A Pig's Tale
A wonderful story about
Chitlin, the pet pig over at Atomic Nerds.
Caution - multiple drink alert - it hurts when you snort a decent Merlot out your nose...
Year of the Pig
Michele blogs about expectations of Christmas as being perfect and Rockwellian, versus the reality of something more resembling a wacky Christmas movie.
I never really had any expectations of a Rockwellian Christmas. The few memories I do have of Christmases before my parents� divorce (I was seven) are of imperfect holidays- Grandma was over and she was riding Mom for something, the Christmas tree went over after cats chased each other up it (or I pulled it over), always something. After the divorce, Christmas day was divided between Dad�s house- always fraught, since my stepmother made no bones about hating my guts, and liked to use holidays to underline her contempt- and Mom�s. The bits that weren�t spent under my stepmother�s just-drop-dead glare were imperfect, but nice; presents were opened Christmas morning, then there was hot chocolate, tea, pajamas all day (until I had to go over to Dad�s), and reading whatever looked the most promising out of the books given that year.
Some years are more imperfect than others.
First, a little background: When I was maybe eleven or twelve, for reasons that seem unfathomable to me now, my mother and I thought it would be a fun idea to get a pet pot-bellied pig. They were exotic, they were all the rage, and being the precocious little animal-lover I was, I had read all about how intelligent and social they were. Which indeed they are- the great pig saga was my first introduction to the lesson every pet keeper needs, which is that high intelligence is often a drawback rather than a plus in a pet, and social means a lot of things.
At the time, we were fairly naive when it comes to obtaining animals; we still thought newspaper classifieds were a great way to find a breeder. We used the classifieds and found a breeder in a nearby county, who traveled into town to sell us a piglet. At the time, we had no idea that during the height of the pot-bellied pig craze, it was a common scam tactic for unscrupulous breeders to pass a cross of the small, docile, expensive potbelly and a big, mean, cheap farm pig off as a purebred potbelly to prospective suckers who wouldn�t be able to tell the difference. As the cute little black piglet we brought home that day wound up growing to more than 200 pounds of ornery pork, it is very likely we were the suckers in this scenario.
We named him Chitlin, short for the chitterlings (stewed, boiled, and then maybe fried bits of pig intestine) common in the region of Lousiana my mother grew up in. That we found this hliarious tells you something about my mother and me, and also perhaps explains why Chitlin grew up with a grudge against humanity. As a piglet, like many young animals that undergo a radical personality shift as adults, he was every bit the charming pet we had been led to expect he would be. He was a litterbox-trained housepet who liked to sleep next to the bed, and LOVED to snuggle in a beanbag. He was easily trained, as he�d do anything for food. For about two years, Chitlin was an adored, if unusual, companion.
And things rapidly devolve into chaos. Quite the story!
Posted by DaveH at December 24, 2007 6:25 PM