Animal Farm

The tables have turned. For the last 24 hours we have been virtually trapped inside the house, while our overly amorous pig Bubble has free rein of the farm. The infamous Houdini pig with the beautiful ears – subject of previous posts – is up to her old tricks, only by now she has 100 kilos and a very powerful bite to back her up. It seems that she is on heat and there are wild boar in the area, and there is no way she is going to stay in her enclosure. She and her sister Squeak had been fairly securely confined by a double strand of wire electrified by a battery, but apparently a 9 volt shock is no deterrent to a pig with other things on her mind. We’ve persuaded her back in with bucket after bucket of food – which she eats very gratefully while we push her massive backside through the fence – then infuriatingly hops out again. We even resorted to luring her into a shed hoping to pen her inside, but as it lacks a door (she destroyed it a few months ago during an over-enthusiastic back-scratching session) she had no trouble jumping the 3-foot high pallet we had wedged across the doorway – remarkably daintily for a lady of her size.

Luckily her more demure and infinitely more refined sister wouldn’t dream of behaving in such a crass manner and simply watches despairingly as her wild and dotty sibling trots around accosting anyone who happens to pass by. If she didn’t pack such a painful bite (I speak from experience) it would

be quite nice to have a pig hanging around. She is like an o

vergrown and very enthusiastic dog and when she is not trailing after the long-suffering farm worker ‘helping’ him feed th

e chi

ckens a

nd repair fences, she spends most of the time in the courtyard upturning

b

uckets and digging up my freshly planted pansies to see what juicy morsels she might find underneath. She then pauses for long periods to think, or to gaze through the window at what we’re up to inside – I swear she’s working out how to open the front door.

Clearly this can’t go on – shutting up the chickens in the evening involves negotiating a love-starved pig in the dark; my daughter’s friend, arriving innocently in the courtyard this afternoon, opened the car door to find an inquisitive and very bristly snout thrust into her face. Her screams were quite impressive.

I’m afraid there may only be one solution …bacon, anyone?