The pig barn is not secure
“The pig barn is secure,” my husband told me the day before our piglets arrived.
He spent hours out there cleaning, repairing, altering, and patching in anticipation of the little oinkers’ arrival.
He was confident of its ability to contain the four-legged diggers.
And well he should have been.
The building is built on an old roadbed, so the floor of it is predominantly blacktop. The remainder is concrete, he having poured some to ensure the stability of the floor.
Our building housed several hundred pigs over the years, and only a few have managed to escape, but it is still known to happen.
In case you didn’t know, a pig has both a strong desire to dig and a strong nose with which to do it.
They can dig under fences and get out of places Houdini wouldn’t have dared go. They have an intense curiosity and a stubbornness that gets the job done. They don’t tolerate boredom well.
Also, believing the pig barn is secure is virtually the same as daring a pig to escape.
One day last week, my son came running into the house shouting about a pig being out. We all threw shoes on and took off to the pasture where the pigs live.
The grass in that field is taller than the little piglet, so finding him was a losing battle until our dog began barking quite loudly. (The dog thought finding the piglet meant receiving the piglet as his reward, but we managed to curb the dog and save the pig.)
Getting the pig back in the building was another story. It ran back and forth through the field, through the fence into another pasture, back through the fence and onto the road in front of the barn.
We followed, circled around, yelled instructions, called off the dog again and stopped traffic momentarily.
Finally, it ran into the feed room in the front of the building.
We were able to close off the doorway and return it to the pen where it promptly bedded down with the other piglets who had stayed behind. (He probably was bragging about his adventures and about how stupid he was able to make us appear.)
We spent the next half hour trying to figure out where he had escaped from and making additional repairs, alterations and patches to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
It hasn’t, but we won’t be jinxing ourselves again by making any kind of confident assurances any time soon.