Esther the Wonder Pig

by Steve Jenkins

  While Derek’s parents were (understandably) baffled, my mom was a little more go-with-the-flow about the whole thing. After years of watching her son fall in love with every animal from here to eternity, it wasn’t all that surprising that one day I’d come home with a pig.

  Derek did insist on one thing: Because I’d brought Esther into our home, most of the responsibility would be mine. Between walking the dogs and cleaning up after them—and cleaning up after me—he’d had enough.

  We were in the kitchen, deciding what we wanted to eat for dinner, when Esther looked up at us sweetly and peed on the floor. Of course I felt guilty the minute she did it, and I knew she didn’t mean to (and Derek knew that too), but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a giant pain in the ass. A few moments passed.

  “You’re going to need to take care of that,” he said. And I planned to, of course, but I hadn’t jumped on it right at that second. I guess I was just taken by surprise.

  “Of course,” I replied, grabbing the paper towels and wiping up the mess.

  “I mean, not just right now,” Derek clarified. “You brought her home without discussing it with me, and if we’re going to keep her, she’s going to be your responsibility.”

  “I get it,” I said, motioning to indicate the fact that I was on my hands and knees. “This is me taking responsibility.”

  “You’ll walk her; you’ll clean up after her; you’ll feed her.”

  I felt like a child being read the rules by Dad before getting my first puppy. It was like I was being given something that could be taken away if I wasn’t a good boy. But that also meant I’d get to keep her if I was a good boy.

  “Okay!” I beamed.

  “Okay,” he said, and for some time after that, I did most of Esther’s caretaking. It was fine with me. If that was all it took to let us keep Esther, I was happy to do it. I’d deal with her messes. And I did pretty well with it.

  But even when Esther was small, housetraining her was difficult, and we soon were going through a metric ton of paper towels. I kept coming up with ideas to keep her contained. First, I found a kids’ playpen for sale (on Kijiji of all places) and bought it. That worked for about a week before it was saturated in urine. So then I moved her into a big dog crate with her little litter box and some blankets to bed down in. It had a plastic base, so it was easier to clean. I tried to keep up on messes before Derek saw them and discreetly hide the evidence deep in the garbage to keep up the impression that I had everything under control. I wanted to show him how incredibly easy and carefree it was to have a tiny piggy. Once we realized we could have wiped out a rain forest with all the paper towels we were using, we adapted and bought reusable, washable towels. Not only was it more cost-effective, but it was also much better for the environment.

  Because Esther was my responsibility, I took her to the vet the first time she went. Doing some online research about toilet training pigs, I stumbled across a pig breeder in Orangeville, a small town about an hour northwest of Georgetown. Their vet talked to me for quite a while about techniques we could try, all of which I felt we had already exhausted. She also said that based on what I was telling her, there was a chance Esther might have kidney stones, apparently a common condition in pigs. This vet referred me to another vet whose practice was just a bit south of Orangeville, in Caledon. Apparently he had a lot of experience with mini pigs, or at least much more experience than our current vet had. I knew pigs were different from cats and dogs, obviously, so I wanted someone who had experience with pigs.

  I loaded Esther into a cat carrier and away we went in my car. She was hidden by the carrier so it was super discreet. Nobody could’ve known she was there. I don’t know who I thought might be looking or why I needed to keep her a secret, but I guess I just didn’t want to make a spectacle. I put her in the middle of the car so I could see her the whole time, and there was her little face, looking back at me, seeming quite happy to go for a ride. I was pretty excited on this first vet trip, because I was so sure he would say, “Yup, she’s got stones. We’ll treat it and your pee problems will be over.” Simple as that. That was my attitude going in that day: complete optimism. This whole pee thing was just a blip. My mini pig will be perfect and barely ever pee anywhere at all.

  Esther was still tiny then, but as soon as the veterinarian saw her, he looked up at me, head cocked, a bemused look on his face.

  “What do you know about this pig?” he asked.

  Huh. That sounded a bit ominous.

  I gave the doctor the story—or at least the story I’d been told.

  “Okay, well, already I see a problem in your story. Look at her tail.”

  I looked at her tail. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be noticing. This was my first foray into pig tails. But I acted like I was examining it nonetheless.

  “Her tail has been ‘docked,’” he said.

  “Is that why it’s a little nub?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” he said. “When you have a commercial pig—that’s a full-size pig—the owners will generally have the pig’s tail cut back substantially. This minimizes tail-biting, a behavior that occurs when pigs are kept deprived in factory farm environments.”

  Well, all of that sounded terrible, but I wasn’t sure what it had to do with Esther or why some monster had cut off her little tail. I wasn’t getting it. And this veterinarian wasn’t necessarily saying it… but it was hanging in the air.

  “If the story your friend told you was true—that Esther really is six months old—she could just be a runt.”

  This threw me.

  “You think she lied?” I asked, trying to wrap my head around the potential deceit. “I know this person.”

  “And I don’t. So you could very well have a runt—”

  Please don’t call my baby girl a runt…

  “—and my suspicions could be over nothing. If that’s the case, when fully grown, she very well could be about seventy pounds.”

  “Okay,” I said. I mean, that’s what I thought she was going to be. No news here.

  “But if not… I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

  The doctor explained that the only way to know anything for sure would be to weigh and measure her and start a growth chart. He said pigs have a very specific rate of growth. He’d be able to compare Esther’s growth to a standard chart and see where she fell. That would give us a better idea of her age and let us keep track of how she grew.

  Over the next couple of months, we got to know Esther and settled into as much of a normal routine as we could. We still found ourselves marveling at the fact that we had a little piglet in the house. People came to visit and we’d laugh as we watched her scurry around or sleep in one of her many positions. Her favorite was having her feet and face buried in the heat vents on the floor. She would pop out the vent cover and literally press herself right into the vent.

  We took her for walks late at night with the dogs. At the time, she was still smaller than both of them, so she could blend in if people on the street didn’t look too closely. People occasionally noticed that we were walking a pig, and they would sometimes stop and ask questions, but most of the time we made it out and back without anything spectacular happening. Walks did prove to be challenging, because all Esther wanted to do was dig up the grass at the edge of the sidewalks—something our dogs never did, as they don’t have that innate desire, so it was a learning curve that involved a lot of pulling on the leash. But we did it. We were handling it. We went for walks as a family and things were under control.

  On our next vet visit, I had to admit, Esther had been growing awfully quickly. Over that short time, she’d started closing in on eighty pounds, which was already in excess of the seventy pounds I’d originally been told her maximum weight would be.

  I had tried to get Esther’s previous vet records—to make sure, among other things, that she’d been spayed—but Amanda had gone radio silent. There was a scar on Esther’s belly that would have been c
onsistent with her having been spayed, but we didn’t have any confirmation. I reached out to Amanda again because it was actually a health concern: If Esther hadn’t been spayed, she could develop tumors later in life. But Amanda dodged my inquiries again, which should have been telling.

  Looking back, Amanda’s intentionally ignoring my texts and emails was a pretty clear-cut indicator that she realized I was catching on: I’d been duped. I tried to reach her a few times, never indicating we were mad or anything, just asking for info about the breeder and trying to confirm whether Esther was spayed. I tried to be optimistic, but in my gut, I knew something was up. I still didn’t honestly believe Esther was a commercial pig, but I knew there was more to the story than I had been told. Of course I downplayed it to Derek, but my wheels were turning. Why was Amanda so easy to reach before I picked Esther up, and now… nothing?

  With no response from Amanda, we had two choices. Cutting Esther open was risky. Pigs are very hard to operate on, because they don’t respond well to general anesthesia. An operation would potentially be nothing more than exploratory surgery, and who wants to cut their baby open? The other option was to wait until she was older and see if she started getting her cycle, which would come with its own challenges. Unspayed pigs go into heat monthly and can become very aggressive. If we waited, she actually could become dangerous to us, and by that time surgery would be even more dangerous to her. Pigs get fatty as they develop, and at that point the risk of accidentally cutting an artery or a vein becomes higher. And if that happens, it can be hard to locate the source of the bleeding, and she could bleed out.

  There were risks either way. It was a phenomenally hard decision, and we struggled with it for a long time. By this point, Derek and I loved Esther. I mean, I loved her the minute I saw her, but my feelings had grown into a deep, meaningful love. She was a member of our family. Derek was on the same page. He put up a strong face but he loved her as much as I did.

  Ultimately, we decided against the surgery, and we wonder to this day whether we made the right call.

  But that led to the conversation about the elephant in the room—or the pig in the room, as it were. The vet said that if Esther truly was six months old when we got her and actually was a runt, we still could expect her to grow to be 250 pounds.

  And that was the best-case scenario.

  The other scenario was that Esther was not a six-month-old runt when we got her. (Fine: when I got her.) Instead, it could turn out that we adopted her at just six weeks old, and she was no runt, but well on her way to being a full-size commercial pig. And at this growth rate, her ultimate full size was anyone’s guess.

  I was trying to wrap my mind around this distressing news. Everything was slowly adding up to the possibility that I’d gone out and adopted a commercial pig, and she could become enormous. I’d acquired Esther under Amanda’s false pretenses, sure, but that wasn’t making me feel any better.

  Right there in the vet’s office, I started Googling pictures on my phone. I was trying to get an idea of what a 250-pound pig looked like. I couldn’t even fathom the size. Two hundred and fifty pounds would be a giant human being. Thankfully I found that pigs are really dense, so they are smaller than a human would be at the same weight. Still, 250 pounds makes for a very large pet, no matter how you look at it. And I was still trying to wrap my head around the possibility that she had not been spayed and would become aggressive for a week every month. Now I was supposed to understand that we might have an angry 250-pound bulldozer running around our little 1,000-square-foot house? The whole situation was very upsetting. And how was I supposed to explain all of this to Derek? He’d eventually come around to my latest surprise adoption, of a pig, no less, but he had no idea she could outgrow either of us. (Much less, as we’d find out down the line, both of us combined.)

  I guess we could have paid more attention to everyone else’s reactions, but it really hadn’t fazed us when people would come over and say, “Holy Christ, she’s huge!”

  We saw Esther every day, so we weren’t noticing it, as strange as that undoubtedly sounds. It’s like the way you don’t notice when you gain weight or your spouse does. (At least you’d better pretend you don’t notice.) But we honestly weren’t noticing, because this was all new to us. Come to think of it, Michelle, one of my best friends, did call Esther “Boss Hogg.” Maybe we’d just been convincing ourselves it wasn’t happening. Denial can be a powerful drug.

  These were all the issues running through my mind as I headed home with Esther from the vet’s office. I knew Derek and I had to talk.

  When this sort of thing comes up, I always give Derek the best-case scenario. I get into the worst-case scenario only if he absolutely needs to know. And I knew he wasn’t ready to hear this one. And if that sounds like I was being a little bit chickenshit about it, okay, guilty as charged.

  I stopped off on my way home to buy Derek’s favorite wine, a shiraz, in an effort to soften the potential blow—or at least get him drunk for it. We were seated on the couch with Esther between us, her head resting on a cushion. I was totally honest about the spay conversation, though, and we both shared our concerns. I used that to segue to the size situation.

  “By the way,” I started. “The doctor mentioned that Esther might grow a little bigger than we thought.”

  He cocked an eyebrow but said nothing. Of course then I got nervous and tried soft-pedaling the truth.

  “There’s a chance that she’s actually not a mini pig.”

  “What kind of chance?” he asked.

  “Well there’s a good chance she’ll grow bigger, because, I mean, she’s already outgrown where we thought she’d be at her full-grown size.”

  Derek looked at her, taking in her already vast little self. “She is… larger than she should be.”

  “So,” I continued, “I just wanted to be totally honest with you.”

  I know, I know.

  “So how big?” he asked.

  “A hundred pounds, maybe 120… not a huge deal.”

  He sighed heavily, and his shoulders sunk down a little. He didn’t seem mad; he seemed worried. I was grasping at straws, and he knew it. I was doing my typical, “It’ll be fine,” but Derek’s initial facial reaction was completely “I told you so.” And then, in a moment of perfect timing times a thousand, Esther lifted her head and rested it back down on Derek’s leg, her gentle eyes looking up at him. Good going, Esther!

  He laughed to himself and just shook his head. I fully expected him to lose it. He certainly deserved to lose it. I’m still counting my blessings that he handled it as well as he did. There definitely was an air of concern, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt. (Whereas what I deserved was a hell of a lot of doubt.) I think it was because he had already fallen in love with her. He knew that even if she grew, we couldn’t just give her up. No matter how mad he was when Esther initially arrived, once she was in and accepted as part of the family, that was it. Realistically speaking, I’m not sure I would’ve gotten the same reaction had I been completely honest and told him all of the vet’s concerns regarding her size. What I was describing to him was an average large dog, but in my heart, I was horrified.

  Of course, I was keeping all that inside. I think in my gut I knew even then that she would turn out to be a commercial pig, but I swear I never thought she would get this big. Three hundred pounds maybe. But I didn’t care. No matter how big she got, I was keeping her. I just had to downplay it all and hope nobody noticed.

  As I said, denial is a powerful drug.

  It was around this time that Esther was really starting to come into her own. She was playful. She wanted to cuddle. She was even playing with the dogs’ toys. And we just loved her so much.

  If you’ve never had a pet pig—and I’m sure that’s the case for most people—this might not make any sense to you. But pigs are just as affectionate and caring and familial as any dog or cat you’ll find. (Frankly, more so than some cats.)

  I’ve never m
et anyone who can resist going nuts over baby animals. I’m like that and then some. In my mind I’ve always imagined my house as having one or two of everything. It’s just a desire to know and touch and be with an animal. But I can’t lie: The fact that Esther was a pig made me a little more excited than usual from the get-go. Hardly anyone had pigs for pets when we got Esther. (And it’s not like they’re giving dogs and cats a run for their money even now.) She was unique—an animal I had never interacted with before—and the thought of having a pig at home was incredible to me. To be honest, it could’ve been anything out of the ordinary and I think I would’ve been just as excited. For example, I’ve always wanted a monkey. I would have died to have a pet monkey. I hadn’t known I’d wanted a pig, but the joy I felt after we had her and once I knew I would always be going home to a pig in my house—it just made me smile.

  Having Esther was just so different, and there were many firsts. We’d notice her little quirks, the way she shuffled around, the way her little hooves slid along the floor when she ran, or just the funny little clicking noise she made when she pranced around. She was precious. She also snorted and farted way more than the dogs, which was less precious, but it was hilarious. Another thing that was completely different from any animals we’d ever had: She’d nuzzle our hands. That somehow comforted her or helped her calm down. It seemed to make her feel safe to know we were right there and that she could touch us. She would lick our palms and rub her snout up and down as she fell asleep. How does your heart not burst into a million pieces over that? She was adorable.

  With any pet, the first time it makes a particular sound or moves in a specific way or just looks you in the eyes, you’re trying to glean the meaning. You want to understand what this animal—now your pet, now your family member—is thinking and feeling, because you care. And you want your pet to know you care, that you’ll do anything for it, just as you would for anyone else in your family, anyone you loved.