Happily Ever Esther

by Steve Jenkins

  I know we hadn’t been at the farm very long, at least in the big picture. But my mind moves a million miles a minute, and no matter how fast we worked, I always felt we could do more. We had barely scratched the surface of what was available to us and the animals, and sometimes it felt like such a battle to reclaim the neglected space. It was incredibly satisfying when we did it, and watching animals explore an area that had been “animal-free” for the better part of three decades was an amazing experience.

  But as soon as we finished one space, I’d look past that field into the one beyond, noticing all the fallen trees and broken fences. It seemed like every moment of celebration was interrupted by the realization that we had barely even started on what we ultimately needed to do out there. Regardless, we knew to celebrate the small victories and not let ourselves get too overwhelmed with the upcoming workload.

  As everyone got settled into their new living arrangements, we felt a huge weight lift from our shoulders. We have really thick skin, but when you put your life on social media, everybody becomes an expert on everything you do. We felt like we were constantly being judged for our actions: I don’t know about you, but the daily caloric intake for a horse is a complete mystery to me. Or was, before we got a horse. We were always very aware of what we posted online, because we didn’t want to get dragged into an argument with someone or have to defend ourselves. We had too much to do, and all of it was more important than dealing with internet trolls. But that’s par for the course—it’s something you accept when you open up your life to the world. And, ultimately, nothing was really happening that could have caused us a problem.

  Until suddenly something did. Derek went out to the barn one afternoon and discovered what looked like a scene from a nineties slasher movie. There was blood all over the walls, on the doors, and in the straw.

  Derek immediately called for me over his walkie-talkie, and just from how upset he sounded, I knew I needed to get there fast. I came running out of the house and into the barn, and I felt a wave of anxiety wash over me when I got my first glimpse of the scene.

  Derek had already headed out the back door toward the forest. So without really getting a good look at what had happened or who was in there, I ran through the barn and out the back door, hopped the gate into the pigs’ pasture, and followed Derek through the gate into the woods. That’s where we found Leonard, lying on the ground with a gash in his leg that was about eight inches long and an inch deep.

  My first thought: I had been working on fencing the day before and left a small section at the very end only partially secured. It was nailed to the post, but there were little wire ends a foot long that I still needed to wrap and secure. In the moment, I was sure Leonard had been caught by one of the wires, that this horrible injury was entirely my fault.

  I was so upset, and even more so because I expected Derek was about to yell at me—until I saw Dan walk out of the barn in equally distressing condition. This hadn’t been any fencing accident—it was a pig battle!

  Leonard had unquestionably been the head of the pig herd, so much so that we never even considered that Dan might challenge him for top position. But Dan must have seen signs of weakness in Leonard and planned to capitalize on it, much as Esther was doing with Shelby.

  Male pigs such as Dan and Leonard have massive tusks with tips as sharp as razor blades. The pigs use their heads like wrecking balls and will slam those tusks into an opponent as a defense mechanism. We don’t know how this particular clash started, but it ended in a fight so serious that poor Leonard was too scared to even go back to the barn.

  Dan clearly had come out on top of this particular melee, so we used kibble to lure him inside. Once we got him under control, we turned our attention to Leonard. We wanted to get him into the old barn where B.J. and Escalade lived before moving in with the cows. While there’s never a good time for a pig fight, we were at least thankful this had happened when it had—and not a month earlier, when the barn was still totally full. After a bit, we secured Leonard and Dan in separate stalls while we waited for the vet to arrive.

  Derek and I stayed in the barn, offering both our injured fighters watermelon and grapes to keep their spirits up, but poor Leonard was having none of it. I’ve noted how expressive pigs are with their faces, particularly their eyes. Seeing Leonard after the fight was absolutely heartbreaking. He was usually so lively and enthusiastic, but now his head hung low, a look of total despair on his face. He had been defeated, and we didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d never spend time with his lifelong friends again. His reign as king of the herd was over. He was devastated, and so were we. Until then, we’d seen such despair on the faces of pigs only when looking at photos of them in livestock trailers or at commercial farms.

  The vet arrived and promptly confirmed that both pigs would require stitches. Leonard’s wounds, he said, might even include muscle damage. The gash had gone clear through the skin and the heavy layer of fat pigs have, right into the leg muscles. That explained why Leonard was having such a hard time walking. His pain must have been excruciating. He couldn’t stand up on that side, and as we knew from our experience with Esther, leg and foot injuries are not to be taken lightly with pigs. At Leonard’s age and size, a bad leg could kill him.

  The doctor immediately started stitching up the wounds. Dan went first because his were far less severe, and then it was Leonard’s turn. During the procedure, the vet also suggested we trim both Leonard’s and Dan’s tusks to help prevent this from happening in the future. Removing pig tusks is a common practice in commercial settings—it’s usually done when they’re piglets, by brute force.

  (Believe it or not, here’s what a staff member at one of the animal hospitals said to us: “Know how we did that in my day? With a baseball bat.” He accompanied this lovely comment with a gesture toward my face as if he were jamming the end of a bat into my mouth. It sent shivers up my spine and brought to mind how Esther must have lost her tail, most likely to a pair of pliers at the hand of some farm laborer.)

  Luckily, female pigs don’t have tusks anywhere near the size of those on males, so it’s not quite the same issue with Esther. We didn’t need to worry about trimming her tusks, because they simply weren’t big enough to pose a serious problem. But Dan and Leonard are very well equipped to fight if need be, and we’d just witnessed firsthand how dangerous that could be.

  Dr. Kirkham explained the process of trimming the tusks, reassuring us that it was 100 percent painless. However, he warned us, “they’ll scream like jetliners.” He continued: “You’re not going to like it, it’s not pretty, but I promise it won’t hurt them.” He explained the procedure thoughtfully, knowing we’re extremely sensitive when it comes to our animals. He showed us the tool he was going to use. It was basically a long metal wire with small wooden handles on either end. It acts like a snare, looping over the pig’s snout and top jaw and tightening. This causes the pig to freak out and try to escape by backing up. And this is where the “jetliner” thing comes in. The pig goes into complete panic mode, but once it hits the wall and has nowhere else to go, it just stands still with its mouth open, shrieking at an ear-piercing level. It honestly sounds like torture. Then the wire is used as a saw to cut the tusk above the nerve, similar to trimming a fingernail. Once the tusks are cut, the snare comes off, and the pig stops screaming and wanders off like nothing ever happened.

  So the tusk-cutting itself is very easy; it’s the snaring part that sucks. And Dr. Kirkham was right: we didn’t like it one bit. After all the stories I’ve told about panicking anytime any of my animals dealt with any sort of trauma, did you think there was any chance I could shake this off? I might be getting a little better about handling these things, purely out of necessity, but let’s face facts: all of my animals are family to me (and to Derek as well), and we can’t stand seeing any of our children in pain or fear.

  Unfortunately, this had to be done, at least in Dan’s case. We knew there wasn’t any other choice�
��if Dan and Leonard clashed again, Dan might just end up killing him. So you do what you have to do.

  The vet trimmed Dan’s tusks first, and the procedure went pretty smoothly, all things considered. As for Leonard, even though we knew the process itself wasn’t a big deal, we were also considering Leonard’s injured leg. We didn’t want to cause him any panic that might lead to his injuring himself even more, so we decided not to trim his tusks at that time.

  The situation with the two pigs was bad enough that we knew we couldn’t chance another fight, so we planned to keep Leonard with Bear and move Dan and Bobbie into their own space.

  In determining the logistics of who would go where, we immediately got to work securing the next pasture over. The plan was to move the goats from the old barn to the cow pasture, move the cows to the new pasture, and put Dan and Bobbie in the old barn. That left April and her babies in the same spot, with Leonard and Bear in the same space they had previously shared with Dan and Bobbie. Did you follow all that? We were having just as hard a time wrapping our heads around all the shuffling, but there was no alternative. The pressure was on to prep the new pasture as quickly as possible so we could get everyone moved.

  Our brand-new cow barn was now taken over by goats and sheep, so that left the cows without shelter again: yet another item to add to our growing to-do list. Had it been winter, we would have had serious problems on our hands. But it was spring, so we had a few months to get another barn built. We focused on sorting the fences.

  Just a few days after the fight, the great migration began. We moved Leonard into Bear’s stall and put Dan and Bobbie in the old barn, which had its own little pasture. The goats settled into their nice new barn, and the cows took full advantage of their massive new pasture, even though it was still missing its barn.

  All this time, things had been getting more complicated with our volunteer Ruth. We’d tried to remain hopeful that we could work through her control issues, but things were getting out of hand. It’s one thing to act questionably on your own time; it’s a whole other ball game when it happens right on the farm.

  Ruth started making her own rules—she really was taking over. During public days, she would carry on as if the sanctuary were hers, telling people where they could go and what they could do. It was becoming very troubling for us, because her judgment was questionable a few times when incidents involving the animals occurred.

  Lord knows we had more than our fair share of fencing. We had kept the goats in a fenced-in forest pasture for weeks without difficulty. But pigs aren’t goats, and when we let some pigs in, we learned they were way too strong for the fencing we had in there.

  After the weekend when the pigs escaped, we left a note that Monday asking Ruth not to let the pigs out. But she decided to let them out anyway. When we got to the barn and saw the pigs weren’t in their stall, we immediately knew what had happened. Derek yelled for Ruth and asked where the pigs were; as soon as she started speaking, he cut her off: “The fences are down.”

  Derek immediately ran out the back of the barn toward the pen. Before we even got there, we could see the fence was even more bent than usual, and the pigs were gone. The pigs had crossed the service road and gone down into the ravine. It was super rocky, very steep, and covered in dense bush. That’s not ideal pig terrain, much less people-searching-for-pigs terrain.

  Within a few minutes, we located a few of the piglets in the ravine and started directing them back up toward the barn. They were pretty easy to move—thankfully not at all like Esther when we had our forest fights. Just as we rounded the corner with three of the five piglets, we saw the other two coming down the path between the two pastures immediately beside our barn. They were heading straight for Esther, who had since woken up and decided to join us outside for breakfast.

  Here’s the issue with that: Esther had never met another pig before without a fence separating her from the other pig. We knew she didn’t like other pigs, and all of a sudden there were way more pigs than people in attendance, with nothing to keep the pigs apart.

  My heart was in my throat, expecting it to become a literal battle. Esther was dramatically bigger than the piglets—she could injure or even kill several of them in a matter of seconds. (Yes, she’s a sweetheart in most instances, but all of that goes out the window when it’s a pig-versus-pig situation. That’s just the nature of pigs.)

  Mercifully, Esther seemed as perplexed about the situation as everyone else was. She honked and spun around as the piglets came running from all directions, but they went right past her and into the barn.

  Afterward, Derek went to have words with Ruth. Things escalated to a yelling match, and Derek told her she was no longer welcome at the farm. It was hard on everyone. We knew Ruth had been trying to help, but we couldn’t take chances when it came to the safety of our animals, and the piglet situation could have turned out so much worse. We were incredibly lucky that no one was hurt. Our experience with Ruth led to the creation of a volunteer-coordinator position, a thorough review of our policies surrounding who comes to the farm, and very specific guidelines covering what can and cannot be done. It was sad to lose Ruth, but it was a beneficial learning experience in moving forward with the sanctuary.

  We had to focus on dealing with the pig situation. We had figured for a while that we would need to create another pig herd at some point, but we always assumed that would consist of splitting up April and her piglets once the babies got a little older. Susie Coston at Farm Sanctuary had warned us that fights among pigs were almost guaranteed, but we’d figured that would consist of the piglets eventually trying to establish their roles in the herd. But then Dan and Leonard surprised us with their fight. It was yet another huge learning experience for us. With them split up, we now had three pig herds, plus the potential of another looming battle among April’s offspring. There was no time to relax; we needed to prepare for a fourth herd. This looked like it would be a never-ending cycle.

  We figure we’ll just need to keep building as we bring in more animals.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  By the time fall came around, we were exhausted. We’d been going full-tilt in nonstop activity for what seemed like a lifetime. In reality, it had been only two years since all this madness began, and things had been happening so quickly we hadn’t had an opportunity to process it all, never mind take time off to reflect.

  Derek had been able to get away to visit his parents in Northern Ontario a couple of times, and I had gone to a few Highland games here and there. But we hadn’t taken time off together since well before Esther the Wonder Pig had become a sensation online. The coming winter was going to be our downtime. We didn’t have plans to leave the farm, but, for once, there would be no crowdfunding campaigns, no workdays, no fences to build. Okay, technically, there were lots of fences to build, but winter makes working outside all but impossible for most tasks, so no fences would be built until spring.

  We finally saw a window with a little bit of time for us to take a breather. We even had a new woodstove and wood to burn, so we knew our heating issues—although not over, because hauling wood is no picnic—were squared away for a while. And hauling wood still beats a $1,200 monthly electric bill for so little heating that it still leaves you, your pig, and your pipes frozen.

  Compared to the previous two years, being basically alone on the farm for a couple of months sounded like an ideal holiday. But then I got an invitation from a foundation based in Exuma, in the Bahamas, to visit the world-famous swimming pigs—the latest viral travel trend. You travel to an otherwise-deserted tropical island full of wild pigs that come swimming out to greet visitors arriving on boats.

  To us, obviously, this sounded like paradise. When we checked it out online, the pictures provided very much the same impression. We’d heard about this place for years. Every week, Esther’s fans sent us numerous articles and photos with accompanying messages such as “Have you seen this?” or “Esther needs to go swimming in the Bahamas.” But
there was also the occasional “I don’t like the looks of this; something’s not right.”

  Put a pin in that: you can bet we’ll be coming back around to it later.

  The island had become one of those places we put on our bucket list, knowing full well people who run animal sanctuaries don’t really get to take holidays. But this wasn’t exactly an invitation, according to the organizers who contacted us; they said they wanted our opinion on how they could improve things.

  They assured us the pigs were really well cared for, fed, and watered daily, and that their lives were as grand as could be. They also promised us the pigs were never used for food, that the locals all loved them, and they’d been there for years.

  The story most commonly told to tourists is that these pigs were brought to the islands back in the pirate days. They’d get dropped off while the pirates went off and did their pirate thing, returning to harvest a pig for food as required. It makes sense, but it’s been awhile since Blackbeard sailed the sea, so I didn’t really put too much stock in the legend.

  Regardless, I shared the info with Derek, who had been dying to take a tropical vacation since the last time I dragged him around Europe for three weeks. He loves to travel as much as I do, but he’s much more of a peace-and-quiet kind of guy. Derek travels to kick back and rest in breathtaking environments, not to take your destination by storm—which (no surprise to anyone) is what I prefer.

  During our European trip, I had us scheduled to be in a different city pretty much every other day. We picked up a rental car in Amsterdam and then ripped through Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and back to the Netherlands over the course of a week and a half. We drank beer from a boot in Germany, jumped three hundred feet into a canyon in Switzerland, and explored the Palace of Versailles in France. It was a dream vacation for me, but Derek’s dream vacation involves palm trees and a wristband that entitles him to bottomless piña coladas all week.