, which they don't like.

With a lot of coaxing and more than a little dry dog food, however, we managed to get Nuff to kind of kneel its way down the stairs to freedom.

With a placid Godzilla-like sound that I interpreted as "thank you," (or something you, anyway) it took itself back to its pen, where, presumably, its adventures in the house faded quickly from its cerebral doughnut hole. They have yet to fade from mine.

I don't know what I'll do with my retirement, but given that dying isn't near the top of the list, farming won't likely figure prominently in the plan.

Something worth bearing in mind.