The Mast-Head: One Happy Pig
Leo the pig will not be 4 until the spring, but he already weighs about 10 times as much as his Texas trailer park breeder-slash-con artist claimed he would.
Regular readers of this column might remember Leo. He joined our household a couple of summers ago over my protests and after we sent a too-big check. My wife, Lisa, and eldest child had found out about supposed teacup pigs on (where else?) the Internet. He would only be about 10 pounds, they said. “And he won’t have tusks!”
Right.
I said he would end up about the size of our Labrador mix only with shorter legs. Lisa said he would stay small. We were both wrong.
The last time I was able to pick up Leo and step onto the bathroom scale with him, he weighed about 80 pounds. That was six months ago. Though he does not get fat-producing quantities of his special pig food, the lawn and fallen acorns are an endless source of calories, and his belly now clears our tile kitchen floor by only about two inches. Weasel, the Lab, tops out at just over 60 pounds.
Leo’s tusks are not really that big a deal, though we worry that one of these days he is going to get annoyed at Luna, the pug puppy, or Lulu, the little, long-haired mutt, and give one of them a slice. Instead, the problem is Leo’s hang- up about chairs, pots and pans, and anything else in the range of his snout. Place any object within about 16 inches of the ground, and Leo is going to flip it over or try to push it around. He has left a trail of broken chairs in his considerable wake and the lower shelves in the parts of the house he has access to are oddly bare.
In the aggregate though, Leo is less of a pain in the neck than the dogs. We have an understanding, he and I. Once he is fed in the morning and has received his requisite ear and chin scratching session from me and maybe an apple core or two, Leo heads back to bed. Later, he will go outside to graze and take care of his pig business on more or less private portions of the lawn. Meanwhile, the dogs follow me around, scrabble noisily among themselves over toys, leave their droppings wherever they please, and shed all over the place.
Indifferent, Leo shambles back inside and gets back into bed by the fireplace. By the time I leave the house to head to the office, he’s asleep again.
It’s a heck of a good life. Maybe I’m just jealous.