The Mast-Head: Wrong by Half

Leo the pig has put on quite a few pounds since the last time I wrote about him. As pigs do, he grew fat this spring and summer, grazing on the lawn, then munched with pleasure on the black cherries, acorns, and beach plums that reached the ground in the fall.

The last time I was able to get a scale under him, he weighed about 110 pounds. Now, in his fifth year of life, I estimate he might be closer to 180. Where this ends I don’t know.

I had been way off guessing how big he would get back when he arrived at our house, shipped from a backyard breeder in Texas via air freight. He would grow to be as big as our black Lab mix, only with shorter legs, I declared. I was wrong by half.

Next time we want to weigh him, it will have to be on the scale at the town waste center.

Pigs can live up to 18 years, I read somewhere. That means that Leo may well have plenty more growth ahead of him. The biggest pig I ever saw was a massive mountain of flesh and bristles lying under a tree near a ferry dock in the Caribbean that did not flinch as four small children climbed onto its spacious flank for a photograph. Given Leo’s good and easy life, maybe that is ahead.

It was not supposed to be this way, of course. The breeder had made assurances that her pigs never got bigger than 10 pounds. When Leo arrived, in a plastic crate about the size and shape of a soda bottle, one might have been deluded into believing that. There was even supposed to be a money-back guarantee — you can guess how that worked out. I was told “she sounded so nice on the phone!”

Sure, information to the contrary abounded. One story I enjoyed involved a supposed “tea cup” pig that grew to 200 pounds and took a dislike to a grandmother, particularly when she tried to sit on a sofa that the pig considered its own. The web is filled with tales of pigs eating woodwork, destroying furniture, rooting up lawns, harassing other pets, and so on. I protested that getting a pig was a very, very bad idea; it made no difference.

I think of Leo’s trajectory as a cautionary tale about the dangers of the online world in general. People on the internet will tell you anything — and some will always believe.