And if you want to make a difference, to my mind, you have to give up all of it. No meat, no animal products. (And you know how hard that is for me to say.) Derek and I knew we could never eat animals again, and we knew we wanted to make a difference.
Once we made the decision to truly go vegan, the process was pretty interesting at first. We’d go grocery shopping and think we had done really well, only to find out our favorite brand of Doritos had milk in them, or that some other weird chemical-sounding name was actually made from cow tendons or something crazy like that. Giving up meat was relatively easy compared to learning just how many other things contain animal products. That’s what really messes with a new vegan. I can’t even tell you how many times one of us brought something home from the store only for the other one to notice something on the ingredient list that was verboten for our new lifestyle. Grocery shopping had been annoying enough back when we ate meat, but shopping vegan turned a one-hour trip into a three-hour marathon. We would spend forever standing in the aisles with two seemingly identical items, trying to figure out if they were vegan or not.
And while this dietary change was taking place, Esther was growing… and growing… and growing. Housetraining was proving to be a little more difficult than we’d anticipated, and even more stressful days were on the horizon. Specifically in the form of a prodigious amount of piggy pee and poop.
We had been told litter training was really easy. You just show her a couple of times and that’s it. We first used a cat litter box with pee pads in it. (We couldn’t use kitty litter because pigs will eat it, so we were told to use pee pads or wood shavings.) We bought the largest litter box we could find with a dome over it. Obviously, the plan was for her to go inside, do her business, and come out.
The first part worked out fine: She had no problem getting inside, but then things got tricky. Because of how the entrance was shaped and how Esther was shaped, she couldn’t turn around when she got inside. When she peed, the stream would go… right out of the box. She was doing the right thing, just not having the right result. So we got a box that was two feet bigger and had to train her to go inside, turn around, and then squat and do her business. That proved to be exceptionally difficult. And as she got bigger, so did the litter pan. I’m talking a pan the size of a couch; if you can imagine building a box around a couch, that’s how big her “bathroom” was. (If you’ve ever lived downtown in a big city, you’ve probably had a smaller bathroom, sink and shower included.) And each time we made the box larger, we had to retrain her. We’d lead her in, she’d turn around and do her business. We lined the inside of the cage with old plastic real estate signs, and the base was a baleful of wood chips.
As you can imagine, this was a nightmare to clean. And because the structure had a top on it, you couldn’t just stand back and clean it with our version of a litter pan scoop. (You guessed it: a full-size shovel.) No, you had to climb right on in there. It was pretty labor intensive—and let’s be honest, pretty gross—and we had to clean it no less often than every couple of days.
At that time, I guess because she still was growing, she drank way more water than she does these days. In one visit to the water bowl, she’d drink about three gallons of water. (That alone tells you how big a bowl we needed.) Of course, her bathroom habits weren’t exactly perfect during those learning stages, and three gallons of anything is a lot when it’s coming out where you don’t want it. We tried to recognize her needs and have the box available when she needed it, but we were all learning then. Accidents happened, just on an exponentially grander scale than if you were housetraining a kitten or puppy. It was more like housetraining an NFL lineman. Possibly two.
When Esther’s bathroom spot—you couldn’t even really call it a box at this point, more like a port-a-potty—reached its maximum size, we moved it down to the unfinished basement, and that’s where it stayed. We created a playpen area there for when we had to go out, because we couldn’t trust Esther to be upstairs alone.
Problem solved, right?
Not exactly.
Even with Esther as contained as possible, with all of our improvised engineering and attention to as many details as we could fathom, there were more accidents. The cleanup was a Herculean task: backbreaking, dirty work. Afterward, we’d think we were in the clear for a few precious moments. We’d spend an hour down there, take the cage apart, sanitize everything, remove the pan, mop everything up, and enclose all the waste in garbage bags. We’d be covered in mess, of course, having been down on our hands and knees cleaning and disinfecting. But at least everything else would be pee-and poop-free for the moment.
So we’d get changed and exhale and sit down to rest, and five minutes later Esther would come down and miss the mark by this much, and once again there would be a ton of backflow under the crate. And we’d have to start all over again.
We’d try not to lose our cool. As I’ve mentioned, in the beginning Derek put most of the cleaning on me, and it wasn’t like I could argue the point because I’d brought Esther into the family without consulting him. But in time, to my great appreciation, he stepped up and shared the brunt of the work with me.
As she learned, Esther’s bathroom habits improved substantially, but she still wasn’t batting a thousand. No matter how well trained we thought she was, every so often she’d wander into the living room, squat right in front of us, and… release a flood.
We’d immediately start screaming “No!” in an instinctive reaction that often made things worse. Esther would realize she’d done something wrong, clench it off as best she could and start racing away, pee spraying out as she ran from one end of the house to the other. And away we’d go with the rug shampooer running, washing machine churning, tempers flaring. We’d put Esther downstairs in her pen because she’d been “bad” and that was how we reprimanded her, and hard as it might be to believe, that wouldn’t even be the end of it.
Because Esther would just start screaming.
When Esther screams, she sounds like a jetliner. It’s just wide-open wailing.
Honestly, it’s heartbreaking. I’d sit in the living room and try to carry on with whatever I was doing, but I’d hear her cries, which—let’s be real—were impossible to ignore, and I’d want nothing more than to let her out and tell her it was all okay. It’s like that phrase puppy dog eyes, where a dog gives you that look that just gets you in your gut, or, of course, a crying baby: All you want to do is comfort them. I knew good parents sometimes (probably often) needed to tell their kids how to behave, that we had to discipline her or we could end up with a terror on our hands. I just hated seeing and hearing her so upset. It sounds so cliché, but I needed to be strong.
At the same time, a part of me worried that this would be too much for Derek to deal with. I knew Derek loved Esther by now, but in the back of my mind, no matter how remote I considered the possibility, I always felt there was a chance he would just throw his hands in the air one day and say, “This isn’t going to work.” I was still afraid I’d have to get rid of her if I couldn’t get her behavior under control.
So I knew I had to get tougher. We would have to enforce some stronger discipline with Esther. It wouldn’t be easy. She’d be miserable and we’d be miserable, because we knew she didn’t mean to do anything wrong. But we also knew we had to reprimand her in some way.
We set her punishment: a half-hour timeout. We’d set the timer on the stove, endure thirty minutes of the jetliner, and then let her out. It was not uncommon for her to forget why she was put down there in the first place. (This seems to be common among all sorts of pets, but what can you do?) We know this about Esther because she would finally come out after her dramatic half-hour, come upstairs, and immediately do the exact same thing again. And then go right back down for another thirty minutes.
And that was her training.
We had a tough time with it. It went on for weeks, and as with any teaching/learning experience, it was often two steps forward, one step ba
ck. Or one step forward, five steps back. One day it would seem like we were making amazing progress, only to have a major backslide the very next day. I couldn’t get the pattern down. Was it something I was doing wrong? We were so good yesterday, now what fresh hell is this? I’d think.
And of course there were other challenges. Just when I thought I had Esther figured out, she would outgrow the litter box or eat something of Derek’s that she shouldn’t have, which of course would piss him off to no end. We lost an endless stream of phone cords and computer chargers—she took a real liking to wires, and it was growing tiresome (and expensive) very quickly. We knew she didn’t want to be “bad”—she was just acting on instinct, much the way dogs and cats do when they tear up items in the home. But we had to get the message across that this wholesale damage couldn’t continue.
So we dealt with it. And we disciplined. And she wailed. And we’d start each new day hoping timeouts would be kept to a minimum.
Right before Christmas, Derek and I decided to take our first trip together since we’d gotten Esther. We were going to the home of Derek’s parents in Barry’s Bay, a small town between Toronto and Ottawa. Leta, my trainer from the gym and a good friend of ours, often puppy-sat for mutual friends and was great with Esther. She said she’d be happy to watch Esther for us and that we shouldn’t worry about a thing. We were only going for three days, and we knew Esther’s bathroom would be bad, but of course we didn’t expect Leta to clean it. We really needed some time away, so we agreed to let Leta watch the house.
This was the first time we’d felt anywhere near comfortable taking a vacation since we’d gotten Esther. I say “vacation” even though it was only three days because our life had become so full of responsibilities that this was a vacation to us—and a desperately needed one at that.
The four-and-a-half-hour drive to Barry’s Bay was uneventful, as was the visit itself… at first. But at one point, Derek dropped a bombshell:
He told me he thought we needed to get rid of Esther.
I couldn’t say I was completely surprised after what we’d been through, but nevertheless, it was incredibly painful to hear. I told him it would be fine, that we’d figure it out. In reality, all I felt was a sick feeling deep in my gut. I understood where he was coming from, but it ruined the rest of the trip for me. I worried that as soon as we got back, Derek would be on me to cast out our not-so-little girl. And I couldn’t even let my brain start to ponder about what that would mean for Esther.
The drive home wasn’t exactly tense, but the Esther issue hung in the air. We didn’t speak of it aloud, maybe afraid that would somehow jinx the peace, but we both worried about what we would find when we returned. I knew Esther could be a handful, but I had reasoned it out in my head the way you rationalize when you really want something like a couple of days away. She’s been so good lately. It’s just a couple of days. What’s the worst that can happen? (Never ask that, by the way.)
At times leading up to that point, I’d try to let Esther have more freedom. While Derek was gone, I’d leave her out of her crate and then leave the house to do some errands. I’d make sure to get home before Derek, hoping I’d later have the opportunity to tell him how good she’d been while we were out, but it virtually never worked out that way. Each of these little experiments ended with me frantically trying to clean something up before Derek got home to see it. My stress always came from trying to keep Derek from knowing about something she had done. I needed to justify all the “I can do it, don’t worry, she’ll be awesome” lines I’d fed him at the very beginning. And I meant it when I’d said it. I just had no idea what the hell I was promising.
On the drive home, my heart was in my throat the whole way. I was hoping for the best—not just for our sanity and the pleasant fantasy of coming back to a perfectly kept home with zero problems reported, but because I was nervous about what Derek would do if this little experiment was a bust. He’d opened the door to getting rid of Esther, and I didn’t want anything to push her through it. I wanted nothing more than to walk in the house and find both a happy Esther and a happy sitter playing together in a perfectly kept living room. Maybe Esther in an apron, having learned to cook during our time away, just putting the finishing touches on a welcome-home dinner.
And then we got home and reality set in.
The term that comes to mind is rock bottom.
The house was a pit. Litter box shavings were spread everywhere. Every inch of the house smelled like urine. Scratch that: not smelled, more like reeked, like with an unbelievable, make-your-eyes-water stink. It was a disaster.
I felt sick to my stomach. I knew how badly this would play with Derek. The outcome wouldn’t be good.
I’d already secretly been having these moments where I’d question everything: Are we going to keep her? Did we do the right thing? How big is she going to get? She’s ruining the house. She’s ruining our life. She’s ruining our relationship.
Now, here we were.
This would also probably be a good time to mention that Derek has always been a super clean person—as in bordering on OCD. A bit of untidiness bothers him. A mess gets under his skin. A huge mess is practically more than he can handle.
And this was a mess like none other.
This was such a mind-blowing departure from what our house (and our life) had been. I could see he was on the verge of tears, which crushed me. He didn’t seem mad, exactly, but clearly he was hugely disappointed. And of course I was beside myself. I was partly upset because I’d let the house get so bad in such a short amount of time, but I was also embarrassed because now our house sitter knew exactly how bad it was and what we had to deal with. After shooting me an uncomfortable glance, she left us alone.
I had done a fairly good job of hiding messes from Derek, but there was no hiding this.
Derek and I walked around the house to survey the damage while Esther tagged along at our feet, no idea how close she was to being exiled. Her smile beamed, and she was full of joyful energy and curiosity, just as always. But for the first time I looked at her with uncertainty about what to do. I felt I was failing miserably, and she would be the one to suffer if I didn’t make it right, and fast.
Neither Derek nor I wanted our house to be a place where you’d walk in and get hit with a brutal wave of stinky animal smells, of course, but for Derek to walk into this after we’d come so far was just too much. Even for me—you know, as a real estate agent you deal with a lot of smelly houses—you never think your house will be the smelly house. I’m the guy who leaves a place and says, “You wouldn’t believe the shithole I was just in.” Now my home was the shithole, and not just figuratively.
I didn’t think I could be more mortified.
Then I went downstairs.
We’d been gone only three days. Urine was puddled on the floor, shavings were everywhere, and because the basement was unfinished, the urine had soaked into the porous wood and completely permeated the entire place.
Derek grabbed some cleaning supplies and got down on his hands and knees in her pen. Everything he touched or moved was covered in urine. Her bed, her litter box, her toys, and now Derek. He had rolls of paper towels and cans of Lysol and deodorizer all around. As he would pick up paper towels to put them in a garbage bag, they would just drip everywhere. It was so gross. He had a mortified look on his face. I had no words, because no words could make this better. There was no simple I’m sorry for this.
I think we were both thinking what neither of us really wanted to admit: She had beaten us. In my heart I knew this couldn’t continue, and I know Derek felt the same, but he also knew how I felt about Esther and how upset I would be. I think he was hoping I would come to the decision myself. I’m sure if I’d gone ahead and been the one to say enough is enough, to make the call to get rid of Esther, Derek would have swiftly agreed.
It was a somber experience. I kept going upstairs to check on Esther while Derek stayed in the basement. I looked at her, wishing she
and I could just talk like people, wishing I could explain how she was on the way to peeing and pooping and rutting and wrecking her way out of our home—her home.
I tried sending her brainwaves—when you’re desperate, you’ll resort to anything—to let her know this was getting dire and she needed to clean up her act.
During one of these trips upstairs, I had my first meltdown. I was looking at Esther, but my mind was on Derek. The man I loved was in the basement, up to his elbows in her urine, and it really was all my fault. I sat down at the top of the stairs, looking out at the backyard, and I just starting sobbing. I felt completely hopeless and broken.
Leading up to this, I’d had many moments of secretly crying when Derek wasn’t around. Because I’d taken on the brunt of the cleanup chores in the early days, there were times I totally lost it. I’d tried to keep a brave face because I didn’t want Derek to see me freaking out.
I was terrified that if Derek saw me feeling so overwhelmed, that would be reason enough for him to say she had to go. And I couldn’t lose her. The thought of losing Esther was unbearable.
I kept going upstairs and down for about an hour while we cleaned her pen. When it was done, we went upstairs and sat on the couch. Neither of us said anything. I was too scared to speak, too scared to give an opening to what was surely going to come next. But then Derek turned to me, and I could see it in his eyes: the genuine fear of broaching the subject we both knew had to be tackled, the sadness of someone who now loved her as much as I did.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
As soon it was out there, we both started to sob. Things had been escalating for so long. We’d both been hiding how we felt about it. I wasn’t the only one who’d been crying in private somewhere; now I found out he had been too. But in that moment, we came to a conclusion:
Esther the Wonder Pig Page 5