by Linda Moller
‘The pigs have been found,’ she cried out to Taggerty. ‘The police say they’re at Hope Farm in Coxton, wherever that is. Isn’t it Haxham way? But that must be thirty miles away. I can’t believe it!’
‘Well, you go,’ growled Taggerty. ‘Arrange to meet Timpson there with his truck. See that he gives you a price for the pigs straight off the field. So he’s got to load them. Heaven help him! Get the price up as much as you can of course, but don’t come home without selling them.’
Mr Timpson and the Faraways were waiting near the gate for Mrs Taggerty’s arrival. The Faraways looked nervous, even more so when Mrs Taggerty got out of her car.
‘Mrs Taggerty,’ said Mr Timpson. ‘There are thirteen pigs here, not twelve.’
Mrs Taggerty’s face fell. Not their pigs? Oh don’t be so daft, she told herself. Twelve or thirteen, their pigs or not their pigs, better those than none.
‘Take a look, Mrs Taggerty. Are they yours? You can see three of them just there.’
The three pigs were by the stony track that led from the gate to the farmhouse. They were grazing a new and most tender growth of grass along its edges. Now and then came a quiet grunt of contentment.
‘Oh yes, that’s them,’ Mrs Taggerty said. ‘Well, well, who would have thought to find them here.’
Instantly the pigs raised their heads. That voice! That voice! Mrs Taggerty’s voice! And then they saw her staring at them over the gate. So they’d been found. After all that, they’d been found. Mrs Taggerty. The man. The cattle truck. The nightmare. All the horror was back. But this time it was real, it was actually happening… now. They’d be put in the truck and driven off to … to be … The pigs fled.
There was no time to think or plan. Only to get away. Which way? Runtling, all of them, rushed headlong for the gap they had forced in the blackthorn hedge many days past.
‘It’s blocked,’ yelled Runtling.
Only three days before Nick had blocked it firmly to keep out stray sheep or dogs. He didn’t want any farmer on his land collecting stray animals for fear he’d see the pigs.
‘We can’t get through,’ Fern shouted.
‘Well push through somewhere else. Anywhere. Hurry! Hurry!’
‘But it’s thick blackthorn and a fence now too. It’s hopeless. It’ll take hours to get through.’
‘And it’s daytime and we’ll be seen,’ wept the Piglings. ‘They’ll follow us.’
So they were trapped, were they? Runtling’s fear turned to anger, then to hate. And his words came slow and cold.
‘I’m not going. I’m staying. We must fight. Who will fight with me? We are thirteen, they’re only three. Even if more come, remember our bite. It’ll cripple them. Come on, wait for them in the thicket … our fortress … Do you trust me?’
They had no choice.
‘Yes, these pigs are ours all right,’ Mrs Taggerty said, although she hardly recognised them. ‘But they look much thinner. Of course they’ve lost a lot of weight. Been short of food all those days. Must have been.’
‘That’s just it, Mrs Taggerty,’ Mr Timpson was apologetic but firm. ‘I’m afraid I can’t take them. I only deal in fat pigs. My trade is with butchers, you see. I wish I could help, but I don’t know of anyone looking for pigs to fatten at the moment.’
Polly stepped forward quickly.
‘Mr Timpson, we would take the pigs if we could. But we’ve just bought this farm. It cost us every penny we had so we can’t pay cash. But I have a gold necklace. I haven’t had time to have it valued. Mrs Taggerty, would you be interested in that?’
Mr Timpson glanced kindly at Polly.
‘May I be permitted to see it, Mrs Faraway? I may be able to advise you both.’
‘Of course. I brought it with me hoping …’
She handed over a dark red and gold box. Mr Timpson examined the necklace closely until he found the tiny engraved sign he was looking for. He seemed pleased and nodded at Polly.
‘Mrs Taggerty, this necklace is almost certainly worth rather more than you would expect to get for the pigs. If I were you I’d take it. It’s valuable and very lovely.’
Mrs Taggerty was thinking. It’s gold, real gold. Taggerty is such a miser. He never gives me anything. No jewellery, not even chocolates, nothing! So I’ll have this necklace. And I don’t care what Taggerty says! She took the necklace in its box.
‘Thank you for your help, Mr Timpson. Goodbye Mrs Faraway. Goodbye Mr Faraway.’
‘And now,’ said Polly, ‘Nick, quick. Paint off that “Less” from the sign. It’s Hope Farm from now on. I’m off to tell the pigs.’
The pigs stood in battle order, heads raised, waiting. They had heard the sound of a car driving off. Shortly afterwards they heard the noise of a truck starting up and pulling away. And after that – silence. They looked at each other, unsure. Was this a trick? Then, running towards them, leaping and smiling, came Polly. She dropped down on her knees before them.
‘You’re ours now, pigs, and you’re here to stay. For ever and ever!
And the following month this advertisement appeared in the local papers:
The Real World of Pigs
PIGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM. Not by their own choice are they dirty and smelly. They earned this reputation from the way they were traditionally kept, often on an undrained, cobbled floor in a small sty, just a lean-to against the farmhouse or buildings. There their dung heaped up in a corner of the open end of the sty, a corner carefully reserved for this by the pigs. They were, you see, doing their best to be clean. The rest of course was up to the farmer who could be pretty casual about the daily chore of cleaning the sty.
Pigs are really forest animals. They are not so perfectly adapted to life outside that environment. They have no coat of fur to protect them from the winter winds and cold or from the hot summer sun. Pigs are unable to sweat freely and easily become overheated, sometimes fatally. Once an archbishop’s famous prize pig died on the eve of an agricultural show, not of stage fright, but of heat stress! In the cool, moist, calm of the forest shades, however, pigs are no longer handicapped. Miraculously, there in and under the forest floor lies all their food. Long ago when most of our land was covered by forest, pigs must have felt they owned the earth.
Today’s pig has to make do with whatever shelter his keeper provides, good or bad. In a heatwave, if it only could, a pig would make for water or mud to wallow in, to roll in and cool off in ‘mud, glorious mud’. It’s true ‘there’s nothing quite like it for cooling the blood’.
Now a dirty pig is just one that has rolled most deliberately, most pleasurably, and of necessity, in mud. If only mud were Blush Pink or Spring Green, or any other nice decorator’s shade, a pig might be labelled something funny instead. Those lucky pigs who spend their daytime out of doors, have (for me) an agreeable piggy smell, and still luckier pigs who have access to water delight in it. No wonder, for a pig is of the hippopotamus family and a hippopotamus spends his tropical days submerged in water up to his snout. Perhaps he cannot sweat either.
A friend of mine kept pigs for years. Her pigs were let out daily for two hours both morning and evening. A river bounded her land. The pigs would splash around in it chucking stones about for fun. One day, she told me, they swam across the river and entered a church during a service. ‘Ah,’ said the priest with great presence of mind, ‘the Gadarene Swine.’ If you think that pigs swimming a river is a tall story, The Beast Book for the Pocket says a pig ‘swims well without suicide’.
On an organic farm near Wexford, in Ireland, a small herd of saddleback pigs has been used instead of a plough to clear areas of land that had lapsed into wildernesses of weeds and bramble. The pigs enthusiastically dig it all up. There is a disc of gristle at the end of a pig’s snout, backed by two extra bones in its nose, hardening it into an excellent tool for endless rootling, digging and probing in the earth for the pig goodies that lie within – the roots and the things that creep and crawl below. Meanwhile, the dung pigs drop
is a rich fertiliser for the soil. Thus does a pig partly sustain itself with less cost and great benefit to man.
But its dung has earned it a bad name in Ireland because the slurry from a large intensive pig enterprise was allowed to drain into that great fishing lake, Loch Sheelin, and the fish died. Silage effluent or cow slurry might have done the same. Nitrates from the vast grain lands draining into Lake Eerie in Canada did the same. Fertilisers like these can set up a process in water called eutrophication. In simple terms, this means an explosive growth of green algae and phytoplankton, drawing so heavily on the oxygen supply in the water that not enough remains to keep fish alive.
Pigs are herd animals and have a basic need for the company of other animals, particularly other pigs. That’s why Runtling, in this book, who was removed from his pig family and kept in a small sty at Stubbs’s farm, found life so unpleasant. All the straw or food a pig could want couldn’t compensate for his boredom and loneliness. Of course, he was not thought of as a pet, but as an economic waste food converter. Farmers are inclined to take the view that if an animal grows and puts on weight, it is contented. Not so, there are fat unhappy pigs just as there are fat unhappy people.
Piglets that have been kept as real pets seem to have adopted the human family as ‘other pigs’ or ‘other animals’ in the way that dogs substitute their human family for the pack. A pet runt I know of was coming in and out of the house, going walkies, even travelling in a car, and if left behind showed positive distress.
Of all farm animals the pig is surely the most intelligent and communicative, but if it’s an agricultural breed, its life as a pet will be sadly short.
These pigs can grow to a monstrous size. A large white boar can weigh up to 250 kilos (600 lbs) and a sow, 200 kilos (440 lbs). They can reach over 2 metres (over 7 feet) in length. Imagine it in the house! More practical would be a miniature pig like the Korean Potbellied, sometimes found in Garden Parks for children. It remains the same size as a dog, I believe.
So how is life for the majority of pigs today, spent as it is from birth to death in the enclosed buildings of an intensive pig farm? Well, they are never hungry, although every meal tastes the same. They are never too hot or too cold. And they are never without the close company of other pigs.
But within the sheds there is only one dominating smell and sound – that of pigs, interrupted at intervals by one other, the sound of their attendants whose clothing already smells of pig. And there is only one unchanging view, that of other pigs in a grey uniformity of concrete pens and steel rails.
And what is lacking? There is no sight of the world outside this factory. Nothing really of the life a pig is equipped for. No room to move freely, except round other pigs in the same pen. No chance to satisfy its innate and compulsive need to dig and delve in the earth with its purpose-made snout. That must bother it a lot as it stands on its concrete floor. There is no opportunity to exercise its keen and discriminating sense of smell and hearing, which in a more natural environment would be sending quick-fire messages for its brain to interpret, and its body to act on, all the livelong day.
And to all of this how does it adapt, an animal with such lively sensibilities as a pig? How does it? I ask.
Linda Moller
About the Author
Linda Moller worked as a farmer, a writer, a photographer and a documentary-maker. Her work centred on the preservation and conservation of all living things. Her love of nature began in childhood when she and her father would ramble the woods and ways of Lord Sefton’s estate in Lancashire. Their ‘nature trails’ always took place on a Sunday when the gamekeepers were off duty and they could trespass in peace! From these early pleasures she went on to become passionately interested in botany and conservation. She made two documentaries, The Shape of Heat and To be a Horse, and wrote for the Observer and the Guardian newspapers before turning her hand to fiction writing.
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2012 by The O’Brien Press Ltd,
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First published 1990
eBook ISBN: 978–1–84717–495–6
Copyright for text © Linda Moller
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© The O’Brien Press Ltd
Royalties to The Wildlife Trusts
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Moller, Linda
The great pig escape. - 2nd ed.
1. Swine - Juvenile fiction 2. Children’s stories
I. Title
823.9’14 [J]
The O’Brien Press receives assistance from
Editing, typesetting, layout and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd
Internal illustrations: Donald Teskey