The Mast-Head: Winter With Leo

Forgive me if I have mentioned this before, but winter has been hard on Leo the Pig.

For those of you unfamiliar with Leo, he is our pet 75-pound, 2-year-old, neutered boar, which my wife and oldest child bought for a ridiculous sum from a Texas con artist they met over the Internet. “He’ll only be 10 pounds, grown up!” they were told, “or your money back!” Ask them how that worked out next time you see them.

The pig mind is a curious thing; of all the animals I have known, they are the only ones for whom boredom appears constant. Years ago, when I worked briefly as a hot-walker at a Maryland thoroughbred barn, the high-strung horses would nip at our shoulders if we were not paying enough attention. That was the only animal behavior that came close.

Dogs quickly give up and go for a nap when the action slows. Cats slink off to their reveries. Pigs, on the other hand, have a range of emotional states, nearly all of them centered on their own demands.

Leo would much rather be outside rooting in the lawn or sleeping in a sunny place, which makes being cooped up inside torture. As I write this, he is at my side at the kitchen table, whining one of his almost cetacean choruses, then wandering to the porch door, which he has distressed with little tusk-marks in attempts to get the message across that he needs to go out for a pee or wants me to get up from my work to give him more breakfast.

That taken care of, he will return perhaps to the kitchen to root at my ankles, which hurts after a while as he inevitably escalates the pressure. So I put my feet up on a chair. Leo responds by walking over to a wooden chest in the entryway and loudly lifting its lid again and again while the rest of the house is sleeping. Then it’s back to poking at the door with his snout. If I yell at him to stop, he’s at my side once more, biting the chair seat while hoping for a scratch behind his ears, and nipping my toes if I do not comply straightaway.

Next, he might take all the cookbooks off the bottom shelf, the one he can reach, and push them around on the floor tiles. One of them, a collection of Vietnamese recipes, frequently draws his attention. He is not one of those Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs that were popular in the last round of porcine madness to sweep the nation, but it is a notable coincidence.

Leo has been described as more of a traditional English pig, pink underneath a coat of coarse white bristles. He’d make a good paintbrush, I tell him when he is being especially annoying. My friends suggest bacon.