Esther the Wonder Pig

by Steve Jenkins

  As soon as you start opening your heart to a creature, you start opening your mind to all the possibilities of what it’s trying to tell you. You look for meaning in behaviors. Is that squeal a squeal of delight, of fear, of hunger, of surprise? Is that tilt of the head suggesting curiosity, concern, or confusion? Will she let me know when she isn’t feeling well, and will I be perceptive enough to get it?

  One thing I didn’t expect was how many behaviors she would share with the dogs. She’d play with the dogs’ toys the same way they would, picking a toy up and shaking it back and forth. Like the dogs, she’d want to cuddle when she was tired, climbing into our laps to nuzzle. To give us kisses, she’d stick her tongue out just a half an inch or so and then rub her head up and down against our hands.

  And just like the dogs, she often wanted attention. She’d push her way closer to make sure you would pet her. If another one of the dogs or cats was getting attention, Esther wanted attention too. Of course, she wasn’t able to sneak up on you like a cat, because she lacked the stealth. Frankly, she lacked any stealth. (Not exactly a prime candidate for the ninja academy is the commercial pig.)

  It’s hard to think that a 100-pound pig with cloven hooves on a hardwood floor would do extra things for your attention—just in case you somehow forgot she was there. But Esther did. And she probably wasn’t unique in this.

  That was when we really started to get it. She was special to us, yes—we adored her—but any other pig would have its own personality. Pigs undoubtedly have their own quirks and personalities, just like the hundreds of millions of dogs out there. We didn’t do anything special to train her or turn her into what she was becoming. All we did was treat her like one of the dogs. She started playing and doing all these other hilarious and clever things all on her own. We could see the glimmer in her eyes and the little change in her facial expressions when she was chasing the cats or shaking one of the dogs’ toys. The more we saw her with the rest of our furry family, the more she started to “look” like them. Not in a physical way, but in a personality and character kind of way. And that hit us deep in our cores.

  What made pigs different? Why were they bred for food and held in captivity, while dogs and cats were welcomed into our homes and treated like family? Aside from physicality, we could see no difference between her and our dogs. (Okay, Esther hardly had any tail left to wag. But if it had been there, it would have been happily wagging away most of the time.)

  Why were pigs the unlucky ones? Why didn’t we know previously they had such engaging personalities and such intelligence? And where would Esther be now if she hadn’t come home with us?

  We’d ponder such things many times over the years, but really, most of the time we were just happy to have our sweet, loving, oinking girl join our family. We’d never thought we were missing anything before—Derek even more than I, naturally—but now we couldn’t fathom having a home without her. She’s as integral to our home as the foundation, the walls, and the floors beneath our feet.

  Floors that she’d soon be peeing all over. And I mean all over. But we’ll get back to that in a bit.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a night in late September, I think. We’d had Esther for only a few weeks. I was at the computer; Derek was cooking dinner. We usually ate dinner around 7 p.m. I’d always have the TV on in the background when Derek cooked, but I’d sit close by at the dining room table with my computer to keep him company while Seinfeld or King of the Hill would ramble away in the background. The dining room overlooked the kitchen, separated by a counter, but otherwise they were right on top of each other. So I’d sit there where we could talk and I could see, hear, and smell everything he was doing.

  Fall was a pretty good time for the real estate market where we lived, so I was fairly busy running around and getting new listings up before winter kicked in and things inevitably slowed down. Derek has an awesome eye for design and great style, so he’s always been a huge help to my real estate business. He has helped me stage my listings, and we often discuss my feature sheets (the little flyer with photos for buyers to take when they view the property) and how they should be laid out. Another reason I think we make a great team.

  On this particular night, we were having breakfast for dinner, something every adult should do on occasion—because you can. I was at the dining table, working on a feature sheet for a new listing. Derek was at the stove, Esther by his feet, wondering what he was cooking. (Just like a dog, as I said.) And I was watching them both. Esther would always honk, squeal, oink, and wag her tail when we were cooking because she wanted some of the food. And we weren’t the best disciplinarians—we were known to share on occasion.

  So there we were as Derek prepared the meal. He started to gather everything we needed for our breakfast sandwiches: toasted English muffins, cheese, eggs, and of course… bacon.

  In the time we’d had Esther in our lives, we’d been eating the same way we’d eaten before her arrival. We had burgers. We had pepperoni on pizza. But we hadn’t had bacon in a while. It hadn’t been a conscious decision. We just hadn’t had bacon. The connection hadn’t even occurred to us.

  On this particular evening, however, Derek was cooking bacon.

  And suddenly something switched in my brain.

  I recalled our vet specifically referring to Esther as a “commercial” pig, meaning her intended lot in life was to be food. That’s the only purpose for a commercial pig. They don’t pull sleds through the Yukon or carriages through the park. They become pork chops and ham hocks and link sausages and…

  … yeah.

  I heard the bacon crackling on the stove. The unmistakable scent wafted toward me. That smell, so wonderful to me (and let’s be honest, to all carnivores) for my whole life up to that point suddenly smelled like something awful.

  Like death.

  I watched Derek cook, glanced at Esther’s happy face, took in the whole scene. Derek was looking at the stove and occasionally down at sweet, happy, oinking Esther. If I could read her thoughts, and I’m pretty sure I could at that point, they’d go something like this:

  Hey, Dad! Whatcha cookin’ up there on that stove, and are you making enough for me?

  Oh my God.

  What were we doing?

  When you eat meat every day (or at least most days), you try to justify it to yourself every step of the way. Or at least you do if you’re me—I know plenty of people who devour meat three meals a day without giving it a second thought. You hear that it’s bad for you, or at least excessive amounts of it can be, but that’s true of everything, right?

  Of course it’s okay to eat meat, you think. Most people do.

  Bringing a pig into the house hadn’t been enough to make me want to shun animal meat overnight, like some vegan superhero turning his nose up at carnivores. (KaleMan: able to leap tall cornfields in a single bound!)

  But realizing Esther had once literally been intended to be someone’s dinner removed my ability to compartmentalize eating bacon while having a pig as a family member. Eating bacon now would be like eating one of our dogs. Or any dog. I started having little flashbacks in my head. I could see the dogs running around in the backyard and me rolling around playing with them, and then little Esther would run over to join in the fun.

  Wait a minute, I thought, sitting by the kitchen. I glanced over at Derek and wondered whether the wheels were turning in his head too. He was looking at the meal he was cooking and down at Esther, back and forth. It was a heady scene. The little voices she was making, the smell in the air… specifically the smell of pig flesh being cooked. Right there in our kitchen.

  I wouldn’t eat dog. And I couldn’t eat bacon anymore.

  I didn’t hesitate at all. I stepped into the kitchen, got Derek’s attention.

  “I don’t think I can eat that,” I said.

  He asked me to repeat myself, so I did: “I can’t eat that, I’m not eating that bacon, it’s creeping me out.”

  His response surpri
sed me: “I don’t think I can either.”

  It was eerie. He didn’t even question me. It was like he was thinking the exact same thing.

  We still enjoyed our egg sandwiches. As I said, we weren’t instant vegans. For the moment, at least, it was just: We can’t eat “Esther.” We carried on and ate our eggs and cheese, made a few jokes about how that wasn’t the same as eating pig. We didn’t know any cows or chickens, so they were just farm animals to us. There was no emotional connection with them. We had been researching pigs so much and learning how smart they were. Just by the way of the Internet, when you search for info on pigs, you obviously come across some not-so-pleasant info on how they’re raised for food. That’s where our love for Esther cemented the connection. When we looked at bacon, we saw Esther. But when we looked at a burger, we still saw a burger. All of a sudden Esther was on a different playing field, but our minds hadn’t made the leap yet to her other farm “friends.” It’s a prime example of the disconnect and the walls we had built up.

  Later that week, Derek and I were scrolling through the online Netflix menu when a documentary called Vegucated caught our attention. It followed three content carnivores in New York who agreed to adopt a vegan diet for six weeks. We’d never intentionally gone looking for that type of documentary before—slaughter scenes are too graphic for me to take—but this one was described as light and comedic. I’d always been an “information” person. I loved documentaries of pretty much any kind. I was fascinated by films about engineering and history, and, of course I always enjoyed nature or animal films—unless they took place in Africa. No “circle of life” predator-and-prey stuff for me, thank you very much. Those things always end with a beautiful zebra getting tackled by a lion, and even though it was nature, I hated watching that.

  When the option to watch Vegucated popped up on our TV, all I was thinking was that it looked like something worth checking out. Derek wasn’t even paying attention to what I was picking, which was typical. He had his nose in his phone to read emails. So I just hit the start button and away it went. But when Derek realized this wasn’t one of the usual documentaries I enjoyed, films on building the Airbus A380 or how wind turbines were built in the North Sea off the Netherlands—stuff he didn’t much care about—his interest was piqued. He put his phone down and started paying attention.

  By the end of that film, we had both begun to rethink our meat-eating lifestyle. From there, we watched other documentaries. Food, Inc. was about corporate farming in America. Blackfish investigated the lives of captive killer whales. We learned so much about where our food comes from, how animals are treated. There were so many cruelties, even in the things we used to think were okay.

  I’d always thought I was a huge animal lover. But suddenly I felt very misled. I was angry about what we’d been told, how we’d been made to believe “they’re just farm animals.” I guess the information had always been there if we’d wanted to go looking for it. But we hadn’t. It was too easy to just accept it and enjoy our carnivorous lifestyle.

  So that was it. Simple as that. No more meat for me. It was time to go full-on vegan, to put my carnivorous lifestyle behind me and learn to love the produce section.

  Okay, that’s not true at all. Actually, as much as I wanted to stop eating meat from an ethical standpoint, there was one big obstacle in the way:

  I’d always hated vegetables.

  To be honest, I still do.

  I could sniff out a sliver of onion in something and would pick around to get rid of it. God forbid if I got one in my mouth and crunched it, the meal was over. I was the simplest of simple eaters. Take me to a fancy restaurant and it’s wasted on me—I want a burger or the pasta. Sometimes I would actually eat at home before going to a restaurant, because I knew I probably wouldn’t like what was offered. Better to fill up before going out.

  Derek asked me whether I thought we should go vegan, and of course I hemmed and hawed. As a tried-and-true veggie hater, I had a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the idea. I like what I like. I was afraid of having to eat things I didn’t like, or even worse, foods I had never tried before. It would all be new, and new food is scary. A lot of what you hear about vegan food was scary to me too: couscous this and quinoa that. What the hell is quinoa and why would I want to eat it? Acai? I wouldn’t even attempt to pronounce it!

  I knew I didn’t want to eat animals and was finally accepting the fact that chickens and cows really weren’t all that different from dogs and cats (or pigs, obviously, who also stood on the “pet pedestal” we had built). But now I had this chilling question bouncing around in my head: If I can’t eat meat, what will I eat? I hate salad. I hate weird vegetables, which to me is most of them. What was left? Was I going to be stuck with seeds and nuts? Would Derek come home one day to find I had morphed into a bird?

  But I didn’t say this to Derek. I eventually just said sure, we could do it. I didn’t want to be the one to stop us from evolving.

  So I made some small steps: I shifted my diet away from meat. It was no longer the bread and butter of my diet, if you will. (Come to think of it, without meat, I ended up eating a lot more bread and butter.) But I’d still have a burger here and there. Milk was also hard for me to give up. I always tried to find a way to make it okay, and I was pretty good at convincing myself of things. I always had been.

  But deep down, I knew I was trying to justify it to myself. The harder I worked to keep the blinders on, the more things kept sneaking into my line of vision. I would let myself get sucked in by industry marketing words like free range and grass fed. I’d think, Oh well, if it’s a happy cow, it’s okay to eat it, or Those chickens lived in beautiful rolling green pastures and had awesome lives, so I can eat them now.

  And then there was my one big crutch, the one I held on to for months: They don’t hurt the cow when they milk her.

  Oh my God, was I wrong.

  I’d always pictured milking a cow as happening on some beautiful farm on a lovely green pasture among rolling hills. Some sweet little Dutch girl with pigtails heads out with a bucket to milk ol’ Bessie. Poor ol’ Bessie probably wants to be milked. She’s happy to provide milk for the family, and they love her for it. That’s the story of milk, right?

  Once again, a little bit of learning goes a long way.

  From watching videos, I learned that cows on modern dairy farms are treated abhorrently. I started to find myself making comparisons I had never made before. I learned that human beings are the only species that drinks milk after infancy. We’re also the only species that drinks another species’ milk. That’s a bizarre thing to do. You hear jokes about how weird it must have been the first time somebody decided to milk a cow… and then drink it? Forget the guy—what about the cow? What do you think she was thinking? She was probably like, Uh… excuse me, but what are you doing?

  Early in our vegan transition period, for lack of a better term, Derek and I would go to a party and eat whatever was there. We had our supposed justifications.

  I didn’t buy it.

  It’s here anyway.

  It’s going to go to waste.

  It’s already prepared.

  It took me a few months to realize that regardless of who buys the meat, there’s nothing okay about it—at least not to me. As I got to know Esther better, as our bond grew, I couldn’t help but compare her to a cow—or any animal bred to be food.

  Where would Esther be if not here with us? In a gestation crate. I’d wonder what had happened to the rest of her litter. How do I know that pack of bacon in the store isn’t a member of Esther’s family? As far as I know, that could be her sister’s litter. And even if it’s not, it’s still the flesh of slaughtered pigs. Pigs with intelligence and personality and affection and love—just like Esther.

  When Esther first arrived she was a novelty, but as time went on and we started to learn a little more about the food industry, Esther became a trigger for the awful images we had seen online and in films we watched. As
I watched her play outside, my mind would flip to the image of a baby dairy cow chained to a veal crate. I’d make her dinner and watch her loving every bite of her watermelon or mango and then find myself picturing a sad and broken pig in a gestation crate. I was feeling like a proud papa watching her reach these milestones of using her litter box and playing with toys, developing her larger-than-life personality, and then I’d be in the meat aisle at the grocery store, feeling physically ill because suddenly everything in there had a face. I couldn’t see a steak or a slab of bacon as nothing more than a product anymore. Any one of those pork chops could’ve been Esther, and that was so upsetting.

  The more time we spent with Esther and watched her character come to life, the more we realized that this whole “they’re just farm animals” notion was bullshit. She had every ounce of the character and personality you’d find in any dog. There was so much more to her than I could’ve imagined, and every day she did something else to show us (even though some of it was super maddening, like opening cupboards and stealing food). Her heightened intelligence was key to our making the changes we did. If she’s this smart, we figured, every pig is.

  What’s funny is that even once we know all this stuff, it doesn’t always sink in. It’s just like smoking: You know it’s incredibly bad for you. You know you’re killing yourself with every cigarette. But you keep doing it. People contrive reasons not to stop smoking even when they know they should. They continue until they finally land on a reason that truly matters to them.

  Esther gave us the reason to search out the truth, to completely revamp our behavior—and to stick to it.

  I’m not saying that going vegan is immediately the easiest thing you’ll ever do. There’s a learning curve, and it can be annoying. Grocery shopping takes longer at first. Looking at labels takes longer. People will make excuses like I don’t have time or It’s too hard. But honestly, it’s not that hard. You just have to reteach yourself things you’ve been taught your entire life.