Houdini hog rides again
It was supposed to be summer’s last hurrah. The calm after the storm, after the civil defence warnings, after the floodwaters receded and the roads reopened.
We trundled off to the beach last weekend armed with fishing rods, a berley bucket, novels and iPads, gumboots and raincoats, and enough chocolate for a four-day feast. But I’d barely bitten into my first marshmallow egg when news came via social media of a localised outbreak of swine flu: at home, one of my pigs was going viral.
At nine minutes past midnight on Easter Saturday, my cream-coloured kunekune appeared on our rural community’s Facebook page. There he was, in flagrante delicto, snapped in the middle of the road, his snout in someone’s else’s garbage bag.
By the next morning, our Houdini hog’s fame had spread through the three valleys of Ararimu, Hunua and Paparimu and onto the wider Franklin Grapevine page. ’’Is that your pig?’’ friends kept asking as news of his shenanagins filtered in via text, messenger, phone and email.
Our peripatetic porker had been seen loitering with intent. He was locked in a cow cocky’s paddock up the road. He’d escaped again. He was on the run. He was sunbathing by our front gate. He was a traffic hazard. He was, by all accounts, having a great old time which is more than I could say for my husband, who was threatening to blow his foo-foo valve from afar.
Said Winston Churchill, ‘‘I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.’’ But my husband does not like pigs. (To be fair, he is equally annoyed by my cats.)
Five years ago I came home with a pair of cute kunekune piglets. I named them Apple Sauce and Plum Chutney – or as my husband prefers to call them, Fat and Useless – and they live in our organic apple orchard, where their main job is to keep the codling moth larvae, and the grass, under control.
American food activist, author and holistic farmer Joel Salatin describes pigs as the ultimate salvage operators. On our farm, they are fungus fighters, helpfully hoovering up blight-stricken tomatoes and peaches with brown rot before the spores can spread. They’re also partial to the occasional bucket of salty snails, courgettes with blossom end rot, overblown brassicas and overgrown gherkins. Plus when we roast a chicken, they get the scraps (when we eat pork, our chooks return the favour).
My pigs are curious, companionable, smart and sociable. Apple Sauce is the friendlier of the two – he follows me around like a dog, loves a good scratch behind the ears and lets the kids ride him. His sister, Plum Chutney, largely keeps her own counsel.
Plum Chutney will come when called for a bucket of crabapples but she’s never shown any interest in the outside world, whereas last weekend Apple Sauce went walkabout. First, he busted out of our fully fenced orchard. Then he somehow defied the laws of physics to propel himself through the wires around our fully fenced house paddock. Then he limboed under the lowest rails of the cattleyards by our haybarn and hit the road.
When you live in the country, escape-artist animals are a surefire way to ruin good neighbourly relations, and no one has been backwards in coming forward with containment ideas. Get him one of those electric dog collars, said Heather. (I suspect his neck is too fat.) Pork sausages, said Greg. A low electric fence, said Alison. Just let me shoot it, said my husband.
‘‘Why would you want to keep a kunekune?’’ asked Waikato free-range pig farmer Jono Walker. ‘‘Get a proper pig. And if it escapes, eat it.’’
At Soggy Bottom Holdings, Jono raises heritage-breed Tamworth and Wessex Saddleback pigs and sells his pork at the Hamilton and Cambridge Farmers’ Markets. He says tight sheep netting and a single electric hotwire keeps most pigs in most of the time. ‘‘Or, if a pig can’t see through a fence, if it’s made from corrugated iron, for instance, it’ll have no interest in trying to push through it. Otherwise it’ll spend all day looking for a weak point in the perimeter.’’
Nadene Hall, a lifestyle magazine editor, was violently pragmatic: ‘‘Get a portable electric fencing unit. It needs to be one with a good kick, so use an old car battery instead of D-sized batteries. They learn VERY quickly.’’
In the meantime, Apple Sauce remains in solitary confinement in our old chook run. But when he does return to the orchard, he’s in for a rude shock.
No one was backwards in coming forward with containment ideas. Get him one of those electric dog collars, said Heather. (I suspect his neck is too fat.) Pork sausages, said Greg. A low electric fence, said Alison.