The Unexpected Genius of Pigs

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As time passed, and friends or neighbours visited, they’d often catch their breath on seeing the honking great beasts amid the craters and spoil heaps that was our garden. Within a year, Roxi stood thigh-high to me and had developed a taste for house bricks. She kept rooting them up out of nowhere and then crunching them into powder. A pink pig with dark splodges, she had bat-like ears and a face that could best be described as ‘shovel-like’. She was densely built as well; a solid mass of muscle, fat and obstinacy. Had we let her stay in the house as a piglet, we’d have needed a winch to get her out.

Butch wasn’t quite so monstrously big. In the right light he could even have passed as cute. He was all black with an elongated belly and a soulful expression modelled on Yoda from Star Wars. Castrated at an early age, because frankly, the consequences of leaving him intact were unthinkable, our male minipig also reminded me of a henpecked husband around Roxi. She really did rule the roost, much to the displeasure of the chickens. Had she taken to crowing at sunrise, I don’t think any of us would have been surprised.

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