Mar022009
Is that bacon I smell, or the neighbor’s pet
Filed under Animals, General, humor by bob hammerstrom at 5:45 pm
Today is one of those swine (I mean swell) work days, when a blizzard gets the wife’s car stuck in the driveway, and my editor asks me to go out and photograph a pig. Yup, a pig. I’m used to the building photos and the big rock in Mont Vernon, but a pig?
Now this isn’t just any little piglet, at least to those workers at the Animal Medical Center of New England in Nashua, and some of my co-workers. To them, this is a cute and cuddly little animal. Here’s what they didn’t see.
Staff photo by Bob Hammerstrom
As I was brought in to the animal hospital’s intensive care unit, I saw a couple people laughing. One was holding on to the piglet, with pink tape wrapped around an I.V. in it’s leg.
It wasn’t until I rounded a desk that I saw why they were all laughing. Can you guess? It was doing what pigs do best - all over the floor, and then all over it’s cage. Yes, that cute little flat-nosed, wirery-haired creature was leaving it’s #2 all over the place, and then stomping through it.
Animal rights activists will need to monitor their blood pressure from here on.
Sarcastic thoughts kept entering my mind all the way back to the newsroom. How could I take this so seriously? After all, I grew up in a Midwestern farm town, where livestock’s days were numbered. When cattle, chickens, turkeys, and yes - pigs, reached a certain age and weight, off to the slaughter house they would go. Only in a very few cases were animals spared as pets to be showed at the 4-H events.
Here in the eastern part of the United States, people treat animals differently. Activists fight to stop hunters, and the media jumps at every opportunity to do a story on an abused pet, or wild animal saved from death.
Now, before you start with the nasty, sarcastic comments about being inhumane, take a look through your refrigerator and closets at home. That bacon may not taste the same now, and you’ll have that image of Miss Piggy in your head when grilling pork chops. And those work gloves in the garage. Yup, them too! All came from pigs. And the next time you order a hot dog at the baseball game, remember, it most likely came from this piglet’s cousin some where down the line.
Check out Tuesday’s Telegraph, or http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/, to read a story about the piglet by Karen Lovett, and more of my pictures. Remember, you can take a pig out of the barnyard, and call it your pet, but you cannot take the barnyard out of the pig and call it clean.
-Bob Hammerstrom
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