Esther the Wonder Pig

by Steve Jenkins

  All of a sudden (technically about forty-five days), we had thirty thousand followers, and we still didn’t really understand why all this was happening. We didn’t know why our story was such a big deal.

  Even though Esther’s page was immensely popular, when we thought about it, we realized it still didn’t really have a voice or direction. It had amassed a strong following among vegans, so we decided to cater to them by giving the page a far greater pro-vegan angle. We started putting in vegan memes and talking about good plant product foods. But pretty soon after that, we started to see head-butting between the vegans and non-vegans. We’d never seen that coming, and we really didn’t like it.

  We’ve always disliked what we refer to as the Nazi-vegan movement, or, as they refer to themselves, Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach. This movement was started by people who I’m sure had good intentions, but they have black-and-white beliefs and harsh views of what constitutes a positive change. People who share those beliefs were constantly putting up posts on our page, criticizing us for what we were doing. They were even criticizing our followers for what they were doing. In essence, they were hijacking our page to push their agenda and alienating people who just wanted to follow our story.

  For instance, there was a woman who posted a comment to our page that said, “I just want you to know that thanks to Esther, I’ve given up pork!” This was kind of a big deal to us. We had yet to understand what we would come to call The Esther Effect, and we considered that a win. A great step. And we told her as much. I replied, “Congratulations, that is a great step!” But that wasn’t enough for the hard-core vegans. They tore into her for giving up only pork—and us for supporting her.

  Now, let’s be real. By that point, Derek and I were vegans, so of course we didn’t want anyone to stop at just cutting out pork. Ideally, we wanted our followers to stop eating all animal products. But why chastise someone for taking a step in the right direction? I put myself in that person’s position. If I wrote on a page to say, Hey, I’ve changed my life in this way because of you guys, and that person responded to me with, Well, it’s not enough; you should also be doing this and this and this, I’d be like, Well, screw you then! And that would be the end of my connection.

  So instead, we congratulated people on those baby steps. And then we’d get attacked for it. The Abolitionist movement would chime in on our congratulations and say things like, How is this pro-vegan? Are you saying pigs are more important than chickens or cows? Of course we weren’t saying that. But they took a hard line and would post Comment after Comment that vegan was the only moral choice. That kind of negativity didn’t foster what we were trying to accomplish.

  We found ourselves in a mess as we were figuring out the page’s direction and tone. A few crazy people attacked us for jokes they considered inappropriate. We posted a photo of Esther’s giant rump and said, Eat your heart out, Kim Kardashian! We thought it was obvious that this was just a joke, but certain people jumped all over us—some claimed we were sexualizing Esther. I mean… really? It was ridiculous and honestly says more about the commenter than us, but we didn’t want to do anything that would upset people, so we considered that in creating the tone of our page and decided to keep things mainstream and lighthearted. We tried to maintain that connection people were finding with Esther and to make them look for answers to questions on their own because they wanted to and not because we were ramming propaganda down their throats.

  Every group has its own way of doing things. Take People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for example. That organization has hard-hitting, explicit print ads and very graphic, attention-getting street displays. That makes sense for PETA, and I understand why its leaders do it. We actually met with Ingrid Newkirk, the president and cofounder of PETA, and she told us exactly why they do the crazy campaigns. Here’s the bottom line: Purchasing ads that would garner the same amount of attention would cost them thousands of dollars they don’t have, so they keep the cash for situations where they can actually help animals. Instead of buying ads, they do outlandish campaigns. That’s what they’re known for.

  Some people love it; others think the people behind PETA are just a bunch of crazy extremists. But PETA is the largest animal rights organization in the world, and Ingrid’s passion and commitment has inspired countless others to think twice before wearing leather or eating animals. She believes animals deserve the most basic rights—regardless of whether they are useful to humans. She spreads awareness that all animals are capable of suffering and have interests in living their own lives. Therefore, they are not ours to use—for food, clothing, entertainment, experimentation, or any other reason. Though you may disagree with some of PETA’s outlandish methods, it’s hard to disagree with the reasons why they do what they do.

  Then you might look at Mercy for Animals (MFA), a completely different type of animal rights organization, with an entirely different approach—perhaps the exact opposite approach. MFA is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing cruelty to farmed animals and promoting compassionate food choices and policies. MFA spends its time and money buying undetectable camera equipment, hiring undercover investigators, and exposing big agriculture for its horrible mistreatment of farm animals. This group’s incredibly important investigations have shed light on the heartbreaking animal abuse that takes place behind closed doors. The investigations have led giant corporations such as Butterball, Tyson, Nestlé, and DiGiorno to drop products from abusive farms. That’s huge. And MFA is totally different from the next organization. And the next one.

  We’ve always felt like there was room for everyone, and it’s not that we don’t appreciate or respect all of the other groups and their very different methods—we don’t begrudge anyone their place in the movement—we just felt that those types of organizations were very crowd-specific and put a lot of people off. With Esther, we had an opportunity to reach a huge spectrum of people with kindness and smiles and positivity.

  This was a crucial moment for us. When we saw that we were alienating the people whose lives we could impact most—people like us who loved animals and wanted to do better but just hadn’t made that connection—we knew we had to do it our way, simply with kindness and humor. We had no interest in the angry “You’re not doing it right” approach. That sort of thing had played no part in our becoming vegan. We had come to our decision by getting to know Esther and asking questions and slowly understanding why going vegan was the better choice—ultimately the only choice for us. So we focused on kindness and humor and pulling heartstrings as opposed to harsh words and upsetting imagery, which I think is why the Esther movement is as successful as it is.

  The Esther movement appeals to non-vegans in that it’s all very approachable, nonconfrontational, and open, but it builds a connection to people. And we’re finding that non-vegans love it because it opens their eyes and makes them think about things. Yet it still appeals to animal activists and existing vegans because we are a bright spot in an otherwise very sad and upsetting movement. We’ve actually had undercover investigators who are constantly reporting on abuse visit us because they want to be around a happy pig in a good environment. Esther was the morale boost they really needed.

  As the Facebook page was taking off, we tried to respond to every single Comment, and we didn’t have anybody helping us. Yes, we actually still try to respond to everyone. Can you imagine? (I guess that also falls under our abiding need to be people-pleasers.)

  I was also noticing an influx of followers on my private accounts. Prior to Esther’s arrival, my social media presence was mostly limited to my Instagram account, which had photos of me and Derek, along with the pets on occasion. It also had photos from our trips to Amsterdam and some things that might be considered a bit questionable by your average Esther fan. I mean, we were a couple of bachelors who liked to party now and then. We were just two normal, fun-loving guys who happened to have a pig. We hadn’t lived the life of angels. We simply
happened to have an awakening after we got Esther, and our lives drastically changed.

  I came to realize that some people who wanted to follow Esther’s story wanted to know more specifically about Derek and me. I could tell because when I went on Instagram, I found that strangers had suddenly started Liking photos I’d posted as far back as two years ago. Until then, I’d never thought my personal life would be of such interest. But for some reason, some people’s fascination with Esther expanded into an interest in me and Derek. We weren’t comfortable with it, so we ultimately decided to do a search-and-destroy mission for a lot of our online footprints. We’d become public figures of a fashion, and we realized it would be smart to say sayonara to material some people might consider a bit risqué. Shortly before Christmas, I converted my Instagram account to Esther’s Instagram and removed all the personal stuff. We never would have thought Esther would take over all our social media, but the demand was there, so ultimately that became the best plan of action.

  Our heads were spinning because of the unexpected impact our little Facebook page was having. It’s been mind-boggling. In keeping our message non-preachy and mainstream, we’ve managed to spread awareness so far. We’ve been covered in People magazine’s Pets of the Week and also in PETA’s magazine. Being able to have Esther make connections with people across such different platforms showed us that she was really striking a chord and that we could make a difference.

  It was around then that we started thinking about recipes and creating Esther’s Kitchen. And with that we lost all references to vegan and started calling everything “Esther Approved.” Of course that means vegan, but so many negative connotations seem to come with that word that we decided to take a softer approach while still sending the same underlying message. And it worked! We didn’t do this just because of the head-butting between vegans and non-vegans. We were getting a bunch of emails from non-vegan people who were telling us how much we’d opened their eyes about pigs. People from all over were sending us messages saying they had no idea how clean pigs were or how smart pigs were and basically retelling us our story. In reading these emails, we realized that Esther’s photos and stories and funny captions had the same impact on other people as she’d had on us—and we were impacting people without having to “preach the message.” I think our softer, nonconfrontational approach, using humor and kindness and Esther’s funny photos, was a big part of why Esther has been such a success in actually changing people’s lives.

  That’s what we call The Esther Effect. Esther has had such a vast impact on people in so many different ways, we are constantly astounded. We met a French woman in Montreal who was in her seventies and already vegan. She introduced herself in very broken English. She told us how much she loved Esther and that she found Esther’s page through one of her vegan friends. She said that Esther’s page had actually taught her all the English she knew! She had started by translating the captions, and over time she needed to translate less and less. She was literally teaching herself English because of Esther, just because she wanted to follow Esther’s story and know what we were saying—which was just incredible.

  We also had a mother who wrote to us that she was a vegan and that she worked a lot in animal advocacy, but her husband and kids were meat-eaters. She said that she never wanted to force her opinion on her kids and had been very careful not to do so. But her son fell in love with Esther; he wanted to see what our pet pig was up to every day.

  One day, the woman was looking at something on her computer about factory farms. Her son wandered over and saw the pictures of pigs in such awful situations and he started to cry. He asked, “Is that Esther?” She told him no, that was another pig, but it could have been Esther. She told us, “That was my opportunity to explain what was going on, because he was so fond of Esther and was confused by what he was seeing.” That’s when she explained to her son why she’s vegan. She told us that the boy bawled his eyes out as he made the connection. He told his mom that as far as he was concerned, all pigs were Esther. On his own, he stopped eating meat. Even as months passed by, he was still vegan because of Esther. That blew my mind.

  Life was busy, and we were trying to maintain our lives as we knew them before Esther. Derek was consistently booked for magic shows. I was doing my real estate work. When I had time, I was taking as many pictures of Esther as I could, to keep her Facebook page active. When we had downtime, we’d sit together in the living room, TV on, both of us facedown in our phones.

  One night we were sitting in the living room, just doing our typical routine. Derek was reading messages and responding to Comments, and then all of a sudden, he burst into tears. I didn’t notice at first. I was lost in my own stuff, not paying attention to him. But when I finally looked over, he was sobbing. I laughed at him because I knew he’d been overwhelmed and tense, so I thought he was just letting it all out. (I’m kind of a jackass like that.) But he didn’t laugh with me as he normally would have. He was serious. He handed me the phone and told me to read it.

  Derek had been reading a message to the page from a woman who was vegan but her husband wasn’t. They’d lived happily, each allowing the other to live and eat as they preferred for many years. But one day when they were in the grocery store together, her husband was ahead of where she was in the aisle. She watched as he picked up bacon and then put it back. She said nothing to him at the time, but when they got back in the car, she asked about it. He looked at her and just said one word: “Esther.” And it was understood. He couldn’t eat bacon anymore.

  I felt a pit in my stomach when I read the message. It’s hard to explain how it feels to read that kind of message. I had never been told by anyone that I had that kind of an impact on them. Clearly, neither had Derek. This was an older couple, dare I say, probably in the third act of their lives, and that someone of that age would even consider changing his life led to the realization of how powerful Esther was and what potential she had. And this was all without our saying things like, You should be vegan or You shouldn’t be eating this or You shouldn’t be doing that. A picture and a caption. That’s all it was. They had such an incredible influence on people we’d never met or spoken with. How was this possible?

  Photos of Esther making people laugh and smile were helping them make the connection on their own, without our pressing a negative message or showing horrific photos that most people ignored—ourselves included. Esther was a very real being who was having a very real impact. This was working out better than we ever could have dreamed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When you think of Christmas, what comes to mind? Ornamented trees with twinkling lights? Kisses under the mistletoe? Beautifully wrapped presents? Christmas songs that started playing the day after Halloween without even giving a thought to poor Thanksgiving?

  For us, it was all of that plus the complex logistical gymnastics of planning our family visits while making arrangements for the animals. We were days away from Christmas, and after our usual back-and-forth about how long we’d be away, the dates were set: We would visit Derek’s family on Christmas Eve and come back the morning of Boxing Day (December 26) to see my mom. We’d lined up Leta to watch the pets and even miraculously got our shopping done in time. Everything was going according to plan.

  Until it stopped.

  And by “it,” I mean everything. On December 21, three days before we planned to leave, an ice storm hit and took everything out. We lost our power, our heat—everything that makes life worth living, at least to my mind.

  If you’ve never experienced an ice storm, it goes… well, the words ice and storm convey it fairly well, but the details are pretty juicy: Freezing rain coats everything. It’s insanely cold, so you’d think it would snow, but it doesn’t. It’s this bone-chilling rain that otherwise seems harmless at first. It turns everything into icicles—a beautiful winter wonderland. Make that a beautiful, dangerous winter wonderland.

  Imagine the worst blizzard you’ve ever seen. Now raise the tem
perature a few degrees to the point where instead of snow, it’s just incredibly cold water. The water sticks to every surface, and when the icy air hits the water, it freezes. It’s actually quite lovely… until you try to move. Your driveway becomes a skating rink (people literally skated down our street that day), the roof of your house creaks from the weight of the ice shifting, and your biggest fear after that is a sunny day. That’s when things start to melt a little bit, and you don’t know what’s going to come crashing down around you.

  We’d known there was a big storm coming. And as is often the case in these situations, some people were buying up all the water and canned goods at the grocery store. By contrast, we were there just picking up some watermelon for Esther. I know that sounds like a questionable decision, but we get storm warnings all the time! They rarely turn into anything major.

  You hear the same thing from people who move to Florida or other places where hurricanes tend to come through. Yes, occasionally a hurricane actually endangers property and even lives. But most of the time, the hurricane just fizzles out over the water or diminishes to a tropical storm, and the only thing most people have to deal with is some heavy rain and wind. Something truly devastating, like Hurricane Katrina, is by far more the exception than the rule. Usually, it’s much ado about nothing.

  So we didn’t pay much attention to this particular ice storm warning. Who can know when a bad one is really going to hit? Call it Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome. Or call it very bad planning. In my defense, I couldn’t plan. Our lives had changed so much that I think I was in denial just as a defense mechanism. Before we had Esther, if we knew we were in trouble, we could pack our pictures and our dogs and cats, get into a car, and get out of Dodge. But now? Any emergency evacuation plans were out of the question. Fun fact: You can’t pack a 500-pound pig in a car. And in the back of my head, I had this dreaded hypothetical where Derek was saying, We need to leave! and I was refusing. I’d be that guy on the news, clinging to his dog on the roof during a flood after everyone else had left. The helicopters would be flying overhead and people on Twitter would be tweeting What a dumbass. ROTFL and I’d just be up there like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. There was no way I would leave Esther behind in a cold, dark house with no idea when the power was coming back on—not even with a house sitter.