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Pig:

A Memoir

Charles Ortleb

Copyright © Rubicon Media, 2016

All rights reserved

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher

Published by Rubicon Media, Boston, Massachusetts

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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First Edition

In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

                                        —George Orwell

The Great Pig Pen

     So in the beginning, there were approximately 180 beautiful and handsome (or at least interesting) swine in The Great Pig Pen, a place that, in general, many of the inhabitants thought must be the most pleasant place on earth, except for the occasional day or night when it wasn’t. The members of the herd could not be faulted if they thought the good times would never end. They only knew what they knew.

     The more spiritual (or superstitious) members of the herd were convinced that they were blessed by The Almighty Hog and they were occasionally tempted to do wrong by the Invisible Evil Pig Devil.

      The Invisible Evil Pig Devil was something piglets were taught to believe in and fear almost from birth. It was a totally nefarious supernatural pig that could never be seen, but was always trying to inspire them to do wrong—acts that usually involved porcine disrespect or disobedience. And the Invisible Evil Pig Devil’s nefariousness was not confined to pig pens. He was also a bad actor in the human world that some pigs considered responsible for any horrible thing humans did to pigs. Luckily, the Boss family, by and large, did not seem to be under the influence of the Invisible Evil Pig Devil. At least not at first.

     The Invisible Evil Pig Devil was quite useful to the Council of Wise Porcine Elders. He was a very helpful icon for keeping rambunctious piglets in line. If any of the piglets were tempted to annoy their parents or the Wise Council of Porcine Elders, The Invisible Evil Pig Devil was responsible, and if he succeeded in making them do something they would regret, he would use his invisible powers to take them out of The Great Pig Pen into the human world where terrible—never totally specified—things would happen

    Beyond the fence that surrounded the herd, long, picturesque stretches of farmland stretched into a dark, mysterious forest, which by the denizens of The Great Pig Pen called “The Real World.” Such a place fascinated and filled the herd with anxiety. Whatever happened there was beyond the Domestic Pigs’ wildest imaginations and was left to the province of the Wild Boars, who somehow seemed to be able to negotiate its perplexing unknowns.

     Porcine life ebbed and flowed with the changing seasons, and most of the pigs in The Great Pig Pen were able to lead fulfilling lives doing what normal pigs do. As overlords go, Mr. and Mrs. Boss and their five very sickly children were kind and generous, considering that they were human beings and always dealing with one illness or another.

     Having said this, it must be noted that Sunday mornings at The Great Pig Pen were sometimes anxiety-provoking for the herd, because a toxic odor emanated from the farmhouse: bacon. But the herd had generally learned to deny what they were smelling. They pretended it was a kind of human flatulence one just didn’t acknowledge in polite porcine company. The Council of Wise Porcine Elders tried several times to convince the herd that the Boss family liked to burn a very unique kind of incense on Sunday mornings after coming home from church. This became known, in some astute circles in The Great Pig Pen, as the Council’s eggs-and-bacon cover-up.

     Some kind of plentiful but questionable pig food (technically referred to as “slop”) was always available to the herd, which many of the pigs loved. When Mrs. Boss poured the colorful mix from a large bag and told all of the pigs how good this recipe was for all of them, JoJo, the perpetually contrarian pig, was never impressed. “I can’t believe they expect us to eat this crap,” he would say. “I’d rather find something interesting in the dump. If they end up eating any of us, I hope we all taste like this slop and they get sick as can be!”

     Sadly, some of the herd had suffered a fate described in The Great Pig Pen as “Passing into Ham.” Everyone in the herd knew at least one doomed pig that had “passed into ham.” The Council and some astute adult pigs had no illusions about what the term meant. But to preserve their sanity, the pigs were able to simultaneously know the truth and share in the herd’s manner of softening the harsh reality the expression implied by simply trying to think about something else.

     “Passing into Ham” was, for Professor Gable IX, proof that the deadly human habit of euphemism had infected the domestic pigs.  At Moonlight University, he sometimes made his students shiver when he mockingly used the expression “passing into sausage or cassoulet.”

     In one of his more poetic moments, Professor Gable IX said, “Domestic Pigs are magicians. One minute you see them, and the next minute you don’t.”

     Given how sociable pigs are, it is hard to chronicle all of the complicated interactions among a very diverse group that included, among others, Pig, Cuchi-Cuchi, Mother and Father Gizmo, Aunt Mathilda and her girls, The Council of Wise Porcine Elders, Mythos (Clarence) The Pig Laureate, Omni The Total Information Pig, Esmeralda the Issues Pig, JoJo and The Mean Pigs, Tulip The Gardening Pig, Jasmine the Yodeler, Professor Gable IX the Wild Boar, Mayor Chow and his wife, Sassafras, Hermione and Buster Hognacious, Rufus, Coppelia the Beautiful, Veranda The Bitter Spinster Pig, Gunther the herd’s psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime, Tiggly-Wiggly, and Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig. But, given the import of what happened in The Great Pig Pen, an attempt must be made.

One Fine Day in March

    Because Cuchi-Cuchi often got up very early every morning before her older brother Pig (his real name) had completed his shuteye, she was practically glued to the gate of the fence when Mr. Boss arrived with the vet and other mysterious, important-looking people—often in white coats or business suits —who always appeared to be full of consternation. She listened to everything they said, because they were usually discussing very complicated pig diseases, and that was a subject extremely dear to Cuchi-Cuchi’s heart.

     The talking-tos Pig gave to Cuchi-Cuchi were usually very curative, but perhaps his most difficult medical intervention occurred when he saved her from “Porcine Spongiform Encephalopathy,” which she decided she had after one of Mr. Boss’s discussions with several vets and USDAers at the fence. It took almost a day of lecturing her, but by the end of his efforts, she was good to go.

     One morning she came bounding excitedly toward sleepy Pig, squealing, “We have Swine Mystery Disease! We have Swine Mystery Disease!” Nothing picked up Cuchi-Cuchi’s spirits more than a brand new diagnosis, especially if it was thought to be terminal.

     “We have what?” asked Pig.

     “Swine Mystery Disease. It’s all over the county. It’s very serious.”

     “What exactly is it?” a very annoyed Pig asked.

     “They don’t know. That’s why it’s called Swine Mystery Disease.”

     “That sounds very silly,” said Pig.

     “Oh, no it isn’t,” said Cuchi-Cuchi. “I suspect that I’m going to get it or I’ve already contracted it. Pig, please look at my tongue. Do I feel warm to you?”

     “How do you know anything about this Swine Mystery Disease?” asked Pig.

     She sniffily responded, “Didn’t I say that it’s called Swine Mystery Disease? It’s a complete mystery. It’s a mysterious mystery!”

     Pig was worried that their younger brother, the beloved piglet, Bambino, would develop a biomedical imagination like Cuchi-Cuchi’s. A few weeks before this, Cuchi-Cuchi had woken Pig up, saying, “Pig, I think I have porcine epigenetics.” Pig knew that she had probably picked those words up while listening to Mr. Boss and some scientist in a tight suit with highwater pants, but he didn’t even know what they meant. He just assured Cuchi-Cuchi that there was no way she had “porcine epigenetics.”

     Swine Mystery Disease was definitely something Pig would have to discuss that night with Professor Gable IX at Moonlight University.

     But Pig still had to get through the rest of the day, which always culminated in Mrs. Boss’s evening serenade. Every night, after doing the dinner dishes, Mrs. Boss came out in her apron at twilight with a bucket of treats and stood at the gate singing, “Oh, Piggy Boy,” which was sung to the tune of “Oh, Danny Boy.”

     Oh, Piggy Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
     From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
     The summer's gone, and all the roses falling,
     'Tis you, 'Tis you must go and I must bide.
     But come ye back when summer's in the meadow,
     Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow,
     For I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow—
     Oh, Piggy Boy, oh, Piggy Boy, I love you so!

It didn’t matter how many times Sassafras and Cuchi-Cuchi heard it. They always swooned. But whenever Pig saw Mrs. Boss barreling across the way toward The Great Pig Pen, he always muttered under his breath, “Oh, brother!” and headed to a far corner of The Great Pig Pen to work on his assignments for the night’s class at Moonlight University.

     Pig was generally fond of Mrs. Boss, but there was an unbearable sadness about her that sometimes forced him to look away and try to think about something else.

     Mrs. Boss had a domineering older sister who often visited from a farm in another county, and she was clearly very competitive with Mrs. Boss. Mrs. Boss had five chronically ill children, so, as a consequence, her older sister had to have six chronically ill children, and insisted her children were even more seriously ill, so she was constantly making the point at the gate (and some of the pigs could hear this all too clearly) that she deserved more sympathy because she obviously had a much harder row to hoe in life. Both women were always referring to a couple of their children as their “special needs darlin’s.” It was not uncommon for them to argue over which one had more children on what they called “the autism spectrum.”

   Cuchi-Cuchi always made sure she was standing close to the two sisters when they conversed. She never knew when she would pick up a new disease threat she feared might pass from all of the sick children to her and the rest of the herd. Each child almost seemed to be an epidemic unto themselves. Thus far, Cuchi-Cuchi had learned she might be in danger of contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, lyme disease, lupus, Sjogren’s syndrome, autism, Asperger’s, juvenile diabetes, cognitive dysfunction, drug sensitivity, brain damage, AIDS, focal paresis, loss of libido (Pig had a hard time explaining that one), shrinking limbs, strep throat, tongue discoloration, seizures, mood swings, transient blindness, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mysterious weight gain and mysterious weight loss. Those were the only ones she could remember hearing the sisters heatedly discuss.

     Whenever Mrs. Boss’s sister visited, Pig always a great deal of clarifying and disease-debunking to do with Cuchi-Cuchi. He often didn’t know where to begin. Cuchi-Cuchi would diagnose herself, and then Pig would have to patiently undiagnose her.

    On an almost weekly basis, Mrs. Boss’s children were taken to the doctor’s or a hospital for one medical test or another—even the ones who didn’t seem to be obviously ill. Omni The Total Information Pig reported to the Council that Mrs. Boss had spoken to her sister about the brain imaging that had been done on her children showing that most of them had something wrong with some vital part of their grey matter. Her older sister had to make one of her predictable comments that “the apples didn’t fall far from the tree,” but Mrs. Boss threw the whole thing back in her sister’s face by pointing out that her sister’s children often acted stranger and more brain-damaged than her own. “I wouldn’t talk, if I were you, Sister,” Mrs. Boss said.

     The two women often discussed how finicky their children’s eating habits were and how they had to constantly change their diets. They both talked a great deal about the “milestones” their “special needs darlin’s” had missed.

     One of Mrs. Boss’s children, Teddy, was always standing around in strange contorted postures the herd had never seen before in humans. Sometimes it seemed as if Teddy were bent over in extreme pain. Clearly, something was seriously wrong with Teddy. Often he would run in circles like Tiggly-Wiggly (one of the Chow’s troubled sons) or he would just lie flat on the ground or on the top of the picnic table staring up at the sky making bird sounds. Sometimes he had to be pulled away from other children his age, because he was trying to bite or scratch them. Aunt Mathilda, Pig’s mother’s older sister (more about her later) took a special interest in the fact that Teddy was still wearing a diaper at the age of seven. There were disturbing occasions when he suddenly would start hitting himself for no reason. Once when little Teddy was striking himself, Mr. Boss went into the house and found a pair of handcuffs to put on him.

     Teddy looked much younger than his chronological age. Sometimes it seemed as if he were being starved to death, but that was because he often refused to eat. Cuchi-Cuchi worried so much about him that she sometimes pushed her carrot treats to the fence, hoping Teddy would pick them up and eat them, which he usually did, to the great dismay of Mrs. Boss.

     Mrs. Boss was always complaining to her sister about their children’s fragile, damaged immune systems. She once said they were like “cookies that had crumbled.” And on more than one occasion she exclaimed, “Our kids have more infections and coinfections than there are ears of corn in Kansas!” The sisters had many spats about their own illness, which they called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. One day Cuchi-Cuchi and Omni listened intently as they fought bitterly over something called “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome neuroimmune subsets.” Mrs. Boss’s older sister had said, “I really think they’re finally getting somewhere with this dynamic neuroimmune subset theory of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I’m even more hopeful about it than the string theory of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” Mrs. Boss immediately shot a wicked glance at her older sister and said, “You’ve never heard a single flaky idea about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that you didn’t jump on. I have a list, Sister.”

     Mrs. Boss, according to Omni, complained to her sister that she believed any silly notion about their medical predicament that came out of the government, and yet she refused to see what was happening before her very eye in the barnyard. He had heard Mrs. Boss yelling at her sister, “Oh yeah, a nation of mysteriously sick pigs has absolutely nothing to do with a nation of mysteriously sick children and adults.”

     Mrs. Boss often said she was exhausted from keeping an eye on Teddy and her other four children. She wasn’t sure whether that was contributing to her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or whether it had a life of its own.

     The swine in The Great Pig Pen were very aware of the illnesses of the Boss family and feared the panoply of human diseases would spread to them. Many of the pigs were careful not to get too physically close to the Boss children. Boss family members always seemed to be wearing different human disease awareness ribbons. Many of the pigs in the pen had heard Mrs. Boss telling her sister that she thought her children were infected with something that was being passed back and forth between them and was always changing. Some of the more nervous pigs literally started avoiding the family like the plague.

     Cuchi-Cuchi took a special interest in Teddy, because he was Mrs. Boss’s youngest and she didn’t think he got the respect from the other children that he deserved. Teddy reminded her of her little piglet brother, adorable Bambino, who constantly followed her around. She was horrified one day when she watched Teddy at a picnic refusing to eat anything and, as a consequence, having a hot dog jammed into his mouth by Mr. Boss. She couldn’t imagine forcing something from the garbage dump down Bambino’s mouth.

     Mrs. Boss and her older sister occasionally talked about the serious digestive problems their children had like Inflammatory Bowel Disease. It was always “inflammatory” this and “inflammatory” that. The two sisters sometimes prayed at the fence together for their children, which was the only time they weren’t at each other’s throats.

     Professor Gable IX was the first one to give a name to Teddy’s problem. After hearing many descriptions of Teddy’s behavior and health issues, he said, “Oh, pshaw! It’s autism. Plain and simple. Your little friend Teddy is autistic. It’s all over the country. It’s been happening for a number of years. I’ve heard about this from Wild Boars living in every part of this country. One Wild Boar told me recently he heard from some Wild Boars from South America that had crossed Mexico and made it over the Texas border that autism is happening in children all over the countries down there. (Every country has its own peculiar name for it.) And they heard from some Portuguese Wild Boars that it’s spreading in humans throughout Europe and Russia and China. The only place I haven’t heard much about is Africa, but not too many Wild Boars have been coming over from there ever since the end of the slave trade. I love that humans don’t think it’s a contagious epidemic. Typical. Students, you must never emulate the humans! Just connect the dots and acknowledge the obvious.”

That Night

     Part One of the lecture that night was drawn from one of Gable IX projects, “A History of Porcine Ideas,” which he thought would completely alter the way pigs looked at porcine history and philosophy. Part Two became one of Pig’s favorites. It was on “The Deep History of What Humans Have Done to Pigs.” It went all the way back to the beginning of humanity, and it wasn’t pretty. Everything had been quite grim from the time pigs were hunted by unwashed cavemen with spears. Gable IX recounted how pigs were put on trial during the Middle Ages. They were even dug up from graves and put in the docket for questioning (their porcine silence was a sign of guilt) and condemnation before they were executed, or, if they didn’t look and smell too funky, they were eaten by the officials of the court.

     After fretting all day about the new mysterious swine illness, Pig anxiously waited until after class to consult with Professor Gable IX. When he grasped what Pig was saying, the Professor’s ears shot straight in the air.

     “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “That’s a good one. Swine Mystery Disease! What will they think of next? Why don’t they just call it, ‘Do You Think We’re All Stupid Disease?’” he exclaimed.

      “What do you mean, Professor?” Pig asked.

     “Pig, do you remember my lecture on human euphemisms?”

     “Yes, sir.”

     “Well, this one is a doozy. And I bet it’s not the last euphemism for you know what?”

     “Are you referring to what I think you’re referring to?”

     “Very good, Pig. You get extra credit points tonight.” Professor Gable IX urged Pig to try to get up earlier in the morning to see if he could get more direct information that wasn’t miscommunicated by Cuchi-Cuchi’s very active imagination. The Professor said, “Go now. I have some serious porcine thinking to do.”

     When Pig returned to his family’s nest in the dark, he could hear the unmistakable, all-too-familiar sound of a sow vomiting in the distance. There was a slightly disturbed pig in the herd referred to as Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig and everyone was always worried she might be taken away because she was much too thin and, for a pig, that made her look sickly and vulnerable to human whims. It was difficult for her to hide that, after just about every meal at the garbage pit, or even after wolfing down some of the Mistress’s treats, she excused herself to what she thought was a secluded part of The Great Pig Pen, where she usually found a stick she could maneuver down her throat until she vomited profusely. Bizarrely, Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig loved her nickname, and was sure all the other female pigs were secretly quite envious of her unique porcine shape. She was convinced her leanness would attract a very special suitor, but Pig was convinced she would end up with a very inappropriate mate—if any mate at all. There was just something about Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig that said, “Big problems here, stay away!”

     When all ofthe disasters and stress started to really accelerate in The Great Pig Pen, Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig was throwing up even before she ate anything.

     Earlier that morning, the Council of Wise Porcine Elders had been briefed on Swine Mystery Disease and, after vigorously debating whether a working group or a committee was more appropriate, had decided to create a high-level Porcine Committee on Swine Mystery Disease to deal with the impending crisis.

The Backstory

     The Council of Wise Porcine Elders was frequently huddled in very private meetings, located in what was considered a sacrosanct area of The Great Pig Pen that ordinary members of the herd were never supposed to go near. It was stocked with the best treats from the garbage dump. (Being in charge of The Great Pig Pen had its privileges.) If choice bits of pumpkin, broccoli or lettuce were ever spotted in the dump, they were immediately transported to the Council’s privileged area of The Great Pig Pen. And when any pig found corn cobs in the dump with the corn still intact, they would be reprimanded if they did not turn over the cobs immediately to the Council. Corn kernels visibly stuck between the teeth of one of the members of The Council of Wise Porcine Elders when they were pronouncing a stern directive or holding a pig-pen-wide communal meeting were considered a major indication of their social status in the herd.

     When there was troubling news the herd had to be prevented from knowing, The Council of Wise Porcine Elders summoned all of the adult pigs to come to an all-barnyard meeting. The piglets were shepherded to the far end of The Great Pig Pen so they could not hear any alarming news. Few things harder to control on a farm than a frightened or hysterical piglet.

     Domestic pigs require a credible narrative to explain what is going on around them. The Council constantly strove to concoct one for the herd, and the task of presenting their fabrications to the assembled pigs usually fell to Wise Elder Gunther, The Great Pig Pen’s psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime. He felt that he always practiced porcine psychology, epidemiology and ethics in an objective, professional manner. Within limits. He and the rest of The Council of Wise Porcine Elders felt it was his responsibility to present believable, scientific-sounding information to the herd in a credible, flamboyant manner that didn’t cause panic or stress, which epidemiologists everywhere consider their main public health duty. It had to be done, no matter what it took ̶ fudge the data, shade the truth, spin and finagle, dilly-dally, employ distracting squealing and oinking ̶ just do whatever the porcine public health crisis required. After the welfare of the Council, the welfare of the herd always came first. Wise Porcine Elder Pigbottom (whom Gable IX once described to Pig as “an iconically stupid swine”) often summed up the Council’s policy by saying, “Public health is public information and vice versa.” Thus did porcine public health in The Great Pig Pen become anything the Wise Council of Porcine Elders said it was. “And whatever they said it was planted in the minds of the herd,” thought Wise Porcine Elder Mason Jar The Opinion Leader Pig. It fell to him to plant the permissible opinions in the herd once the Council had decided what exactly those were. He sometimes worked closely with Wise Porcine Elder Stanley The Disinformation Pig, whose job it was to spread rumors in the herd that would undermine the credibility and reputation of anyone who didn’t adopt the opinions planted by Wise Porcine Elder Mason Jar.

     Although The Council of Wise Porcine Elders always presented themselves as the true, once-upon-a-time-elected—but nobody can remember when—voice of the herd, its members seemed to have arrived at their positions by simply being born into a line of presumptuous pigs extending back to ancestors who had self-appointed themselves to the very first prehistoric Councils of Wise Porcine Elders. Pig thought there was something exceedingly odd about the arrangement. It was very peculiar that the Council was viewed as permanent. No pig ever seemed to even think about protesting it. Pig had grown up with some of the porcine sons of the Council, and he shuddered to think that one day that loosey-goosey gang (especially Tiggly-Wiggly) would be running The Great Pig Pen. He wouldn’t have let some of them even run the garbage dump. He couldn’t imagine taking orders or directions from them, so, increasingly, he resented taking them from their fathers.

     Executive Wise Porcine Elder Cameron Chow ̶ referred to by all in The Great Pig Pen as Elder CamChow or affectionately as Mayor CamChow ̶ heralded from the distinguished line of alpha pigs who always seemed to be chosen by The Council of Wise Porcine Elders to run the show in The Great Pig Pen. The herd overlooked the nepotistic issues involved in the uncanny fact that the Chows always seemed to be in charge, because the family—for the most part—had the barnyard charisma that comes with natural dominance. And they knew how to keep The Great Pen in working order, which meant that the great enemies of pigs everywhere ̶ namely stress, panic and confusion ̶ were kept to a minimum. And they certainly knew how to charm the lady pigs, who all the half-way smart male pigs knew were the real power in The Great Pig Pen. One of the very private sayings in The Council of Wise Porcine Elders was “Keep the gals happy.”

     Pig noticed that the interesting fact about the entire Chow family—and its ancestors—was that they were all a bit cockeyed. He privately wondered if Domestic Pigs were predisposed to always choose cockeyed leaders. And as far as The Wise Council of Porcine Elders was concerned, he didn’t know exactly what was truly meant by the word “choose.”

     There was great concern in the Chow clan because the newest generation wasn’t quite as promising as their predecessors, and many wondered if the torch would ever be successfully passed. Some of the piglets and adolescent pigs were dumber than dogs and there were a few unsavory rumors that Mother Chow had played around behind Wise Top Porcine Elder CamChow’s back with some sexy but intellectually-challenged member of the herd and, consequently, Wise Elder CamChow wasn’t the real source of their progeny’s unpromising qualities. Case in point was Tiggly-Wiggly, the putative eldest son, who had the attention span of a pig who had hit his snout one too many times on the fence of The Great Pig Pen. He thought that running in a circle was an impressive porcine feat. It always exasperated his very imposing, quick-witted and politically astute patriarch. Sons who run in circles are every father’s worst fear. Whenever Tiggly-Wiggly started his antics, Mayor CamChow would lean over to Mother Chow and say, “Would you please tell that moron to stop running in circles! That fool will try and mate with a tree stump if we let him. What inappropriate things did you let him eat in the garbage pit when he was a piglet?” Everything that was wrong with their offspring was her fault.

     One afternoon, after Tiggly-Wiggly once again overheard his father saying mocking things about him to his mother, he asked to talk privately to his father, Mayor CamChow.

     Father and son stared into each other’s cockeyes and Tiggly-Wiggly said, “Father. . . I’m . . . sorry . . . I . . . exist.”

     Top Wise Porcine Elder CamChow was too vigorous and proud to shed a single tear, but he came very close. He was stunned. He couldn’t say anything.

     Tiggly-Wiggly unlocked his cockeyes from his father, turned and walked slowly and sadly away.

     Like any ruling body, The Council of Wise Porcine Elders constantly required exhaustive up-to-the-minute information on what was going on in the herd, and for that they relied on a pig named Omni, the herd’s Total Information Pig. The Elders felt that any smoldering secrets in the herd put every pig in The Great Pig Pen in potential danger.

     Omni had taught himself to read both human and pig lips. Human lips were easier than pig lips because humans didn’t usually speak and munch on stuff from the garbage dump at the same time. Pigs are masters of deceit when it comes to food, so sometimes when they are eating they throw their voices (Hey, look over here!) to distract anyone who might think of taking a bite into something appetizing they had spotted in the dump. Omni was even skilled at identifying which pigs in the herd were throwing their voices.

     In order to keep the tightest possible grip on public health, Omni The Total Information Pig had been put in charge of a special Council of Wise Porcine Elders project which was called Operation Total Porcine Information. It was his job to collect every conceivable kind of porcine intelligence about the herd, information that went way beyond Aunt Mathilda’s daily herd bowel movement inspections. It was his responsibility to pry and peel back every layer of porcine privacy and confidentiality in the herd. The Council had decided that in order to protect the mental well-being of the herd and to prevent the kinds of public health issues that are created by internal disharmony and stress, the Council of Wise Porcine Elders needed to know, not just what every pig did during their waking hours, but they needed to be informed of what every pig in the herd was thinking as well as what they dreamt about at night. Most of the work of the Council of Wise Porcine Elders seemed to consist of piling more work on Omni the Total Information Pig.

     At night, Omni would prowl the sleeping herd that usually slept nose to nose. Omni reported any signs of insomnia to the Council of Wise Porcine Elders. In the morning he moved quickly and efficiently through the herd, questioning each pig in depth about his or her dreams. Like most living creatures, Domestic Pigs loved to recount their dreams and were flattered that anyone was interested. And each one thought his or her porcine dream was special.

     One night while he was sleeping, Pig suddenly stirred, opened his eyes and saw the unsettling sight of Omni The Total Information Pig standing nearby and staring at the nest of Pig’s entire sleeping family. Pig quickly closed his eyes but Omni saw that Pig wasn’t really sleeping and subsequently referred the matter to the Council which was concerned that any insomnia could be caused by a member of the herd’s guilty conscience for something they had secretly done wrong. The Council did not want there to be any secret wrongdoing in the herd that went unmonitored and unpunished.

     Pig’s distrust of Omni The Total Information Pig was so intense that he always made up his dreams when he was questioned. He made his dreams sound harmless but somewhat interesting. His favorite thing was to tell Omni that he had been nibbling all night on a giant corn cob, one the size of a tree. Omni made a clicking sound with his tongue that implied he thought that was very revealing and walked away.

     Unfortunately, Pig’s sister, Cuchi-Cuchi, more than anyone, cherished being quizzed about her dreams and usually they were about dying painful deaths from diseases she couldn’t even pronounce correctly and certainly didn’t understand. Omni rolled his eyes impatiently every morning as Cuchi-Cuchi started her litany of diseases: One morning she said “Last night was awful. I dreamt I had Elephantiasis, Progeria, Guinea Worm Disease, Ebola, leukemia, lupus, polio, and malaria.” Pig was standing next to her and screamed, “Cuchi-Cuchi, will you please stop memorizing every disease you hear about while listening to the vets and doctors who visit the pen! You’ll be sorry. You’ll end up getting one of these diseases because you talk about them so much. You’re the healthiest pig in this pen. You’ve got to get a hold of yourself.”

      “How do you know, Pig? Something terminal could be developing in me right now and I might not make it through the week.”

       After the first time Omni diligently reported all of Cuchi-Cuchi’s illness dreams to the Council and they all started snorting and oinking with laughter. Subsequently, he kept Cuchi-Cuchi’s far-fetched biomedical dreams to himself. He secretly wondered if Cuchi-Cuchi was deliberately making fun of him and setting him up for embarrassment during his briefings with the Council, and if so, whether Pig was secretly behind it. He did not trust Pig. But, luckily for Pig, Omni was deathly afraid of Pig’s Aunt Mathilda.

     Very formidable Aunt Mathilda was known and feared in the herd as an omnipresent, all-seeing matriarch who had always kept a close watch on her children’s digestive regularity and related matters. She had the habit of frequently asking her growing brood—especially the girls—if they were having good bowel movements. And she was not inhibited about embarrassing all the other young piglets in the herd with the question, “How are your movements?” This wasn’t always fully comprehended because when she first asked Cuchi-Cuchi about her “movements,” Cuchi started showing her all her recently-mastered dance steps. “No, silly pig,” Aunt Mathilda screamed, “I mean your bowel movements!” And needless to say, even Aunt Mathlda’s questions about bowel movements sounded outrageously invasive and inappropriate to her younger sister, Mother Gizmo.

    In the winter, special huts were brought into The Great Pig Pen to help shield the herd from the snow and wind. One small hut was always designated by the herd as “Aunt Mathilda’s hut,” not because she resided there, but because that was the only place the herd would do its business during the winter.  It became Aunt Mathilda’s winter observation post.

     Truth be told, bowel movements in pigs are not of minor importance. Pig knew this from Gable IX’s disturbing lectures on Montgomery Disease. One of the first tell-tale symptoms of Montgomery’s Disease was what Gable IX referred to as loose bowel movements. Or even more ominous—blood in the bowel movements. Pig never told Cuchi-Cuchi about this particular symptom because Cuchi was always discussing her concern about her digestion. But as a result of this particular lecture, Pig himself was always anxious whenever he had an upset stomach from eating a rotten apple core or nibbling on a mystery snack from the dump.

     Since Aunt Mathilda—who was a loud, judgmental busybody of a sow by nature—kept a close watch on the entire herd’s bowel movements, she was quite useful to Omni The Total Information Pig. She often noticed changes in the herd’s bowel movements, which he knew could often indicate a potential disease threat to the herd, and she usually promptly reported these to Omni The Total Information Pig, who then prepared a special advisory for the Council of Wise Porcine Elders. Omni the Information Pig was in a position not to fear any pig in the herd since he had the goods on everyone, but there was one person who he was always very careful not to offend and that was Aunt Mathilda, because she watched both him and his bowel movements like a hawk. And he knew that in a pinch she would not be afraid to go over his head. He officially deputized her as the Senior Bowel Movement Total Information Officer of the herd. Better to keep her as close to him as possible.

     The other male members of the herd knew not to mess with a three or four hundred pound angry sow, and when Aunt Mathilda got irate, the whole herd got out of her way and headed to far end of The Great Pig Pen. Omni had never experienced her rage first hand, but he had seen it from a distance enough times to always accede to Aunt Mathilda’s wishes.

     If the full Council of Wise Porcine Elders was not immediately available, Omni made sure that any urgent information from Aunt Mathilda was always delivered to Wise Porcine Elder Gunther, the herd’s psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime.

     All early education of the piglets and adolescent pigs was provided by the Wise Council of Porcine Elders and their assistants. But what was called senior swine education, and was only provided to the smartest and highest achieving young pigs, consisted of intense lectures at Moonlight University which were conducted by seasoned Wild Boars who lived outside The Great Pig Pen in all the hiding places they could find in “The Real World.” The entire Council of Wise Porcine Elders had received their own advanced education that way, only because they had been born into a ruling dynasty, rather than any accomplishments of their own. The Domestic Pigs hated to admit it, but only the much smarter Wild Boars could introduce their young and promising pigs to the nature of life beyond The Great Pig Pen and all the complications, issues, and challenges that it entailed. The hope that would never fade away—a foolish one, perhaps—was that their progeny would lead freer, more productive and satisfying lives than they did. What was left unsaid was that really meant that this would only happen in the very unlikely event that they somehow escaped from The Great Pig Pen and forged their own destiny, not the most pleasant thought for parents who loved the litters which they thought The Almighty Hog had given them. The parents knew in their hearts that the comfort and safety of The Great Pig Pen provided the solace of a porcine prison. While Domestic Pigs were not as smart as the Wild Boars, they were not brain dead.

     Higher education for the smartest and best-connected pigs was something guaranteed by the herd’s Porcine Constitution. Pigs only have a very long oral—sometimes verbose— tradition, so their Porcine Constitution was truly a living, breathing long-winded document subject to the whims of any constitutional expert in the Council of Wise Porcine Elders who was doing the “remembering” at the time. Some of the Elders constantly insisted that their Porcine Constitution was a permanent thing inspired by The Almighty Hog, that must never change one iota, and as could be expected, its values and notions always seemed to coincide with the interests of the current Wise Council of Porcine Elders. “We must never make things up as we go along,” they often said to each other, as they creatively made things up as they went along. The sole instructor at Moonlight University, Professor Gable IX, who was a huge, aristocratic looking Wild Boar with a white stripe on one of his ears, thought that the Elders’ take on their unchangeable Porcine Constitution was hilarious.

    Gable IX had been assigned—by his fierce tribe of Wild Boars—the Moonlight University teaching assignment at The Great Pig Pen, one that he found thoroughly rewarding, because he loved the attention and enthusiasm of the five very special students he was charged with: Latoya, JoJo, Tulip, Pig, and Jasmine The Yodeling Pig. He was especially fond of Pig, the one he thought had the brightest future, even if he was just a Domestic Pig. He loved the hunger for knowledge he saw in all his students’ beady-little eyes. It was exhilarating to be able to provide diverse lectures to such a grateful and focused group of Domestic Pigs, talks on topics that included “The Metaphysical Difference Between Wild Boars and Domestic Pigs,” “The Porcine History of the World,” “The Complete Swine Liberal Arts,” “Drawing and Sculpting in the Mud,” and “Pigonomics” which expanded his students’ knowledge of numbers they would need to know to conduct negotiations over who got what to eat at the garbage dump and how to survive their interactions with the human race and other difficult species. The introductory mathematics lecture of that course established the fact that one was the exact number of humans it took to endanger a Domestic Pig and any number over that made things even dicier.

      Several times during classes at Moonlight University, Gable IX told the students, “I’m only interested in thinking and saying the unprecedented. We must all try to be pithy. The unquotable porcine life is not worth living.” Like many serious teachers, Gable IX had an ambitious secret project that he was afraid to share with his Wild Boar colleagues, but did feel safe discussing it confidentially with his very best students, which in this case was Pig. Thus did Pig learn about Gable IX’s magnum opus, “Metapigology, the Unified Theory of Every Porcine-related Thing Since the Beginning of Time.” The other great intellectual project that Gable IX had was “The Porcine Theory of Humanity.” He said that he expected the theory would be very depressing and the fact that the Gable family had its roots in the Black Forests of southern Germany may have created the conditions in his very soul from which such a grim theory would originate. There was a saying that had been passed down through generations of Gables: “We ponder as we wonder and we wonder as we ponder.” Pig had trouble following terms like “porcine-being-in-the-human-world” or “Porcine Thereness” that Professor Gable IX used when he really got going on his theories. Gable was always talking about the importance of listening closely in silence to “Porcine Being of Being.” Pig often said to himself, “Whatever that is. It must be something good.”

     Gable IX had a special reverence for the preternatural and the serendipitous. He thought that it was uncanny to even be alive as a Wild Boar capable of traveling the whole world with all the wisdom necessary (for the most part) to outsmart the duplicitous, murderous humans. And he never stopped being grateful for the serendipity that had always seemed to make sure he was in the right place at the right time and more importantly, never in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    Gable IX sometimes described his classes—that started late at night at the back fence so he could make a quick getaway if any humans spotted him—as a “One Wild Boar University of Moi.” To know Gable IX well was to know that his favorite lecture was “Liars, an Analysis of Human History and Civilization.” The Professor began his seminal lecture with four maxims that he said summed up the nature of humanity.

     1. Humans lie about everything.

     2. Humans always speak in euphemisms.

     3. Even when they are telling the truth, humans are lying.

     4. Through lying and cheating, humans have created an epidemiological madhouse.

     Pig loved the way that Professor Gable IX often spoke authoritatively and paradoxically when he lectured. The lectures usually gave him something to think about and he wondered whether he would be smart enough to be paradoxical and metaphysical himself one day.

     Pig always feared not meeting Gable IX’s exacting standards. The Professor did not gladly suffer porcine fools. Whenever any members of the class said anything that the professor thought was egregiously stupid, he said, “Stop being a pig in a blanket.” The very first time he said that, he had to explain the origins of the insult to the class: “A pig in a blanket is what happens when you are exterminated and turned into a pathetic greasy little sausage full of strange kinds of fillers and all kinds of chemicals and then stuffed into some very cheap white dough and then tossed in the oven and browned. Human families love to do that to you on Christmas mornings.”

     Upon hearing that, one of the advanced students, Jasmine the Yodeling Pig, felt like she needed to lie down.

     The subject Professor Gable IX wasn’t too keen on was porcine theology. It is widely known that, compared to Wild Boars, Domestic Pigs are intensely sentimental and superstitious. Wild Boars believed that too much sentimentality and superstition could turn them into a stuffed head on a mantelpiece. The closest Gable IX came to any form of worship of a higher porcine power was his unshakable belief that things happen when they want to happen. Time and fate were the only mysteries that inspired anything that might pass for reverence in him. He thought that there was something uncanny and often serendipitous about the when of things. Time was the territory his mind wandered around endlessly, trying to grasp its porcine essence. The chronological nature of a pig’s life fascinated him. He sometimes thought that time was the very soul of porcine being. The when of things was far more powerful a concept to him than the images of The Almighty Hog or The Invisible Evil Pig Devil which so many of the gullible Domestic Pigs saw by connecting stars in the sky. When Gable IX looked at stars he saw stars. They were wonderful enough for him. For him time and timing were everything. You could say that the when of things was the force that Gable IX was always on the brink of grasping. But he could never penetrate the when enough with his mind to begin to figure out how to do that. The lecture at Moonlight University which presented all of his evolving ideas on the subject was entitled “The Zany When of Destiny.”

     Gable IX was determined to give his students the knowledge they would need to survive and thrive as adult pigs. “Transparency, clarity, accountability, integrity and communication have been essential to the survival of Wild Boars,” insisted Professor Gable IX. “Let that be a lesson to all you Domestic Pigs.”

     Given the pervasive health threats that pigs faced, the most important course that Professor Gable IX taught was on the emerging medical issues of the porcine community. He always urged the class to pay close attention, because their own lives might depend on the information about the kinds of germs and human public health shenanigans that threatened them—as well as the entire herd.

     The first (and most disturbing) medical lecture that Gable IX gave was on the dreaded Montgomery’s Disease. When he was done the overwhelmed students stared in stunned silence and their pig flesh turned white as the first snow of an Iowa winter. They all had nightmares for many nights after the lecture. They would never forget the nature and history of Montgomery’s Disease that they had learned about at the introductory lecture. They were not happy to hear that Professor Gable IX planned more harrowing presentations on the subject.

     Professor Gable IX explained to his class that Montgomery’s Disease had been discovered in East Africa by a guy named R.E. Montgomery in 1921. The disease, according to Gable IX, had originally been called East African Swine Plague. The disease had basically infected warthogs and had evolved into something that did not make the warthogs sick. But a tragic event occurred when, regrettably, Domestic Pigs were introduced to that part of Africa in the 1960s. The Domestic Pigs became deathly ill when they came in direct contact with the infected-but-not-sick warthogs.

     Gable IX said that Montgomery’s Disease was constantly changing and you never knew what it was going to do next. He said that the one thing Domestic Pigs really had to watch out for was ticks, because they bit the Wild Boars, sucked their infected blood, and then when they moved on to Domestic Pigs they infected them with the virus that they had feasted on. Ticks were a very efficient delivery system for the disease to move from Wild Boars to Domestic Pigs. “Ticks are like vampires! This is a total nightmare. It’s horrifying things like this that makes thoughtful pigs wonder if there really is an Almighty Hog.” But he didn’t like to get into theological matters too deeply, because it often ended up offending the porcine parents of his students. He hated nothing more than parent-teacher conferences with Domestic Pigs.

     Gable IX said that the real problem was that while Wild Boars could carry the Montgomery’s Disease virus without getting sick, once domestic pigs came in contact with them, the virus would be transmitted into their bodies and would tear them apart organ by organ. The Professor said, “That is one of the reasons the relationship between Wild Boars and Domestic Pigs has been so tricky. You Domestic Pigs love what we can teach you about “The Real World” out there, but your kind are generally a little nervous whenever we’re around.”

     Gable IX urged the class to pay close attention as he spelled out what the disease did to the bodies of Domestic Pigs. He said that the virus that was eventually discovered to be the cause of Montgomery’s Disease was so fast-acting and lethal that the immune systems of infected pigs were quickly overwhelmed and the Domestic Pigs developed what Gable IX referred to as “Acquired Immune Deficiency Disease of Pigs or Porcine AIDS.” He made the class repeat the term several times so they would never forget it. Together his five advanced porcine students said “Acquired Immune Deficiency Disease of Pigs, Acquired Immune Deficiency of Pigs, Acquired Immune Deficiency of Pigs. Porcine AIDS, Porcine AIDS.” The words began to give Pig a slight headache.

     Nothing amused Gable IX more than stories that had circulated among Wild Boars for years about the human efforts to develop an effective vaccine against Montgomery’s Disease. He called it “one of the most entertaining episodes in the very crowded history of human stupidity.” He said, “Some human moron tried to make a live vaccine for Montgomery’s Disease in Portugal and many of the vaccinated pigs developed all kinds of atrocious reactions like pneumonia, disgusting, disfiguring skin ulcers, spontaneous abortions and all manner of other problems. They even had trouble walking. Many died.” He continued, “And the craziest thing was that those who survived were carriers of a brand new strain of the Montgomery Disease virus that developed from being infected with the live strain of the virus. Professor Gable IX said, “Humans are great at one specialty, namely making things worse.”

     Pig raised his right hoof and asked Professor Gable IX if the Council of Wise Porcine Elders knew about Montgomery’s Disease, and Gable IX responded, “Of course they do. It’s a required lecture at Moonlight University. They just have adopted the same bad habit as humans. They don’t want to talk about it. They always find something else to discuss and distract the herd’s attention.”

     Gable IX explained that stress and anxiety played a major role in the disease process if a pig was lucky enough to survive an initial infection with the virus that caused Montgomery Disease. “That’s something your brilliant Council of Wise Porcine Elders must have learned when they attended Moonlight University many years ago,” he said. “I don’t know which Wild Boar was unlucky enough to have to teach that gang, but I’m sure they were schooled in the basics of Montgomery’s Disease. And they all know about the dangers of porcine stress. That’s why they feel they have to control everything the herd thinks or says. They think of it as a medical intervention. I’m sure they think that dissent and doubt are an infectious disease which the herd must be vaccinated against with directives, advisories and hokum.”

     At the end of each class, Gable IX, who supposedly could speak 30 different porcine languages fluently, always said to the class “boo, boo,” which is “Oink, oink” in Japanese.

     That night, Pig had many nightmares and the phrases “Acquired Immune Deficiency Disease of Pigs” and “Porcine AIDS” kept repeating themselves over and over in his head like one of the catchy songs made up by Mythos (Clarence) the Pig Laureate that were sung at memorial services in The Great Pig Pen.

     Every time a pig was mysteriously taken from The Great Pig Pen and not returned, the Council on the Elders held a special memorial service to try and keep the emotions of the herd under control. There is much theoretical debate about grief and pigs, and while there are those people who work in slaughter houses who have seen numb pigs march to their deaths (they called them “dead pigs walking”), those who have raised them and believe they have intimate knowledge about their feelings and sensitivities, tell a different story. Nothing is more disturbing than when pigs start crying uncontrollably. Deaths and porcine breakups can start the waterworks. Sometimes the sound makes their human owners crazy and they react cruelly and try to slap them quiet, which only creates more reasons for the pigs to cry.

     The Wise Council of Porcine Elders knew that it didn’t matter how much one controlled porcine information in the herd, if one lost the ability to shape porcine culture. So they made sure that memorials were the herd’s central cultural and social events. Nothing that transpired in them was left up to chance. Every moment was choreographed.

     The key to the herd’s peace of mind was the aggressive process of manufacturing, orchestrating, and enforcing closure, so after every memorial service Wise Porcine Elder Finito The Closure Pig went to work in order to make sure each pig had achieved total closure whether they liked it or not. Finito was a very imposing pig, so, generally speaking, closure was not a problem.

     The memorial services always began with a moment of porcine silence, during which the Council asked that there be no squeaks, oinks, squeals or snorts. Then there was always the “Parade of the Piglets,” a kind of testimony to the herd’s communal belief in the future. The diminutive five-pound piglets looked absolutely adorable doing their ceremonial parade and synchronized jig for the adults. A few of the sows shed tears as they thought about how quickly time would pass and in a flash these five pound cuties would weigh a few hundred pounds and some of them more than that.

     At these memorial services everyone had a chance to talk about their memories of the mysteriously departed pig. Even pigs that didn’t know the lost member of the herd said kind things. Omni The Total Information Pig took careful note of everything that was said. And there was always a point at which Mythos (Clarence) the herd’s Pig Laureate was asked to recite a poem or sing a song. He usually put something formal on his head—like a discarded pot from the dump—to mark the momentousness of the occasion. A favorite was his composition “After He Was Gone,” or, if it was a sow that had disappeared, “After She Was Gone.” The chorus of the song always moved the herd:

          After he was gone I loved him

          After he was gone I cared

          After he was gone I was humble and I shared

          I became his perfect lover

          After he was gone.

     Although it became one of the herd’s iconic memorial songs, it was originally written by Mythos (Clarence) The Pig Laureate about a boyfriend who left him for a more masculine pig. While everyone in the herd was thinking about the member of the herd that cruelly had been taken from them, Mythos was actually singing about his own personal pig that got away.

     Sometimes, behind his back, the enemies of Mythos would make vicious fun of his songs and poems–and The Pig Laureate himself. Some made up their own sarcastic versions and sang or recited them with shoes on top of their heads.

     The only time Veranda (more about her later) had a kind word to say about a male pig was after they were taken away. But, she was very fond of Mythos and quite protective of him. At these services she was often the most emotional when Mythos sang and sometimes even made a scene.

     Mythos needed all the protection he could get and made sure he kept a close relationship with the biggest, most sympathetic sows, except Aunt Mathilda. He loved to chat with the sows endlessly, but had no interest in siring any litters with them. Some were so attracted to him that they almost wouldn’t take no for an answer.

     Mythos (Clarence)The Pig Laureate had so many songs about lost male lovers that when some of his fellow pigs did the math, there seemed to be more songs of unrequited love than there were male pigs in the herd, which made some suspect that Mythos may have fooled around with some sows when nobody was looking. But Mythos vigorously denied any of that kind of interest in sows whatsoever. Which frustrated more than a few of the sows who dreamt of having a porcine poet in their romantic lives.

     It should come as no surprise that Mythos and his sexual orientation had caught the resentful and prejudiced gaze of JoJo and The Mean Pigs. When Gable IX heard about Jojo and The Mean Pigs mocking Mythos (Clarence) The Pig Laureate, he decided it was time to give the class his lecture on porcine samesexers or malelovers and the equivalent in the realm of perpetually horny sows. The lecture was actually quite detailed and covered the unpredictable erotic lives of many other species. Wild Boars had an innate empathy for all the forms of love on the planet. And they had seen everything. Malelovers or samesexers weren’t the half of it. Professor Gable IX said, “From what I and my fellow Wild Boars have observed, nearly all animals, at some time or another engage in male-on-male love. I’ve heard that alligators may be an exception, but I have my doubts. I don’t think any Wild Boar has gotten close enough to an alligator to check the situation out.

     While there isn’t a male pig who isn’t aroused by two sows nuzzling—and sometimes they even try to join in—some male hogs in the herd were not comfortable around porcine malelovers or samesexers like Mythos. And the fact that so many sows succumbed so easily to the poetic charms and vocal gifts of Mythos quietly enraged many of them. Their own misguided attempts at poetry and songs were generally the most awkward oinks ever heard in The Great Pig Pen.

The Next Week

     One morning that week, in his daily briefing, Omni The Total Information Pig reported that Mrs. Boss’s older sister said she had gone to her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome support group and they had a special guest speaker, a scientist who had come all the way from Atlanta’s prestigious Centers for Disease Control. Omni reported, “She said that the scientists told the group that the Centers for Disease Control did not think that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a real epidemic, but if it is they would immediately find the cause and then develop a vaccine. He said that nobody should panic, that the Centers for Disease Control had everything under control, just like they had controlled every other epidemic in its history. Mrs. Boss’s older sister said everyone was so flattered to have such an important speaker that many had baked special cookies and brownies for the occasion. Some asked the doctor from the Centers for Disease Control for his autograph and had their picture taken with him.” (When the older sister’s picture with the CDC man appeared in the county paper, she became a local Chronic Fatigue Syndrome celebrity.) Omni reported that Mrs. Boss said she was sorry she had missed the special Chronic Fatigue Syndrome support group meeting, but one of her chronically ill children was having a very bad day.

     That day, Omni also reported to the Council that when he had heard Mr. and Mrs. Boss discuss Swine Mystery Disease, Mrs. Boss said to her husband, “Maybe our children have Human Mystery Disease. Maybe we all do.”

     When Gable IX heard about Mrs. Boss’s so-called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from Pig, he laughed and said, “Well that must be Swine Mystery Disease in humans.” He decided it was time to give his class a detailed lecture on the porcine immune system. Before he began, he said, “JoJo, you’d better listen to this one carefully, because one of these days, when you least expect it, the class is going to get a pop quiz on the swine immune system. And you won’t be able to fake your way through the test.”

     Professor Gable IX began by first telling the class that, unfortunately, the immune systems of pigs had a great deal in common with the human immune system, which humans only liked to admit when it was convenient to them.

The Next Night

     One of the first students to arrive that night at Moonlight University was Latoya. She was one of the most punctual and attentive attendees of Midnight University. She was always concerned that the very bright and aggressive male pigs were trying to dominate conversations in class. She hated when the males loudly oinked over her delicate, thoughtful oinks. She was famous in the herd for her concern about sows’ rights. Gable IX, who both respected and feared his own Wild Boar mother, was very sensitive to the role of powerful females in porcine society. He was totally at peace with porcine matriarchal culture and understood that whatever power male pigs had in pig society was at the pleasure of its females. In class, whenever Pig or JoJo’s testosterone kicked in and they tried to interrupt or talk over Latoya and Jasmine The Yodeling Pig, Gable IX intervened.

     Gable IX also made a serious effort to work on Jasmine The Yodeling Pig’s self-esteem. Once when she had come to class in tears he asked her what was wrong. She said that one of JoJo’s Mean Pigs had called her a “nobody.” “Jasmine, don’t mind them,” he said. Nobody’s a nobody. Especially a pig that can yodel.”

     Gable IX encouraged the sows to speak up for themselves and not let the males dominate the conversation. But he urged the sows to never let their consternation turn into passive-aggressive petulance. He warned, “A petulant sow can all too easily become a bitter spinster sow. And you all know what that’s like. “ He was referring to one of the sows in The Great Pig Pen that he had heard a great deal about. More about her later.

     The third highly intelligent sow in the class, Tulip The Gardening Pig, was peculiarly skilled at caring for anything that grew along the rim of the fence around The Great Pig Pen. She aggressively policed her garden area and made sure JoJo and The Mean Pigs didn’t eat any of the fruits of her horticultural labors. She always had a flower or two hanging precariously behind one of her perky little ears and she never failed to bring something to Gable IX from her garden even if it was only an interesting weed

     Jasmine wasn’t the brightest sow Gable IX had ever taught. There was scuttlebutt that she had not done well on her entrance exams, which were given by Gable IX, but her seductive porcine yodeling had won him over. He had seen a lot of Domestic Pigs in his life, but never one who could yodel.

     Professor Gable IX’s second lecture on Montgomery’s Disease was a hard-to-follow account of how the illness had spread from Africa to Spain, Portugal and France in the 60s. Then Malta and Sardinia. He said that one of the most disturbing things was that the disease had come over the Atlantic Ocean in an infected pig transported by a ship or a plane to Brazil in 1978. And tragically, from there it spread to Haiti and Cuba. “I hope you all remember your geography lessons and know where all these places are and how close they are to this country, the very one you are standing in,” he said in a rather stern voice. Then he ominously added, “Montgomery’s Disease is breathing down your necks, if it isn’t already here.”

     The thing that upset the class the most—and Gable IX hated to tell them about it—was the way that humans dealt with Montgomery’s Disease. Gable IX did what he always did when he was about to share some sobering information with the class. e paused and looked up at the skyH

He paused and looked up at the sky for a moment and then said, “They kill all the Domestic Pigs. Every last one of them. They assume they all are infected with the Montgomery’s Disease virus or soon will be and they slit their throats. All of them.” He paused again and stared at his stunned students and added, “Even the piglets, the innocent little piglets.”

     Pig looked at a distant star somewhere in the sky. And then at the half moon. He tried to think about something else since he couldn’t or wouldn’t let his mind get itself around the shocking images that Professor Gable IX had just presented to them.

     Gable IX usually kept to himself, but his relationship with Pig became more of a mentor type of relationship with a great deal of mutual trust and plenty of father-son overtones. He opened up a bit about his own life in “The Real World” beyond The Great Pig Pen. Pig’s father, Gizmo, was a wonderful pig, but the relationship with Gable IX fulfilled some deep need 

     Pigs are curious animals, and like Father Gizmo, Pig was chronically inquisitive and always thinking, which is one of the reasons he was Gable IX’s star pupil. He had an exceptional sense of smell that bordered on the prescient. He was always the first to locate the finest mushroom in the most unexpected places and to know what (or who) the Bosses were cooking that night. But it was his acute sense of impending danger and an ability to recognize nonsense that was second to none in the herd. Gable IX once said to Pig, “Are you sure you’re not a Wild Boar?”

     JoJo, the other male student in his class, who was almost as intelligent as Pig—but was a bit of a smartass—could have easily become some kind of errant, delinquent pig and have suffered the consequences if the Council of Wise Porcine Elders hadn’t kept a close eye on him. He was always trying to involve Pig in new forms of misbehavior. The minute she met him, Mother Gizmo detected JoJo’s questionable character and urged Pig not to spend too much time with him outside of class at Moonlight University. JoJo was always trying to get Pig to come over with him to the fence and mock the intelligence of the Boss’s two simple-minded dogs and their furry cat. Pig felt a bond with all the animals on the farm so he always found some excuse to avoid joining JoJo and his circle of Mean Pigs in their fun. But somehow JoJo always found his way—with his entourage of Mean Pigs—into Pig’s life in one way or another almost every day.

     JoJo had quite a nasty porcine mouth on him. At one time or another virtually every pig his age heard him say, “You’re dumber than a cat.” He was always being sarcastic and nasty about the chicken that lived on the farm—making fun all the time of the fact that unlike the civilized pigs who had pristine hygiene, pooped in the same place as they ate. He also had some choice words for the cows outside the fence in the field who would poop and then lie down in it. (Had Aunt Mathilda been a cow, she would have had to make those cows roll over in order to do her public health inspections.) JoJo, at one time or another, mocked nearly every pig in the pen, and many of the pigs did not find him to be that clever or humorous, although he was a big hit with his following of Mean Pigs.

     Pig was determined to keep himself in shape, so he had a standing pre-lunch date with JoJo to jog a few times every day around the perimeter of The Great Pig Pen. JoJo usually tried to engage Pig in some kind of mischief, but wary Pig almost always resisted. He knew JoJo was bad news, but he was never boring. And it was safer to know what JoJo was up to than not.

The Next Morning

     Very early the next morning, which was exceptionally sunny, the Boss woke up a couple of the pigs early when he appeared at the gate of The Great Pig Pen with Dr. Packer, the county’s top veterinarian. Pig had made a point of rising before Cuchi-Cuchi and sauntered to a position near Omni the Total Information Pig and close enough to the two men at the gate, who were leaning on the fence, to hear what they were talking about. Suddenly all the bristles on Pig’s flesh stood up. Pig didn’t just hear what they were saying. It was more intense than that. It is a little known fact that swine have interspecies intuition where their human overlords are concerned. They generally know what their humans are feeling and thinking before they do. Humans have very few secrets they can conceal when pigs are around. Unfortunately, this often results in pigs becoming overwhelmed with the emotional peculiarities of humanity, sometimes developing the same psychoses and obsessive compulsions their owners have. And Pig was the most intuitive member of the herd.

     Pig was the only one who heard Dr. Packer anxiously whisper words that no pig with an advanced education ever likes to hear: “Not Montgomery’s Disease! Don’t even say that in private.  It’s Swine Mystery Disease.” For just a second Pig pretended that he had not heard it, the way one pretends that one has not seen a poisonous snake suddenly slither into The Great Pig Pen. He also sensed that he had just heard a human lie about something. He didn’t want to tell anyone, especially his younger, very impressionable sister Cuchi-Cuchi. He knew all too well, from classes at Moonlight University, exactly what Montgomery’s Disease was—if that’s what was hidden behind what seemed like a major lie.

     While, from the very first moment that Cuchi-Cuchi’s squeals made sense, she had been a very imaginative porcine hypochondriac. It was ironic, given that there was no shortage of real medical threats for her to worry about. Or misunderstand. One of the problems was that she often couldn’t distinguish between human diseases and pig diseases, and at one time or another she feared that she had or would contract them all. Even ones that only happened in Third World countries. Whereas most pigs occasionally develop a headache from rooting around too aggressively for mushrooms and whatnot, hypersensitive Cuchi-Cuchi frequently developed mysterious migraines which she feared could be the first symptoms of a porcine stroke and death. Pig was always amazed at how Cuchi-Cuchi’s migraines seemed to immediately disappear the moment Mrs. Boss came out and threw the herd an armful of fresh corncobs. Cuchi-Cuchi, chronically near death, usually snatched the first cob.

     Pig nervously looked around and was happy to see that at the further end of The Pig Great Pen, Cuchi-Cuchi was still sound asleep. He didn’t want to have to explain to her what Montgomery’s Disease was, because Pig knew she would start to develop all the symptoms and that would have created problems that nobody in his circle of family and friends could ever manage. Pig didn’t know where she got the idea, but he recently had to disabuse Cuchi-Cuchi of the notion that she might be developing what she called “Psychoneurotic cancer.” Pig had to explain to her that those two words didn’t belong together, and that while everything she ever had was basically “psychoneurotic,” there was no way she had cancer. She always ended these discussions with, “I just wanted you to know, in case anything bad happens to me.”

     Pig was now worried that something really bad was going to happen to all of the members of the herd. Or that it had already begun to happen.

     After careful consideration Pig decided not to tell his mother. Pig wanted to run this by Gable IX first.

     The day that Pig heard the vet mention Montgomery’s Disease, Father Gizmo was hard at work trying to build a windmill with some bizarre new things he found at the garbage dump. Pig didn’t want to interfere with his father’s work by giving him something awful to worry about. At least not until he consulted Gable IX after class at Moonlight University.

     Cuchi-Cuchi was a real bother all day while Pig waited for the hour in the dark that Moonlight University began. Cuchi-Cuchi, must have sensed something was up because she kept staring at Pig as though there was something changed about him. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Fine,” he curtly responded. He wished that Cuchi-Cuchi was out playing with their younger brother, Bambino, or even gossiping with the other young pigs and picking up the names of crazy new maladies that she could be afraid of and never get. He just didn’t want her to know about this real threat. Pig was horrified about what the prospect of contracting Montgomery’s Disease would have done to Cuchi-Cuchi’s imagination. Luckily, it was such a terrifying prospect that anyone who knew what it really was, sealed their pig lips and never dared to openly discuss it with any member of the herd.

The Backstory

     Pig’s mother had the normal porcine parental concerns. She was usually worried about her children getting enough to eat when she wasn’t preoccupied with her own need to consume enough to maintain her size and attractiveness. She was always digging through the garbage and finding something fetching to put on her head (like a dog’s water bowl) and then, in true passive aggressive-manner, asking Father Gizmo if it made her look skinny. Nothing terrified him more than figuring out a way to answer that question. He usually tried to skate around the question by saying “You’re still the big beautiful pig I married.”

     Father Gizmo, whose real birth name was Hieronymus, was called Gizmo because he was always trying—unsuccessfully—to invent things. For someone so creative, it always seemed strange that he had given his only son the name of “Pig,” which frankly, didn’t seem all that inventive. Father Gizmo had, over the years, tried (and failed) to build ambitious things like a windmill, a porcine bicycle, and even a sailboat, which always puzzled Pig, since The Great Pig Pen, located in Iowa, was not near any serious body of water, and certainly could not be used, even if he had built one, in the occasional wet mud in which the herd took their baths to prevent sunburn in the summer.

     Father Gizmo was always a great source of amusement to a number of pigs who, watched from a distance as he gathered items from the garbage dump in The Great Pig Pen, which, he insisted, he would engineer into all kinds of potentially useful inventions which were often abandoned when he got a new bright idea. The pieces of castoff this-and-that that Father Gizmo tried to reconfigure intro inventions never quite stopped looking like useless pieces of junk, but, pigs with the gift of imagination could see in them the creative will to transcend, even if they were just porcine failures. Pig felt embarrassed anew for his father whenever he remembered one of the snarkier pigs shouting at his father, “Is that a boat or a train or a new garbage dump?” But it didn’t matter, because, along with Mother Gizmo, Pig and Cuchi-Cuchi kept an outwardly positive, optimistic attitude and often told Father Gizmo that one day he would invent something that was very important, or at least inspiring to the herd. Pig liked the fact that his father could never be successfully humiliated by any member of the herd and he hoped to inherit that trait. About Father Gizmo, Gable IX once said, “Well, at least your father has projects. A pig without a project is a ham sandwich just waiting to happen.”

   There is nothing more curious and enthusiastic than a curious and enthusiastic pig, and Father Gizmo may have been the greatest enthusiast in the history of American Domestic Pigs. He exuded the power of positive porcine thinking. Father Gizmo may have been a constantly failed inventor, but he frequently was a catalyst in the herd. His spirit of innovation and improvisation inspired other members of the herd to try new and often crazy things. His chronic failures often led to other pigs’ successes.

     Father Gizmo celebrated just about everything he encountered in life and Pig and Cuchi-Cuchi were constantly amazed by their father’s state of wonder and joy. It seemed like everything in the world amazed him and had to be duly noted and shared. It was that kind of cacoon of optimism that the Gizmo progeny—Pig, Cuchi-Cuchi and Bambino—were nurtured in.

     “Will you look at that cloud!” Father Gizmo would say.

     “Yes, father, I see it,” Cuchi responded, always determined to react the way she was supposed to.

    “Whatever you say, Father,” said Pig, not quite as enthusiastic as Cuchi, but still respectful of his father.

     “No look over there at that other cloud,” Father Gizmo squealed. “It’s even better.”

     Every day was like that. Each unique cloud was praised as it journeyed across the sky, as well as the ever-changing shades of blue in which the sky transformed itself. Their father was living proof that The Great Pig Pen could be a very satisfying place for a Domestic Pig, if they just kept their tiny eyes open.

     Even rainy days were a source of pleasure for Father Gizmo. “Isn’t rain glorious?” he would say to his children. Pig didn’t know how glorious it was, but he had to agree that it was interesting. Mother Gizmo didn’t have quite the poetic sensibility of her husband, usually because she was quite practical about things, and because she didn’t have time to look at the sky when there were issues like finding enough food in the garbage dump or competing for the slop the Boss family put out so she could adequately feed her family. She would sometimes remind Father Gizmo that one can’t eat clouds or build a nest in The Great Pig Pen with them. She also was too busy keeping their nest area of their pen meticulous to get carried away about clouds and rain and whatever. Mother Gizmo was careful, though. She had once hurt Father Gizmo’s feelings when her response to his cloud-watching was, “That’s about the dumbest cloud I’ve ever seen. And by the way, I think rain is very annoying and pigs who love the rain are extremely irritating.” She later apologized for being in a bad mood, but the damage was done.

     But nothing could deter Father Gizmo from celebrating the wonders of the world. Which is why he was always trying to make a contribution to it by inventing things that would fill the herd with a sense of possibility.    

     Pig’s father really wanted his son Pig to follow in his footsteps and become an inventor. Pig knew his father meant well, but he didn’t see much difference between what Father Gizmo imagined he was doing and what Tiggly-Wiggly did when he ran around in what he thought were impressive circles. Mother Gizmo ambivalently encouraged Pig’s pursuit of higher learning with Gable IX. She was torn between her fear of her beloved Pig knowing too little and knowing too much.

That Night

     The lecture that night at Moonlight University was very provocative. The Professor urged JoJo to pay close attention. One long-term goal of Gable IX’s life was to develop a comprehensive theory of porcine ethics. He thought he had found the lynchpin of his theory in the assertion, “The universe is not fair, but pigs should try to be.” His other way of saying that was, “The world does terrible things but a creature with four toes on each hoof that oinks doesn’t have to.” He wanted to develop a whole reality-based porcine ethical philosophy around that, but his teaching duties always seemed to get in the way. One ethical issue he needed to solve was how to find a place in his theory of swine morality for both strict porcine judgment and forgiving mercy, but he had yet to work out the philosophical specifics. Gable IX closed the class with a discussion of the perennial desire of Domestic Pigs to live in a totally harmonious society free of porcine confrontation and snappishness. The lecture was titled, “The Fallacy of Pigtopia.” He said, “While some pigs pray to their so-called Almighty Hog for a world in which there is no conflict and no disagreement, such a world would turn The Great Pig Pen into a lifeless world of meaningless porcine contentment. In such a world, every pig might as well just turn themselves into the brisket manufacturers. Dreams of Pigtopia always turn into Disastertopia.”

     Pig stayed after class so he could talk to Professor Gable IX about what he had heard earlier in the day. He was shaking as he uttered the words “Montgomery’s Disease” to the Professor.

     “Well, I’ll be!” he muttered. “It’s finally happened. One day Montgomery’s Disease is going to come back and bite these evil imbeciles on their asses,” said Professor Gable IX. “Sometimes, between the humans and you Domestic Pigs I think that I’m going to laugh so hard I’ll start hemorrhaging from all my orifices. Then everyone will surely think that I have contracted acute Montgomery’s Disease.”

     The professor was secretly fascinated by the way the supposedly highly-intelligent humans were destroying the whole planet, a subject that was now an animated discussion on the gossip network of Wild Boars that extended to almost every country on the planet. Wild Boars were hypersensitive to everything that was happening in the cosmos around them: the disappearance of entire species, the worsening air and water quality, the overpopulation of the aggravating, so-called humans who were making it all happen as fast as a hungry fox spots a juicy rabbit. Frankly, the Wild Boars didn’t care what happened to the very creepy masters of the earth, but they were certainly fearful for what lay in store for themselves and their inferior colleagues, the Domestic Pigs. Professor Gable IX often said to his class, “As far as humans are concerned, we are their collateral damage. Don’t forget that humans like to eat your pickled feet,” said Gable IX. “How sick is that?”

     The only class that Gable IX agreed to teach about human politics was called, “Human Political Psychopathology,” because he believed that, in human society, it was virtually impossible to have politics without extreme, almost criminal psychopathology. They were a married couple that were almost indistinguishable from each other.

    At the end of their evening chat, Professor Gable IX said, “Don’t tell anyone anything until we know a lot more. Promise me, Pig.”

     “I promise, Professor.”

     Professor Gable IX just stared at Pig in silence. Pig could tell that his professor’s mind was racing. Gable IX looked up at the sky, as though he would find something to say in outer space.

     “I have to think about this. It promises to be a big mess for everyone,” he said. “For all the Wild Boars out here, all you Domestic Pigs in there, and, no doubt, the humans too. This can’t end well. I hoped I would be dead before this day ever came.”

     As Pig headed back to his family’s area in the Great Pen, Gable IX yelled, “Not a word, Pig, not a word.”

     Pig spent a restless night and tossed and turned in his sleep. He woke up several times and gazed at the stars that supposedly formed The Almighty Hog’s outline in the sky and wondered if he should be praying like some of the easily fooled pigs in the herd. But he was too full of anxiety to do anything.

The Backstory

     Domestic Pigs generally hate to admit it, but the Wild Boars were the alpha creatures of their kind. They were the living representatives of the ancestors of all Domestic Pigs everywhere. Their dumbest were faster, craftier and braver than the smartest Domestic Pigs. They had continuously survived the hunting holocausts that humanity was always imposing on them. They knew how to move surreptitiously in the forest and avoid both humans and grey wolves. Under the cover of darkness, they overcame multiple challenges in all kinds of climates, even when they were alone. Although they had originated in Africa and subsequently expanded their habitat to Eurasia, they had found their way ultimately into just about every country on the planet. Even islands. While the Domestic Pigs were from a line of Wild Boar that had succumbed to human captivity, the Wild Boar had, by dint of their fierce will and acumen, avoided that pathetic fate. You could also say that they cut themselves out of the comforts of porcine hominess that Domestic Pigs were afforded on some humane farms. But they also had avoided being put on the assembly line to you-know-what. They never “passed into ham” without a bloody fight. One could say that their motto was “Be a free pig or die.” And many of them had scars from grazing bullet wounds and the teeth marks from hostile grey wolves to show for their courage and determination. Both Wild Boars and Domestic Pigs are multitaskers. But Wild Boars even more so. They could hunt for food, teach the young Domestic Pigs as well as their own young, and monitor the bloodthirsty humans at the same time.

     The best Wild Boar universities were believed to be in the forests of central and northern Europe. The German Wild Boars, of course, thought they had invented Wild Boar civilization, and discounted anything accomplished by their ancestors in Africa. The German Wild Boars who considered themselves to be the most serious porcine philosophers were downright scary. They held the opinion that the French Wild Boars were light-in-the-hooves and existentially facetious. And they were very competitive with the English Wild Boar who were famous for their pretentiousness and fruity obsession with the imaginary bloodlines of porcine royalty. The British Wild Boars spoke in long, complex sentences that never seemed to end. And there was always some delusional Wild Boar in a forest near London that considered herself the Queen of the Wild Boars. Given that Wild Boar society is largely matriarchal, many believed her.

     Gable IX ran the one-Boar Moonlight University every night at the back fence—when the humans were safely sound asleep—so an elite group of young pigs could have some advanced education. Like parents everywhere, the Domestic Pigs in The Great Pig Pen were ambivalent about higher education. No pig wants an uppity son or daughter. They wanted their children to have the most promising futures, but feared it would alienate their progeny from the barnyard-based interests of their less accomplished parents. Instructors like Gable IX were publicly praised, but the wariness of the parents could be seen in the limited number of treats from the garbage dump they were willing to pass on as payment for attendance at Moonlight University.

     Gable IX was from a line of academic Wild Boars that survived the crossings on ships from Europe. Professor Gable IX told Pig that he hailed from a rigorous porcine family tree of Germanic Wild Boars that had a propensity for thinking deeply and originally, and some were famous for their intense, sometimes opaque and ponderous philosophizing. Gable IX insisted that he had been able to loosen up his thinking a bit and make it less Germanic by hanging out with flamboyant poetry-obsessed French Wild Boars who heralded from truffle-laden forests on the outskirts of Paris.

     On their trip to America, Wild Boars were chained in the hold of ships and kept there to provide dinner during the voyage. A few lucky ones always avoided the fate of being dragged to the upper deck to be sacrificed and barbecued. Hence, the famous Wild Boar notion that anything that doesn’t get you grilled only makes you stronger. Of course many escaped their demise on the ships only to experience the same outcome on the new continent. But given the astute judgment and strategic thinking built into the DNA of Wild Boars, several found their way to the lush, green, merciful forests of America and succeeded in creating a new porcine life for themselves. But the fate of the more servile and abject Domestic Pigs who had descended from Wild Boars was not so fortunate. They existed for the pleasure and whims of humans. The Wild Boars existed for themselves. Their souls fought with all their might not to be turned into someone’s ribs with a side of greasy fries.

     Gable IX believed, but said he could not prove, that his German forepigs actually descended from Wild Boars who dazzled Greece and that a capacity for groundbreaking, seminal philosophy ran in their porcine germ line. Gable IX insisted it wasn’t the kind of feathery philosophy that kept a Wild Boar’s head in the clouds and put him at risk for being successfully hunted by humans. No, he argued that their philosophical nature was more reality-based and enabled them to run and hide from humans with great shrewdness. “I come from a long line of pigs that can recognize traps, nonsense, gossip and scams,” he often told his mesmerized students.

     Mother and Father Gizmo had raised Pig to believe in the The Almighty Hog, but ever since he had been attending Moonlight University and listening closely to Gable IX’s lectures about the dark episodes in porcine history, he had begun to have doubts about the very existence of “The Almighty Hog” who had created all pigs and looked after them from some kind of celestial pigsty in the sky. But Pig hedged his bets and occasionally prayed, especially when something unsettling happened. Whenever the humans suddenly took one of the pigs in the herd away was one of those prayerful occasions. Pig always prayed that he wouldn’t be next, or Bambino or Cuchi-Cuchi, or Sassy, or his parents, or any of the nice pigs. There were a couple he could do without, but he was afraid of wishing ill on any pig. He feared such unwholesome wishes would come back to haunt him, courtesy of the Invisible Evil Pig Devil that he also didn’t exactly believe in.

     Professor Gable IX had urged his students to depend on themselves and use their own wits for survival, even though, truth be told, he fundamentally didn’t have much respect for the judgment of Domestic Pigs. Professor Gable IX was fond of saying “Humans are absurd, plain and simple. Domestic Pigs are quasi-human.”

     More than once, Gable IX explained the porcine theory of evolution, namely how humans were a short term mistaken blip in the chain of being. Just an uglier and ultimately more self-destructive version of swine. “Even more than an evolutionary misstep than Domestic Pigs,” he sometimes quipped to his five advanced students who were never quite sure when their professor was being ironic

     Gable IX regularly told his attentive students, “Always be sure the evidence is on your side before you even think about opening your mouth.” Whenever one of his students started to say anything that sounded egregiously stupid, Gable IX interrupted them, saying “Stick an apple in it and cook it at 350 degrees for 20 minutes a pound.”

     Gable IX explained to his class that the deep history of Domestic Pigs was heavily influenced by the invisible hand of infection, disease and—from his perspective—human and porcine foolishness. He was fond of saying, “Domestic Pig and human folly is everywhere, open your eyes and smell the barnyard! And the farmhouse!”

     As their learning progressed, thanks to Gable IX, when his five students looked at their human overlords, they saw the embodiment of mendacity and foolishness. And they gradually learned the sad fact of life that the liars and euphemizers who looked at them saw only breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack. Even if they were taught a handful of embarrassing tricks and occasionally received a welcome massage on the snout.

     The facts of life—namely their perpetual pigocide, as Gable IX put it—were not told to any of the pigs until they reached an appropriate age to shock them. It was never easy to learn that you are just finger-licking spare ribs on four hooves, making yourself healthier more and more attractive each day in order to end up on some dull normal human’s plate in the middle of a dysfunctional family’s dining room table.

The Next Day

     The next morning, after a night of insomnia, Pig awoke with bloodshot eyes and a sense of dread about what the future would bring. As Pig headed over to the garbage dump to dig up a little something for breakfast, he saw Cuchi-Cuchi and said, “Cuchi, can I get you anything from the dump?”

     “If you see anything that cures leukemia or swine polio, grab it,” she responded.

     Cuchi! Will you please stop it!”

     “And how do you know I’m not in the early stages of leukemia?” she asked.

     It was the last thing Pig needed to hear. But as he scurried toward the dump, he so much wanted to tell her about the Montgomery Disease scare, which would have been disastrous. He desperately needed to share his fears with someone.

     When Pig reached the colorful, eclectic pile of garbage from the farmhouse, he saw his very judgmental and commanding relative, Aunt Mathilda, his mother’s older sister, holding court with several of her sycophantic porcine girlfriends who were also a little afraid of this imperious sow. His aunt and her devoted following of sows were spending their morning sorting through their potpourri of snobbish barnyard opinions and competitive aches and pains. Aunt Mathilda was standing next to Bernice The Redundant Pig, who repeated her every oink. Even Aunt Mathilda’s long and winding stories. They were all there digesting their morning egg shells and banana peels while Aunt Mathilda was repeating one of her labyrinthine stories that seemed to continue until dusk.

     After Aunt Mathilda met with any females in the herd, she usually said the same nasty thing behind their backs (no matter what they looked like) to her closest confidantes, “She’s gotten kind of thin and sickly, hasn’t she?” She had never once complimented a single sow by telling her that she was “big as a barn.”

     Pig was fully prepared for his aunt to demean him in front of her little entourage. It didn’t take long.

     “Well look who woke up and decided to grace us with his royal presence!” she said.

     “Good morning, Aunt Mathilda. So very nice to see you. I hope you are well.”

      “How in the Almighty Hog’s name could I be well? Did you forget about my arthralgia? It never gives me a moment’s peace!”

     “I’m sorry, Aunt Mathilda.”

     She looked away from Pig as though he had been impertinent and found her way back into the ever-expanding story she was gracing her porcine friends with.

     Cuchi-Cuchi especially didn’t like Aunt Mathilda and tried to steer clear of her. Arthralgia was the one pathology that Cuchi-Cuchi never imagined she suffered from, because she felt that it would somehow mean she was in some way like Aunt Mathilda. Cuchi-Cuchi was also protective of her older brother and had always resented the fact that she had heard that the word around The Great Pig Pen was that Aunt Mathilda had told a few gossipy pigs that her nephew Pig was “uppity.” Which, of course, Cuchi-Cuchi immediately passed on to both Pig and her mother.

     The mother immediately tried to protect Pig’s feelings by saying, “Don’t you mind my sister Mathilda, Pig! She’s just jealous of your gifts. Her own two pathetic sons don’t even know where their snouts begin and their tails end. She thinks she is the Empress of The Great Pig Pen, but she has only sired losers.

     Pig actually liked his oversized two cousins, even if they were not the brightest pigs. At least they hadn’t bullied Pig the way other pigs his same age had.

     There was a turning point many years before when Pig’s mother and Aunt Mathilda had words and then didn’t speak to each other for several harvests. It made things very awkward for the entire Great Pig Pen as cryptic unfriendly messages were sent back and forth between family pigs and mutual friends. Pig dreaded any sentence that came out of his mother’s mouth that began, “You can just go and tell your Aunt Mathilda . . .”

     Their rivalry went back to childhood and the fact that they came out of different litters. Aunt Mathilda was the only piglet to survive Pig’s grandmother’s first litter and was therefore treated like the whole Great Pig Pen revolved around her. As a young piglet, it made her very bossy and she was always telling Pig’s mother and all the other siblings in the later litters what to do and when to do it.

     Aunt Mathilda never let Pig’s mother forget the inferiority of her childhood in which she was stuck weaning on her mother’s posterior teats while her other siblings were all welcome to the anterior ones. Aunt Mathilda always brought this up when Mother Gizmo was in any way acting like she had any kind of prominence at all in the herd.

     When Pig’s mother met and fell in love with Father Gizmo, the relationship between the sisters practically reached a permanent breaking point. From the minute Aunt Mathilda met Father Gizmo, she did not have a kind word to say about him. After their first introduction, when he was out of earshot, she turned to her sister and said, “Where did you find that damn moron?”

     “But he’s an inventor, said Pig’s mother.

     “If he’s an inventor, I’m a Jersey cow,” Aunt Mathilda responded, huffily.

     Aunt Mathilda consented to come to their wedding but her gift was only a couple of mold-encrusted avocado pits that had been in the garbage dump for months.

     Sometimes, after a long lecture by Aunt Mathilda on Pig’s mother’s failings as a wife and mother, when Aunt Mathilda was out of sight, she would refer to her as “Her Highest Highness.”

     One of Aunt Mathilda’s close confidants was even more imperious than she was. Veranda was what is often referred to in hog herds as a bitter spinster sow. Even though she was unmarried and pigletless, she had very intense pretensions of matriarchy. All the male pigs in the herd trembled when she was around. If the males ever had to face both Veranda and Mathilda, a very sensitive part of them just shriveled in place.  Even Gable IX said that from what he had heard about Veranda, he, too, would have given her wide berth. The male pigs could simply do nothing right where she was concerned, and the female pigs—even the ones who occasionally had breakdowns and ate their young—could do no wrong. Veranda made up for the fact that she never sired a litter by being a judgmental busybody and acting as though she was the controlling matriarch of the whole herd. Even the members of prestigious Wise Council of Porcine Elders were cowed when they were in her presence. The Council members sometimes referred to Aunt Mathilda and Veranda as “The Wise Porcine Council of Don’t Mess With Them.”

     Pigs resent ever being put on a leash like a dog (the very sight of one made them snarl) and some pigs thought Veranda had been cruelly leashed as a piglet and that, even though they couldn’t prevent it, she blamed all the male pigs in the herd for letting it happen to her. (Gable IX described leashes as torture and a violation of porcine rights.)

     That night, after class at Moonlight University, Gable IX, who was in a particularly solicitous mood gave his star pupil the ultimate compliment: he said, “You are one vivid, in-the-moment hog, Pig. You’re totally there. Your head is not adrift in the sky or lost in the mud. Where you are, you really are. You are a pig of destiny. Great forces in the universe are converging in your being. I know it. Your soul is totally expansive, but disciplined. Because you see the world for what it is, the world must watch out for you. And best of all, I think you’re totally non-negotiable, one of the most independent pigs I’ve ever taught. And you know how to keep things simple and straightforward. There is not a pretense in you. You’re not a hoarder of transient physical things that you find in the dump. You have nothing to lose. That will get you into trouble.  You’ll never be safe in any barnyard because you are a herd of one and you are too free-thinking for the common swine. There will always be a target on your back.” And since it was in his nature to be paradoxical, Gable IX added, “But be very, very careful. The less you have, the more people will envy you.” And then he closed with, “Pig, destiny is character, and I believe you have a great destiny. Destiny makes a lot more interesting choices than pigs ever do.”

     Pig glowed so much he could have lit up the entire Great Pig Pen. He didn’t even need to sleep that night. He floated in a waking dream across the sky.

     Gable IX had high hopes that Pig would accomplish a great deal when he finished his classes at Moonlight University, but he often warned him to pace himself, saying, “I’ve seen too many very promising Wild Boars in my life accomplish one great thing quickly and then for the rest of their lives they’re just disgruntled and annoying, forever waiting for the rewards they think pigs of their stature deserve. Don’t let that happen to you.”

Backstory

    

     Once a month, Mr. Boss and his wife came to choose the new pigs that would be taken to another pen which was the location of  the Boss’s Sunday Pig Petting Zoo. Mr. Boss had found that the only way he could pay his farm’s mortgage was to start a petting zoo. Twenty pigs were selected, including Cuchi-Cuchi, who was always a favorite of the children. She loved the attention. The twenty porcine performers were herded down a pathway to a separate pen, and one of the Boss’s sickly son’s stood there with a hose, washing the pigs down so they would be presentable for their petting. Although the water was cold, a clean pig is generally a happy pig. Cuchi-Cuchi thought the washing made her look glamorous and referred to it as her “makeover.”

     At noon, on Sundays, cars started to pull up along the road in front of the farmhouse and all kinds of families with loud and exited children came bounding out of them and headed for the Pig Petting Zoo. The fence of the Sunday Pig Petting Zoo was not a high one and it allowed the children to reach over it and touch the pigs, who for the most part squealed with delight. Some of them actually performed a little impromptu dance to entertain the families. Occasionally, one of the brattier children would pinch a pig, making it oink in protest. Gradually the pigs learned the hard way that not all humans had pigs’ best interests at heart. Gable IX could have told them that, and probably would if and when they reached Moonlight University.

     The best part of the Sunday Pig Petting Zoo experience was when the good Mrs. Boss handed out buckets of treats to feed the perpetually hungry pigs. The potpourri in the buckets included cheerios, shredded wheat, popcorn, grapes, cooked broccoli, pitted apricots, cucumbers, dark green lettuce, cooked potatoes, beets, pieces of pumpkin, slices of squash, zucchini, snow peas, spinach, yams, kale, tomatoes, chard, carrots, pears, apples, berries, oranges, grapefruit, melons, pitted cherries, pitted peaches and tasty squares of cheese. Even the pigs who felt like being petted was an annoying humiliation liked this part of the experience with humans immensely. The food at the petting zoo was much better than the daily slop they were fed in The Great Pig Pen, when they were not gulping down bits of strange things in the garbage dump and rooting around for worms.

     As the pigs ate all the treats that the families threw at them, they wagged their adorable curly tails in total glee. They had the responsibility of leaving the children with a good impression of swine that would last their entire lives.

     The high point of Petting Zoo Sundays was a clever little show in which several of the more gifted pigs that had been trained to do tricks showed off their surprising skills. They would start with simple things like lining up in a row and bowing to the families who clapped in delight. As the trainer blew a whistle like the ringmaster in a circus, the performance continued with more amazing stunts like riding skateboards, walking backwards while squealing, and the old classic, playing dead. Just like the fireworks on the 4^th of July, when the audience thought the show was over, the pigs formed two teams and played soccer with the cutest little red soccer ball.

     After every show, the pig who had given the best performance always got a special massage on the snout from Mrs. Boss. And sometimes a little piece of apple pie.

     Training for the Sunday Petting Zoo was conducted in a special pen where there would be no distractions from the learning tricks process. Training always began with the trainer tenderly grasping the pigs by the snout and, with gentle fingers, holding their mouths closed, which calms most pigs and puts some into and hypnotic state perfect for learning tricks. It took a great deal of effort to train the pigs because the process had to be kept very positive and pigs could not be taught for more than twenty minutes at a time or they would have so much going in their porcine brains that they would start to confuse tricks or start to hyperventilate. The sound of “Good little piggy, good little piggy!” could often be heard coming from the training pen. The trainer always called the pigs affectionately by their first names. The only trick that never worked was the one day the trainer got the bright idea to make a toilet a part of the show and put one in the center of the pen to begin the lessons. When he saw all the pigs present turn in disdain, shock and repulsion at the sight of his humiliating notion, he knew he had seriously overreached. It was almost as bad as the time he tried to get one of the older pigs to smoke a cigar for the public. They were glitches in an otherwise very cordial relationship. They loved the feedback they got from the trainer, namely delicious bits of banana and apple as well as a friendly scratch on the head.

     “Don’t bite the children who come for the Sunday Petting Zoo. Don’t even nibble or look like you’re going to nibble,” warned the Wise Porcine Elder Bubba, the assistant spokespig for the Council of the Wise Elders. “We can’t be held responsible for anything that happens to you as a result of such irresponsible behavior. Even if the children pinch you or put chewing gum on your snout, don’t react. Just be professional pigs.” On occasion, a few pigs tested the patience of the trainers who ran the petting show performance. The trick was figure out how to manipulate the humans with passive-aggressive porcine cuteness. JoJo had crossed the line once, but Mrs. Boss, with her kind, forgiving heart, interceded and he wasn’t taken away.

     Pig was quite determined to escape what he considered to be a total debacle. Especially after what he was learning from Professor Gable IX, he wanted no part of any form of sham bonding experience with humans. When he was taken to the special pen to be taught the Sunday Petting Zoo tricks, he refused to be bribed with treats or what he thought were tacky massages on his snout, and remained as sullen and uncooperative as he could be when he was asked to sit or roll over, until the trainer, totally exasperated, threw his hands up in the air and said, “I can’t do a thing with this difficult pig.” When Pig told Gable IX what the trainer said, he replied “All exceptional pigs are difficult.”

     Tiggly-Wiggly was the trainer’s other big disappointment. He would never learn to do anything but run in circles, and at best, would sometimes run in the reverse direction. The trainer, however, did work him into the Sunday shows as a kind of comic relief for the audience. It seemed to fascinate the audience that Tiggly-Wiggly’s circling could reach a pigs maximum speed of 11 miles an hour in just a few seconds. That was something to behold.

     When Gable IX heard about all the gourmet delicacies that the pigs in the petting zoo were getting for successfully performing their tricks, he said that the con artists (which is what he called humans at least once a week) were just trying to make sure the families, who paid a pretty price to pet the pigs, didn’t have a clue that the pigs were being humiliated.

         Nevertheless, Gable IX said they were lucky to be in such a copacetic herd because what he had seen at other pig pens, and from what he had heard from other Wild Boar professors in the state of Iowa, the lives of most Domestic Pigs tended to be short, nasty, and creepy. He said that if the worst thing that happened to the herd was the petting zoo on weekends, they should count their blessings.

     Cuchi-Cuchi never felt like she was being mistreated or disrespected by being taken to the petting zoo. She actually considered herself privileged, and when she went on and on about the special way she was treated in the petting zoo, all her friends became envious. Pig wasn’t happy about her enthusiasm, but decided that anything that took her attention away from possible terminal diseases she could get was all for the good.

     While Cuchi-Cuchi always worked Pig’s last nerve, Sassafras, his sweetheart, did just the opposite. Pig loved everything about Sassafras. He thought Sassy had the most alluring teeny-tiny eyes and a curly, vivacious tail to die for. Her porcine body was extra thick in all the right places and her perfectly shaped short and stubby legs were the envy of all the matronly pigs in the herd. Her 44 very healthy teeth made for a beautiful smile and her sharp tusks sometimes seemed to sparkle in the sunlight. She was what some of his buddies referred to as a supersow. Unlike some of her sloppier and envious girlfriends, she always kept her highly sensitive snout clean as a whistle.

     Pig had an odd relationship with many of the pigs in the herd. Most of them liked Pig, but for some reason, there was something about Pig that made other pigs want to yack and yack, constantly talking over him so that he could not squeeze in a single world or fact about himself. It may have been because Pig, who was clearly Father’s Gizmo’s son, was always interested in other pigs and the different ways they were trying to conduct their lives in The Great Pig Pen. He was perpetually curious and he always asked probing questions. He needed to take the measure of every pig he spoke to. This may have left too much of an opening that other pigs easily took advantage of as they constantly went off on tangents and often told very long stories that to Pig never seemed to have a beginning or a middle or an end. Pig’s politeness invited every hog he encountered to dominate the conversation, no matter what they had to say. There was something about Pig that brought out the condescension in every hog in The Great Pig Pen. Pig’s manners were a major liability in the barnyard. Sometimes all Pig heard coming out of his friends’ snouts was “Me, me, me, me, me, oink, oink, oink, oink, and more about me.” But it did have its benefits. While the loquacious pigs went on and on, Pig often had a chance to cogitate and as a result was becoming one of the foremost porcine thinkers in The Great Pig Pen, if nowhere else. At his current age, his thoughts may have been just seeds, but he sensed that they might one day grow into the kind of wisdom that seemed to glide so easily off of Gable IX’s professorial tongue. Maybe one day his mind would conjure up vast porcine systems, theories, and conundrums that would impress Professor Gable IX.

     While all the other pigs regularly tried to put Pig in his place, he was never exactly sure what or where that place was. But Sassafras was different. Sassy, (the name of endearment he always called her), was endlessly curious about what was going on inside of Pig. Sassafras knew it was a wonderful time to know Pig because Gable IX’s classes at Moonlight University had ushered in a period of tremendous intellectual ferment in him.

     Pig courted Sassafras by bringing her deluxe insects and juicy worms that he had dug up in a special secret place in The Great Pig Pen that only he knew about. But he didn’t need to do a thing since she was smitten the second she laid her itty-bitty porcine eyes on him. He was even more attracted to her than to Coppelia, the breathtakingly beautiful sow that every male in The Great Pig Pen seemed to think was “The Sexiest Pig Alive.”  Some referred to her as “The It Sow of The Great Pig Pen.” Predictably, she had her eyes on Pig, but he didn’t like her flashy style and her habit of striking seductive porcine poses whenever she thought anyone was looking at her. She also did something funny with her pig lips (which unfortunately, humans liked to salt pickle and snack on) that he thought was just downright strange. He was decidedly not attracted to Coppelia, which naturally put him on her “must have” list. It was an imaginary relationship for her that was bound not to end well.

     Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig thought she was Coppelia’s competition (she spread the rumor that JoJo said  Coppelia was a sloppy smooshy kisser), but Coppelia just ignored her when she tried to outpose her with her pathetically bony body that she had developed through prodigious, misguided  regurgitation. Neither Coppelia nor Skinny Mimi made Sassafras’s life easy.

    One weekend, during which there were no classes at Moonlight University, Pig spent the night on a date with Sassafras. When he got back, Mother and Gizmo were still up waiting for him at the family nest.

     “How was your date?” asked Mother Gizmo

     Pig hesitated and appeared to be in some kind of dream state when he replied, “More fun than a picnic with miniature pigs. Sassafras is the kindest, most positive and supportive pig that I have ever known. Everyone wants to be her friend.” It made Pig exceedingly happy that she always acted impressed with whatever cockamamie invention Father Gizmo was currently working on. “Your father is some kind of genius,” she would say to Pig. While Pig didn’t know what kind of genius that was, he always passed his compliments on to Father Gizmo, which made him give out a patriarchal squeal of porcine satisfaction.

     Sassy kept him on his sixteen toes. He was always afraid of disappointing her.

     Mother and Father Gizmo knew things were clearly quite serious when, one evening, Pig returned to the nest and told his mother he wanted to invite someone special to dinner. Mother Gizmo could always whip up a tasty meal with just a few egg shells and some left over pasta (from a discarded can) that she dug up in The Great Pig Pen’s dump.

     “What’s for dinner, Mother?” asked pig.

     “Your favorite, “she relied.”

     “Oh goody, rodents!

     “Big hairy ones, the kind you like.”

     Pig paused and then nervously  asked, “May I invite Sassafras to dinner?”

     “Absolutely. Just be sure she comes with a big appetite.” Mother Gizmo didn’t trust sows (like Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig) that didn’t eat or only pretended to. She didn’t want her son to marry a sow who had “slop issues.”

     As time went on, Pig’s mother became more and more supportive of Pig’s courtship of Sassafras. She could easily imagine the grandpiglets that she would one day be surrounded by. She was relieved that Pig had lost interest in a couple of what she referred to as floozy sows. Like most mothers, she wanted her first born son to have a mate that was worthy of him.

     On one date, over a perfect meal of cucumber and avocado peels, which they found at the dump, Sassafras described to Pig all the county fairs she had been trucked to because the Boss family considered her their real “looker.” She had become a bit of a celebrity pig in the state because of her huge number of blue ribbons, medals and gold cups. Sassafras was the pig always selected by the Boss family to take to county fairs, and she had many awards to show for it.  Occasionally, Mrs. Boss proudly brought out a bulletin board pinned with all her blue ribbons to show the whole herd. But, to the dismay of her viciously envious girlfriends, Sassy only increased her attractiveness to Pig by never making a big deal about her success or haughtily sashaying around The Great Pig Pen with her awards after returning from the country fairs. In fact she wished Mrs. Boss would just keep them all in the farmhouse and admire them privately. Her stunning humility was another thing that made her so attractive to Pig. Pig couldn’t believe that his true love was not only beautiful, sensitive and hefty, but she was also quite humble about her accomplishments. He knew that she would imbue her many litters of piglets with solid porcine values when they finally married.

     Sassafras helped Pig keep things in perspective when JoJo did hostile things like calling him “teacher’s pet.” She told him, “JoJo and The Mean Pigs are just jealous because you’re so gifted. It’s pure envy. I know what envy looks like because I see it in the eyes of all the other pigs at the country fairs. Especially when I win. Which, just between you and me, I usually do.”

    When she described what a county fair was like, Sassafras told Pig that she loved watching the parades of farm equipment, the intense ploughing competitions and meeting all the sows and boars from farms all over the state was always quite interesting. And she had a special fondness for the human cowboys who always seemed to show up at these affairs and put on some kind of a show. She didn’t go on too much about the cowboys because she noticed a little flash of jealousy in Pig’s eyes whenever she brought the subject up.

     Sassafras loved watching the amusement rides that filled the county fairs with the laughter of children which always made her feel like the world was a safe and secure place for her. And, although the fireworks at night at first frightened her, she had come to look forward to the spectacles. She said she was also fascinated by what the farmers at the fair called “the city people” who visited the events. “They really are different.” she said to Pig, “They don’t seem to be bad people, just different.”

     Sassafras told Pig that she wasn’t crazy about the sheep that showed up at these fairs. She felt a great deal of identification with the rest of the animals attending the event, but about the sheep she would always say, “I don’t know who they think they are.” She would never elaborate. She said that there were no really impressive performances at the fair’s petting zoo, like the ones their herd gave at the Boss’s Sunday Petting Zoo every Sunday afternoon.

     She really wished that Pig had been taken to one of these fairs. She said, “Pig, a great mind like yours would really appreciate the county fairs. There are all kinds of talks about how to grow things on a farm. I think you’d understand them better than any of the other pigs”

     Pig would often share some of the more interesting things he had been schooled in at Moonlight University. Sassafras thought she was the most fortunate sow in The Great Pig Pen because her future mate was a very learned pig. But Pig made every effort to protect Sassafras from some of the more disturbing things that his Moonlight University education had taught him as well as some of the more questionable things that he thought were going on in The Great Pig Pen without anyone noticing. He tried to keep his darker thoughts to himself. He thought that it would be best for his courtship with Sassy to focus on the positive things and the happy times. There would be plenty of occasions in their later lives to deal with some of the inexorable grim realities that Professor Gable IX had presented to the class in an uncompromising manner.

     Pig’s courtship of Sassafras was full of porcine tenderness. When it was unbearably hot in the summer, Pig always found the shadiest place for Sassafras, and gently rubbed her skin with mud to protect her from the sun’s harshest rays. Once, when he was nuzzling Sassafras, he stopped himself from erotically foaming at the mouth the way that aroused pigs do. He respected Sassafras, who was a porcine virgin and they had not even married yet. He had not even formally asked for her hoof.

     Sassy’s best friend, Lurleen, thought that in Pig, Sassy had found the perfect hog. Lurleen had been raised on a Southern farm and had memorized virtually every country and western song she had heard her owners sing. It was uncanny. She wasn’t that attractive, but she expertly used what she had. And the males in the herd found her country songs quite captivating. They loved her songs because they told stories they could understand and they seemed to contain wisdom that could be used in their lives in The Great Pig Pen. Sometimes Pig and Sassafras brought Lurleen along with them on dates so she could serenade them with country love songs.

The Next Day

     Early that morning an agitated Omni The Total Information Pig rushed into brief the Council of Wise Porcine Elders about some very disturbing information he had collected while spying on Mr. Boss and what was clearly a well-fed USDAer who accompanied him to the gate of The Great Pig Pen that very sunny morning in order to inspect the awakening herd.

         Omni had become extremely skilled at recognizing the kind of humans who visited The Great Pig Pen: veterinarians, medical doctors, nurses, businessmen, USDAers, and wierdos. The USDAers were the easiest to recognize because, facially, they usually looked very porcine themselves and had big bellies that hung pendulously over their disappearing narrow belts. To Omni they looked like the herd’s very distant, dumber, and more dishonest relatives.

     Omni cleared his throat and said to the Council, “It’s no longer Swine Mystery Disease.”

     “So they solved the big mystery?” asked Wise Elder Pigbottom.

     “They think they did. They’re now calling it Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, or PRRS.”

     “PRRS, that’s very catchy,” said Wise Porcine Elder Neanderthal.

     “Tell us more, said Wise Porcine Elder Pigbottom. But try to be brief. We have a number of important porcine commission meetings to trot off to today.”

     Omni dug into his prodigious memory and told them more than they probably wanted to know about Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome.

     Omni reported that the USDAer said what he always said, namely that nobody should panic because the USDA would eventually have a test and a vaccine. Just as soon as they found the cause. He insisted that the USDA had everything under control. Omni said, “I distinctly saw Mr. Boss roll his eyes when the USDAer said that.”

     With a tremble in his voice Omni said, “I remember hearing them discussing two farms in the county that have the newly named Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome.  The USDAer told Mr. Boss that they’ve been seeing it break out all over the country. He said its origin is a total enigma.”

     “What could it be caused by?” asked Elder Pigglesworth.

     Omni replied, “They don’t seem to have a clue. They’re very nervous about it spreading here. They’re even afraid that it already has.”

     “What are the signs of this so-called Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome?” asked Elder Wombat.

     Omni answered, “They kept talking about flu-like symptoms. The USDAer repeatedly asked Mr. Boss if he or Mrs. Boss and the children had seen any pigs here coughing or sniffling or looking feverish?”

     “Anything else?” asked the Elder.

     “Well,” Omni looked down and paused, “he also asked if Mr. Boss had seen any of the sows give birth to a dead mummy piglet.”

     “A dead mummy piglet!” exclaimed Wise Elder Gipper.

     A sheepish, knowing look passed from Elder to Elder. And Omni knew exactly what they were all thinking about was the fact that earlier in the week, one of the younger (and not bad looking) sows, Vickie, a charming young thing, had given birth to a horrifyingly disfigured dead piglet. It happened in the middle of the night, so the Council was able to have the atrocious little porcine freak buried in the far end of the pen before the rest of the herd awoke, and before Mr. Boss or the rest of his family could see the bizarre spectacle of a dead mummy piglet. They were afraid it would cause panic and stress. It was not unusual for a sow to lose a piglet, but the appearance of this grotesque dead piglet was anything but usual. The piglet looked like a creature from another planet or another species. The piglet’s bloody rib cage was visible. The sight almost made two of the Wise Porcine Elders throw up their morning meal from the dump.

     Omni was sworn to total secrecy about all information that he shared with the Council as well as what was said at their high level morning briefings. And Omni didn’t tell a single pig. Except Aunt Mathilda, who he was deathly afraid of. But he swore her to complete secrecy. And she complied. Except that she always passed on whatever she heard to Mother and Father Gizmo. And Pig was often there with them listening intently. Aunt Mathilda in turn swore all three of them to secrecy and they didn’t say a word to a soul. Except Pig always relayed the information on to Professor Gable IX during their after-class discussions. And that is how Gable IX learned Mr. Boss and the USDAer were concerned about an epidemic of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Disease.

     Pig didn’t expect Gable IX to show such little surprise when he got the news. Gable IX said, “I’ve been hearing bits and pieces about this Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Disease thing in the forest for weeks. I didn’t want to say anything about it because I thought some of my Wild Boar friends were getting slightly hysterical. Some of them like to make porcine life more dramatic, as if our challenging, perpetually hunted lives out there aren’t turbulent enough. But the fact that it was given such a disingenuous-sounding name means something. When humans start playing name games like that, you know that they are probably hiding something that we should all be paying attention to. Well, Pig, this is a good test of your learning and acumen. What do you suppose it is?”

     Pig really felt on the spot. He thought hard for a second and said, “I’m sorry sir, but nothing is coming to mind.”

     Gable IX looked at Pig with a wince of annoyance and responded, “Haven’t I schooled you on the sins and stupidities of humans over and over.”

     “Oh, you mean they’re not telling the truth, Professor?”

     “Now I think we’re getting somewhere. You’re definitely getting warmer. Pig, what do they use when they don’t want to tell the truth about something. I’ve lectured the class over and over about this”

     “Oh, I know, I know!” squealed Pig. “Euphemism! Euphemism! Isn’t that the word?”

     “Pig, if ever in my challenging life I’ve heard a euphemism, it’s “Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome. It’s no better than Swine Mystery Disease. One of my favorite antics, as you know so well, is the human game of constantly renaming things to make them go away.”

     “So, why exactly would they do that?” asked Pig.

     “Come on Pig. How many times do I have to tell the class that humans only tell the truth when they are dying or when there is a gun pointed at their head. And sometimes not even then.”

     “Well, what are they lying about? What is the truth about Porcine Reductive and Respiratory Disease?”

     “Okay, Pig, I’m not going to tell you, but your assignment tonight is to go home and think about this. Cogitate and recogitate. The more you meditate on the issue, the more likely it is that the truth will just pop into your head.

     Pig looked befuddled, but as he sauntered away, he at least felt proud that the Professor thought he could complete the assignment if he worked hard enough. He was determined not to fail.

    Aunt Mathilda was very vigilant after she had gotten word from Omni the Information Pig that Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Disease might spread to the herd from other farms. She knew that her bowel movement surveillance was invaluable to the Council’s public health duties. She doubled down on her inspections. And she didn’t tell a soul except the Gizmo family who basically tipped off most of the herd. Although it was assumed nobody knew about it, it was all any pig could talk about privately. It made every member of the herd nervous. Some became sullen and others immersed themselves in frivolous porcine things.

     One morning that week, the herd was greeted by a team of vets at the gate with long needles. The pigs were all seized roughly and had needles jabbed into them for some kind of mysterious vaccine. A couple didn’t cooperate and the needles broke off in them, causing profuse bleeding. After they were vaccinated, some of the pigs got very tired and couldn’t move. Others developed lumps at the site of the vaccination. And still others had all kinds of breathing problems. It was no fun being protected from diseases so that one could be successfully devoured by humans.

     Later that week, in the middle of all the stress and commotion that the rumors about Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Disease had started to cause, the herd was horrified to wake up to see one of Pig’s cousins—Aunt Mathilda’s youngest daughter, Claudine, who had recently given birth to several piglets—munching on the already half-devoured body of one of her newborns. The whole herd erupted in cries of outrage. One of sows who witnessed the whole thing said that Mathilda’s daughter had made the usual grunting sound that signaled her young piglets that it was time to suckle and the next thing that she knew her daughter was chomping away on the poor thing and there was blood flying everywhere. Gunther, (the herd’s resident psychologist, bioethicist, epidemiologist and mime) rushed to Claudine before she finished dining on her offspring and pulled the half of the carcass that was uneaten out and took Pig’s cousin to the far side of The Great Pig Pen for emergency counseling and intervention. Claudine was kept away from her other newborns, and Aunt Mathilda, totally embarrassed about what happened—and furious—took the abandoned grandpiglets into her care. When Pig looked over at his mother, he was shocked to see a strange look of glee on his mother’s face. This tragic event had clearly upended the social prominence that Aunt Mathilda was accustomed to. He whispered very quietly to Cuchi-Cuchi, “Wow, they really don’t like each other!”

     Because of this event—and the turmoil that had driven their cousin crazy—was not going away anytime soon, the Elders decided to start the Porcine Commission For Not Eating Your Young to raise awareness about the issue. A prominent sow in the herd suggested that some kind of porcine consciousness-raising ribbon could be made out of pieces of old blue jeans from the dump and every one could wear it on their ears to express solidarity with the Not Eating Our Young Movement. Mythos, the herd’s official songwriter and poet began working on a catchy song called “Love Means Not Eating Our Young.” The Council also decided that one day a year would be chosen as Not Eating Our Young Day. The Council asked Elder Gunther, the psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime, to give a talk to calm the herd down. He put something together which he called, “A Psychological, Epidemiological and Bioethical Understanding of Our Current Situation and the Importance of Not Panicking and Eating Our Young.”

     The Council was always collecting new information and forming commissions to investigate what they considered to be the herd’s emerging problems. Sometimes it seemed like the only thing the commissions could do was to try and control information in order to tamp down the stress level of the herd.  

     Eventually a few concerned sows got Aunt Mathilda’s oldest daughter calmed down and she vowed never again to eat her young. But Aunt Mathilda had been taken down a notch or two socially and it would take her months to get herself back up on the porcine pedestal that she was accustomed to. Aunt Mathilda had been a very strict disciplinarian, especially where her daughters—who she referred to as “my girls”—were concerned. The notorious fastidiousness of sows was emblemized by Aunt Mathilda’s high expectations that her girls keep their area of the pen spotless and she often woke them up earlier than the rest of their herd to do their chores. They were only allowed to play games and root around in the dirt after their daily tasks were completed. Maybe she wasn’t the best mother in the herd, but she certainly thought she had trained “her girls” not to eat their young. As she looked back in time, she tried to figure out what she had done wrong.

     One day, shortly after the piglet-devouring atrocity happened, Aunt Mathilda could be found lecturing Mother Gizmo about the fact that she thought she was being far too lenient with Cuchi-Cuchi and that she should be more assertive in making sure that Cuchi-Cuchi performed all her cleaning tasks in the family’s nest. Aunt Mathilda snapped, “That girl would not be constantly thinking she is suffering from so many bizarre medical conditions if you kept her busy. Look at my girls. I never hear a crazy peep out of them.” Mother Gizmo had wanted to say, “Yes, your daughters are quite well-behaved until they eat their young,” but she didn’t want to set Aunt Mathilda off.

Two Weeks Later

     On a blustery Friday, Omni the Total Information Pig told the Council that he had overheard Mr. Boss say that he had learned that supermarket pork was going to be marketed all over the country—at the advice of the USDA—as “PRRS-free” if the deceased pigs from which it had originated were not infected. If scientists could find no evidence of anything odd going on in a pig’s body, they would label the bacon or other meat product a pig had “passed into” as “Free of All Swine Mystery Diseases.” Omni told the Council that the USDAer “seemed very excited about the new marketing campaign even though previous campaigns pushing pork as the ‘non-AIDS meat’ and ‘the non-autism meat’ had failed miserably. ” He told the Council that he heard Mr. Boss tell the USDAer “Well, this may make my herd more valuable—for now.”

     The fact that the herd didn’t seem to be infected resulted in Sassafras not being taken to any more county fairs where she might pick up PRRS if not some other emerging mysterious porcine malady with an imaginative name.

     Pig tried to comfort Sassafras by telling her that at least she would no longer be taken to places where she would be exposed to all kinds of mysterious human diseases.

The Next Month

     One morning at the beginning of the following month, Omni The Total Information Pig and Cuchi-Cuchi were present at the fence when Mrs. Boss seemed to be losing her temper at her sister again. “I’m sick of all this genetic bullshit,” Mrs. Boss said to her sister, who was constantly talking about the fact that she was proud that her children were part of a genetic autism and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research project being conducted to determine why they were all so unwell. Omni said he thought he heard Mrs. Boss say, “They can just gene sequence my ass. What is going on, an epidemic of genetic predispositions?” And for good measure she added, “If you say the word “genome” one more time, dear Sister, I swear I’m going to throw one of my delicious lemon merengue pies directly into your face.”

     What kinds of food to serve their children was a frequent topic of discussion and the issue sometimes caused violent disagreement between the sisters. The children in both families were constantly having all kinds of strange allergic responses to different foods they were served. Mrs. Boss said that some of her children seemed to have problems even tasting food.

     Most of the observant pigs in the herd thought there was something very odd about the Boss children and their cousins. In the sunlight, they all looked green and yellow from the toll of chronic illness. Cuchi-Cuchi told Pig that she thought that some of Mrs. Boss’s children had oddly shaped heads. “With humans, how can you tell?” responded Pig.    

     Mrs. Boss told her sister that she was quite upset that morning that a scientist had visited her and asked if she would donate Teddy’s body to science if he ever had some kind of unexpected medical event and, God forbid, she lost him.

     Mrs. Boss and her sister were constantly fighting over the fact that the older sister wanted Teddy to see a psychiatrist like her own “special needs darlin’ ” was. Omni told the Council that Mrs. Boss told her older sister that she walked out on a psychiatrist when he wanted to give Teddy experimental shock treatments.

     Mrs. Boss snapped at her, “Oh yes, little Teddy’s immune system has all kinds of psychological problems and his mitochondria, what’s left of his mitochondria, are having serious emotional issues. Sister, give me a blessed break. If you can’t see that this is all just one big loosey-goosey epidemic that’s affecting all of our children in different ways, you should have your I.Q. tested.”

     You’re not a doctor or a scientist,” the older sister said.

     “Thank the Lord,” said Mrs. Boss.

     Mrs. Boss once referred to the doctors that her older sister brought her children to as “quacks,” and because of that, the sisters stopped speaking to each other for nearly a month. They didn’t even attend each other’s potluck dinners during that period.

     They both had children who were diabetic or pre-diabetic and all of their kids seemed to have some kind of attention deficit disorder. They both had children who had developed thyroid problems. The two women were practically in tears when they discussed their fears about their children’s medically compromised futures. Omni The Total Information Pig frequently heard them worrying out loud about who would take care of all there sick and immune-dysfunctional children when the two of them were six feet under.

The Following Week

    

     Early in the week, Mrs. Boss had to be away for an entire day. She told her older sister that one of her children’s immune system was such a mess that he needed to see what she referred to as “the state’s only AIDS doctor,” in Iowa City. Cuchi-Cuchi always loved to see what Mrs. Boss wore when she dressed up, but this time she didn’t seem to wear anything special like she did on Sundays when she went to church early in the morning. Cuchi-Cuchi noted how weak and forlorn the sick child—the middle one—looked as Mrs. Boss helped him hobble to the car. When they returned, the child looked even worse.

     Omni had reported earlier in the week that Mrs. Boss had a discussion with her sister in which she said that she thought that her children had what she called “50 shades of AIDS.” The sister said that when she had suggested to her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome support group that maybe what they all had was actually AIDS-like, the mostly female members violently protested. One woman actually slapped her in the face when she was going to grab a cupcake during refreshments break. Omni quoted the older sister as saying. “One CFS sufferer started screaming at me, ‘We don’t need any of that scary kind of bullshit. We joined this organization to get support, and to wait together for the government to figure out something it can tell us about this disease that won’t frighten us. What kind of American are you? Don’t you trust your government? Are you a kook?” The older sister said she decided not to bring up the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome connection to AIDS again.

     In the ensuing days, all kinds of strange things began to happen on the farm. Men in white coats with stethoscopes—and sometimes with nurses at their sides—started to appear on a regular basis at the gate of The Great Pig Pen. They always looked concerned, like they had come to stare something totally awful in the face. They also had cameras and at first they were mainly taking pictures of individual pigs for their research. The clicking of the cameras was non-stop. One would enter The Great Pig Pen, and rather rudely prod the pigs one by one with a dirty stick to make them walk closer to the fence. Instead of the endearing nicknames that Mrs. Boss called them, like Honey Bunch, Potato Cheeks and Stevie-poo, they had assigned a number to each they photographed. Pig heard someone say the number “39” when they took his picture. The very idea of being just “39” made him feel totally worthless. Pig agreed with Professor Gable IX who, when he heard about the medical photographing that was going on during the day at The Great Pig Pen, raised the issue of barnyard ethics and said he believed this was a vile intrusion into porcine privacy.

     Cuchi-Cuchi missed the ominous import of the whole enterprise and actually tried to pose cutely for the cameras. She always turned left before they snapped the photo because she thought that was her most attractive side.

     When she wasn’t performing at county fairs, Sassafras was exceedingly private and when she started to hear the persistent clicking of the cameras by the men in suits, she hid behind the other pigs until she had no choice but to be prodded, medically numbered with black paint on her side, and photographed. She hated being manhandled. Because she was a prize pig at the county fairs, it was not the kind of treatment she was accustomed to.

     Then one day the following week, men in white uniforms started coming into The Great Pig Pen and selecting pigs, one by one, to take out of The Great Pig Pen to give them intense, invasive medical examinations in another area of the farm. They put a leash around the pig’s head and led it out as though it was a stupid, servile pet. When a pig sometimes was stupid enough to resist, the vet’s assistant hit it with a stick, which usually made the affected pig start to shriek and caused the whole heard to squeal in empathetic protest.

     The other disturbing thing that happened that week was that The Porcine Peppermint Twins (who had identical red stripes on their snouts) were taken away in the middle of the day in a van that those in the know recognized as a vehicle that gave pigs a one-way trip to a factory farm. Famous for their synchronized oinking at memorial services, the Porcine Peppermint Twins were much loved in the herd and the anxiety that their disappearance caused forced the Council of Wise Elders to task Wise Porcine Elder Finito The Closure Pig with the organization of an immediate double memorial service for them to give the herd closure. Mythos (Clarence) The Pig Laureate sang a memorial song called “I Never Let You Leave My Dreams” based on one of his unrequited loves—twice, in honor of the Porcine Peppermint Twins.

     I never let you leave my dreams

     I bet you didn’t even know

     Don’t ever ask to leave my dreams

     The answer is forever no.

     Because of the disappearance of the Porcine Peppermint Twins, Gable IX prepared a lecture for his class about the intensely disgusting things that happened to pigs on factory farms. He told them that in such institutions a pig’s normal 15-year lifespan was cut down to six dreadful months. He sadly said, “Piglets are kidnapped from their loving mother sows and dumped into vast, windowless room with no fresh air or sunlight. Some of these little piglets die immediately from broken hearts. The survivors never get to run around and see the wonders and mysteries of the great outdoors. They never get to frolic and play adorable little piglet games with each other in a carefree youth. They never get a chance to learn how to socialize with other pigs. Because of the sheer horror of it all, some of the pigs are overcome with fear and hysteria which leads to insane tail biting and as a result, the humans are only too happy to move through the piglet room snipping off tail after tail without even the tiniest bit of anesthesia.”

     Professor Gable IX clearly wished he could stop there, but he had to continue, “Their poor, distraught mother sows are confined to something euphemistically called a ‘gestation crate,” which is really no larger than the doomed sow who will never have a chance to exercise or run again. They are all basically raped repeatedly by being artificially inseminated without the slightest bit of affection being shown. They were denied the thirty-minute porcine orgasms that nature had bestowed upon them. And after a cruel and cramped pregnancy, they have to give birth in disgustingly tiny spaces. They are only allowed three brief weeks with their newborn piglets. And then they are violently dragged back to their gestation crates and again repeatedly raped by artificial insemination. It happens over and over until they can no longer give birth at which time they are taken to an even more horrible place to be murdered and processed for humans with clogged arteries to eat.”

    Gable IX noticed that the three females in the class, Tulip, Latoya and Jasmine the Yodeler, were so shaken that they were basically leaning against each other for support, and Pig and JoJo were looking up at the full moon. “I think we’d better take a break before I continue.

     After everyone had a chance to regain their composure, Gable IX continued his account of the atrocities: “The factory farms are absolutely filthy. All the pigs are constantly being shoved around as if they were already dead. No nuzzling with sweethearts. No creative building of cozy nests. Everywhere they are surrounded by metal bars, their own disgusting regurgitation, and bowel movements in every direction. As you all know, Domestic Pigs may not be the savviest creatures on the planet, but they are the cleanest animals in the world, and it is tragic that, in factory farms, they find themselves living on cold, hard cement floors covered in vomit and their own bowel movements! On top of that, the poor, innocent creatures develop bed sores from not be able to move around freely. Many suffer from mange and chronic pneumonia.  Even though they fill the pigs and piglets up with all kinds of medicines, they develop fatal infections, arthritis and severe joint problems. The loneliness of solitary confinement causes all kinds of mental problems and the desperate, confused pigs start to try and eat the metal bars of their cages. If they don’t move as quickly as ordered, they’re slapped around and tortured. When the pigs are transported in crowded trucks in the summer they suffer from stifling heat, and in the unheated trucks during the winter trips they end up with lice all over their bodies and some of them pass away before the vehicles deliver them to their certain deaths. And just when it seems like it can’t get any worse, upon arrival, the pigs that survive the journey are dumped in scalding water meant to make their skin soft and remove their hair.”

     Gable IX took a long pause and continued, “The little piglets have their tiny testicles cut out of their scrotums. And a lot of them have their teeth cut in half with dirty, rusty pliers, and their sensitive little ears are brutally mutilated in all kinds of ways so that they can be identified. Any unfortunate piglets that look weak or even slightly ill are held up in the air and slammed down on the floor. It’s a horrible death, but some kind of relief in such a gruesome setting. If you ever have the misfortune to be trapped in a factory farm and want to stay alive for a while longer—although I don’t know why you would want to—you must at least pretend that you are healthy in any way you can.” Professor Gable IX closed his class by saying, “One thing you probably won’t be surprised to hear is that what humans do to pigs, they’re even happier to do to each other.”

The Next Week

     Early Wednesday morning, Omni heard Mrs. and Mr. Boss talking about the threat of what they called “Recombinant porcine and human retroviruses.” When he reported the discussion to the Council, Omni said, “They’re not just talking about regular old viruses anymore. It’s retro this and retro that. The word virus has become boring to them without a “retro” in front of it. I guess all the other viruses just got old and retired.”

    Later that day Esmeralda The Issues Pig was approached in The Great Pig Pen by two men in white coats who wrapped a leash around her neck and pulled her out of the pen, squealing and crying out to her parents and any pigs in the vicinity. They all stood helplessly by with the rest of herd, oinking in empathy and fear, with tears running down their snouts as she was taken out and thrown rather rudely and roughly into the back of a white van with the words “Miracle Porcine Transgenic Labmeat Laboratories” painted on the side of it.

     It was surprising how fond the herd was of Esmeralda, given that her nickname was Esmeralda The Issues Pig. She had earned that moniker because she seemed to say, in response to virtually anything any pig said to her, “I have issues with that.” If a pig told her about something that happened in their past, she would say, “I have issues with that. Even the most innocent porcine joke, like “Why did the pig cross the street?” instantly earned her response, “I have many issues with that.” It became oddly comforting for the herd because you never had to wonder how she was going to respond to anything you said. Eventually she developed a sense of humor about it herself and always warned pigs that even before they opened their mouths, she was probably going to have issues with what they had to say. Domestic Pigs savor predictability.

     For once it was the herd that had issues with what had happened to her. Because there was so much distress in the herd at the disappearance of Esmeralda The Issues Pig, the Council of Wise Porcine Elders ordered a quickie memorial service the next day with all the usual fixings, including having one of the artistically gifted pigs scratch an image of Esmeralda in the dirt with their hooves. There was much weeping and wailing, but the herd became more serene when Jasmine, whose family hailed from one of the few pig herds in Switzerland, was called upon to yodel and Mythos (Clarence) The Pig Laureate sang another iconic song about one of his lovers which everyone assumed he was actually about Esmeralda, someone that truth be told, Mythos was not all that keen about. Esmeralda had once kicked him with one of her hefty hooves when nobody was looking.

      To everyone’s great surprise, a month or so after that, the same van pulled up to the farm. The entire herd gathered nervously at the gate. They all wondered who was going to be next, but were quite surprised when the back of the van was opened up and a stretcher was pulled out with a large white sheet covering the body which had the unmistakable big balloon shape of a pig. The men in white coats headed in the direction of The Great Pig Pen, some of the more emotional sows grew faint when the stretcher got close to the gate. It was Esmeralda!

     There is no more ecstatic animal on four legs than a happy swine and the current of elation that ran through the herd was like the eighth wonder of the world. Some of the more spiritual members of the herd began saying prayers of gratitude to the Almighty Hog. The white-coated men opened the creaky gate and brought the now totally beloved Esmeralda into The Great Pig Pen. They lifted the sheet and everyone suddenly worried that she was so still that she might be dead and have been brought back to let them view her body. But she suddenly stirred and shifted herself off of the stretcher and onto the ground. Some of the younger pigs were literally jumping into the air in elation. Tiggly-Wiggly began running in the most joyous circles he had ever run. Some sows headed immediately off to the dump to find some treats for a giant impromptu party. But the rush of orgiastic joy ended abruptly when everyone got a good look at Esmeralda’s visage. The whole herd froze in the longest moment of shock as they realized that Esmeralda now had two human eyes. Two unmistakably human eyes. They all gasped in unison at the sheer horror of what they saw before them. And the herd’s alarm increased exponentially when they realized, upon further inspection, that Esmeralda had one human blue eye and one human brown eye from which her tears of relief at being back with her own kind were flowing.

     But what could they do? One by one, the adult pigs approached her. (The piglets were totally shaken by the sight and ran to the back of The Great Pig Pen.) Although the adults were practically speechless, and trembling with ambivalence, they stumbled and stuttered to find adequate words to welcome this new Esmeralda with the human eyes back into the herd. It was so awkward. No matter how well-intentioned their individual welcomes were, the tone in which they delivered them betrayed the fact that they felt, when they looked into Esmeralda’s human eyes, that they were peering into a dark abyss, maybe even into the realm of The Invisible Pig Devil. Some even thought Esmeralda’s eyes were some omen of a tragedy to come. Not a single pig let out a grunt of genuine friendliness or even offered to groom Esmeralda. Many Domestic Pigs are known for their stoic natures, but what the humans had done seemed to every member of the herd to be unspeakable. They felt like they were looking at a pig staring back at them from a grave. They could do nothing but sink back into the deepest, saddest stupor.

     Esmeralda was not an ignorant pig by any means, and her porcine brain had not been harmed in any serious way by the life-altering ocular transplant experiment she had been involuntarily made a part of. Even her parents didn’t even bother to rub noses with her and quickly and glibly welcomed her home and just as quickly moved away from her and couldn’t stop looking down at the ground as they crept away in forlorn embarrassment and tried to disappear into the herd. Her relief at being back in The Great Pig Pen had quickly turned into despair and total terror about what lay before her in her life with the only herd she had ever known, one that clearly did not love her anymore. Was she back in a place where her life was now really over?  Pigs cannot survive in the kind of social exile that she suddenly envisioned on her horizon. She had come to a moment of truth in The Great Pig Pen when there seemed to be absolutely no options. She wondered where her own eyes were. Was some unfortunate, powerless human being experimented on and mistreated now by their own kind because her people were looking into the eyes Esmeralda had at birth? After what had happened to her, she thought anything was possible in the realm of humans.

     It was difficult to be a recluse in The Great Pig Pen, but not impossible. But Esmeralda knew that it was not for her.

    When Gable IX was told by the class at Moonlight University that night about what had happened to Esmeralda the Issues Pig, he paused and said with all his professorial sonorousness, “Humans are the earth’s bowel movements.” He also said, “Pigs are capable of great forgiveness. In fact there is some objective evidence to suggest that pigs were the first species to forgive. But that being said, what they did to Esmeralda The Issues Pig, was totally unforgiveable.”

     Gable IX said, “The Late Esmeralda The Issues Pig is lucky they didn’t send her to a laboratory for the experimental treatment of burns, where they might have burned off most of her flesh with something called a Bunsen Burner in order to figure out how to treat third-degree burns on humans using all kinds of inventive ideas from first-year medical students. She could have also ended up in a surgical unit where they might have cut her throat, or had a needle stuck directly into her bones, or even had the tissue removed from around her heart while she was wide awake and squealing for her life.”

     Gable IX stared in the distance and then continued, “The worst possible thing might have been the military scientists getting a hold of Esmeralda. They could have used her for what they call trauma-training.  She would have been ruthlessly shot, stabbed and dismembered without fanfare. Or perhaps she would have been used in a warfare experiment and shot several times in the face and then kept alive in terrible pain for the entire day before she was incinerated.”

     Gable IX told the troubled class to take a break and run to the dump and grab a treat but to come quickly back for the rest of his lecture. When they returned, he continued, “One of the most notorious experiments was during the most intense nuclear bomb research years. Your kind were considered a large very useful biological species and they took 135 Domestic Pigs and crammed them into aluminum containers and subjected them to small nuclear explosions while they were still alive. One or two of the 135 survived the immediate explosion. But they, of course, did not live to tell the tale of the medical examination of all their organs that they were given on a surgeons’ table without anesthesia. To say this was beyond the pale is an understatement. To humans you’re not Domestic Pigs. You’re guinea pigs.”

     Before he let the students go, Professor Gable IX, tried to end on a positive note by saying, “Pigs must maintain a sense of humor no matter what. Even in the face of factory farms and military and medical experimentation. There can be no serious consideration of the horrors of a pig’s life and what humans do to them without a sense of humor. When horror and terror seem to remove all the air you need to breathe and the space you move in, humor will provide you with the oxygen and mental space you need to survive. It would be better for you to lose your tails or your ears and eyes than to lose your sense of humor. That’s all I’m going to say. Goodnight students.”

     Whenever Gable IX’s lectures seemed to go over to the dark side, Pig’s imagination always projected a vision of terrible things happening to Mother and Father Gizmo, and worse, to little Bambino, Cuchi-Cuchi and lovely Sassafras. Sometimes he had nightmares in which Cuchi-Cuchi’s adorable snout was replaced by a bulbous human nose covered with warts and acne and her pristine little toes were disfigured by transplanted human toes covered in some kind of garish pink nail polish. And the most devastating aspect was that he couldn’t think of a thing he could do about any of these horrors if they ever became real. Other than just wish them away.

     When JoJo heard these stories, he always had a rather guilty look on his face, like he was thinking that they might be some kind of punishment and he might come face to face one day with the Almighty Hog after having paid a terrible price for some of his actions by being selected for a factory farm or even medical and military experimentation. He was always better-behaved with his mean pigs on the following day, but after only a few hours he was back to his usual mischievous antics.

     That night Pig had horrible dreams filled with images of mutilation, pigs with the heads of other species, pigs that could drive cars, and pigs that were half-pig and half-machine.

     The next morning The Council of Wise Porcine Elders had a high level security meeting to discuss the crisis that Esmeralda’s human brown and blue eyes had caused in The Great Pig Pen.

     “This is an atrocious development,” said Wise Elder Pigglesworth.

     The Council had no choice but to consult Gunther, their psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist, and mime. After summoning him, the Council laid out all of the options to deal with Esmeralda The Issues Pig, and they left all of the troubling bioethics of the matter to the professional.

     For Gunther, it presented perhaps the most challenging bioethical conundrum in his life. He kept muttering to himself, “What to do, what to do, what to do?”

     After snacking on a tasty half-dead rodent provided as compensation by the Council, and subsequently giving the matter deep thought, the herd’s psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime made his professional decision about what was right and wrong in this situation and almost immediately a plan was set in motion.

     With careful objective ethical thought, they had decided that Esmeralda the Issues Pig had begun living a porcine life unworthy of porcine life. They had no choice but to end it as quietly as possible. During the night a team of burly porcine overeaters appointed by the Council, descended on Esmeralda while she slept, hit her snout so hard that she was knocked unconscious, and dragged her away. In the morning all that was left of Esmeralda was a tooth or two.

     The herd was told that Esmeralda was so ashamed of the way that she looked, that she had dug a hole under the fence and had fled. Under the guidance of Wise Porcine Elder Finito The Closure Pig, a memorial service was scheduled for later in the day and Mythos began preparing a song for Esmeralda called “We Never Know the Hour,” which was really about one of his lost lovers.

     We never know

     How many candles await us

     And who around the table

     Loves and who hates us

     We reach out in a dream

     But we hope we have the power

     To become what we must be

     But we never know the hour.

     The herd had barely recovered from the disappearance of Esmeralda the next day, when they had to deal with the unfortunate thing that happened to Old Hilda.

     While pregnancy is always a cause for celebration in a herd of pigs, when the miraculous event involves an elderly sow, it is considered very auspicious indeed. General glee had spread throughout The Great Pig Pen when it became obvious that Old Hilda was with litter. She was given all the usual extra attention as well as the best edibles the garbage dump had to offer.

     It was not an easy pregnancy, but when Old Hilda dropped her litter in the afternoon, great relief was felt throughout the herd. The whole Boss family—including all the ailing children—was also present at the event when the joy of an elderly sow giving birth quickly turned into tragedy. The whole litter consisted of very pale pigs partly covered in blood. They were all either dead or dying. Mr. Boss yelled in horror, “Oh my God, Pale Pig Syndrome! I was afraid this was going to happen. She was just too old.” The piglets were quickly wrapped in newspaper and taken away. The next night Old Hilda was removed from the herd by Mr. Boss when most of herd was sound asleep.

     In an emergency meeting of the Council the next morning, it was decided to tell the herd that Old Hilda had a very serious illness and had been taken out of the herd before it spread to the rest of the herd. They made up a story about her going first to a special pig hospital where she would be cured of her disease with “next generation porcine DNA sequencing”  and then to a progressive sow retirement facility where she would get the best care and would spend the rest of her life. (Cuchi-Cuchi immediately wanted “next generation porcine DNA sequencing.”) In order to force closure on the matter, the Council ordered Wise Porcine Elder Finito The Closer Pig to throw together a memorial service for Old Hilda with all the fixings. Because of her popularity in the herd, her memorial service was especially moving with more verbose pigs than usual testifying about her. She had been a sow that pigs could always depend on. When some special pig disappeared a part of The Great Pig Pen was named after her. The area where the pigs ate became “The Old Hilda Slop Center.”

     Privately, some in the herd blamed the pregnancy disaster on Old Hilda’s porcine lifestyle and diet, insisting that she stayed up too late and had not eaten enough wilted lettuce leaves from the dump. After Cuchi-Cuchi heard rumors about Pale Pig Syndrome, she constantly slipped away from the herd in order to hit her snout on the fence to increase the blood flow in her pig cheeks. And she’d often ask Pig if he thought she looked pale and was possibly headed down the same road as Old Hilda.

     So many unfortunate things were happening in the herd that the Council thought they should set up a Porcine Bereavement Commission to manage the level of grief in The Great Pig Pen. When Aunt Mathilda heard about the Porcine Bereavement Committee, she put pressure on the Council to make her its director. But given that the Council suspected that overbearing Aunt Mathilda would only make grieving pigs feel worse, they tabled the matter.

     The disappearance of Old Hilda inspired Pig to wrestle with a concept that Professor Gable IX had introduced in one of his lectures: “The Goneness of Gone.” Pig could not quite get his mind around the concept and when he tentatively tried to introduce the subject somewhat inarticulately that night at Moonlight University, Professor Gable IX said, “Ah! The Goneness of Gone. The dark corollary of the Thereness of There! Pig, those are the two most promising entry points to my ‘Unified Theory of Porcine Being and Time.” I may not live long enough to explore that theory, but I hope you will pick up where I leave off.”

     Once again, Pig blushed and thought to himself, “If I can’t understand what is going on in this crazy pig pen, how am I going to master a Unified Theory of Porcine Being and Time?”

     Two days later, Omni heard Mr. Boss discuss Pale Pig Syndrome with the country vet and he reported to the Council of Wise Porcine Elders that the vet was urging Mr. Boss to avoid any more incidents like Old Hilda’s by selling off the older sows while there was still time to get a good price for them. Omni said that Mr. Boss told the vet he would think about it. The Council decided to do its best to keep this totally secret, which meant that by the next night all the aging sows were nervous wrecks.

The Following Week.

     On Tuesday morning, Omni reported that Mrs. Boss had stood at the gate telling her older sister that a doctor who had seen her ten-year-old daughter, Maybetheline,  said that she had Gulf War Syndrome because she had all the telltale symptoms. It surprised Mrs. Boss because her ten-year old had never been deployed to the Gulf. She said that the doctor wanted her to bring her daughter back to be examined by military doctors, but she decided she would pass on that.

     That night, under a full moon, Hermione Hognacious was heavy with litter and a number of solicitous (or nosey) sows were hovering around her dispensing all kinds of tips about piglet birth as she fell asleep after a particularly rough day.

     In the morning the herd awoke to discover that Hermione Hognacious was the proud mother of 13 living piglets. Rufus won the lottery which was held whenever a sow was about to give birth. He nailed it when he predicted that she would have six boy piglets, seven girls, and one hermaphrodite stillbirth. He was congratulated for his prescience by all of the envious herd and collected his five mostly-full corn cob winnings that had been procured from the dump for the contest.

     All the male Domestic Pigs surrounded Buster Hognacious and congratulated the proud first-time father by nuzzling his snout. Of course some of the alpha pigs used the occasion to remind the group that they had fathered larger litters. Chicken have nothing on pigs when it comes to pecking order.

     Pig had one of his happiest weeks ever with Sassy. They dated every night and exchanged a great deal of affection. He showered her in delicacies from the garbage dump and she couldn’t praise him enough for his brilliance and kindness. He decided that he would ask her to be his mate once and for all the following week. But Monday morning of that week the unthinkable happened.

      That fateful morning was overcast and after a night that was filled with strange dreams, Pig awoke to a great deal of commotion and dismay in the herd. Two men in white coats were in the pen and they were cornering and leashing up a kicking and hysterically oinking Sassafras.  Pig let out a snort of horror as they dragged her out of the pen and toward a van that said, “The Porcine Transplant Research Center.” Mrs. Boss was at the gate fighting with Mr. Boss. She was very upset. Mr. Boss was screaming at Mrs. Boss, “We need the money for the children’s mysterious illnesses, for crying out loud.” “But not her, she’s our winner!” Mrs. Boss stood there crying, holding the bulletin board with all of Sassy’s blue ribbons from the country fairs.

     Pig rushed to the entrance and hit his snout violently several times on the gate to no avail. He was in a state of shock. His parents rushed to his side and tried to comfort him, but, after watching the van disappear into the horizon, he didn’t want to be with anyone, and he ran to the far side of The Great Pig Pen to be alone with his thoughts. Pig wept.

     For the rest of the day, Pig stared forlornly out at the farmland and the mysterious forest in the distance beyond that as though somehow he would see Sassafras come home accompanied by a group of Wild Boars who had figured out some heroic, ingenious way to save her from the humans. Pig wished that Gable IX, who seemed able to think anything he wanted to, was also able to do anything he wanted to. But alas, he, too, was only porcine.  Pig didn’t even look up to the sky to pray to The Almighty Hog, because if there really was an Almighty Hog, how could he possibly let such a terrible thing happen to such a beautiful, innocent pig as Sassafras? She didn’t deserve this.

     Pig didn’t care whether she came back with human breasts or hands or even a saggy human behind. He just wanted her back. They could mutilate her body, but they could not mutilate her soul. But even that disquieting prospect never happened, and the entire herd suspected that somewhere a porcine medical experiment on Pig’s beloved probably went terribly wrong. They hoped she didn’t feel any pain when they went to work on her, but they feared the worst.

     Pig never had a full night of sleep after the disappearance of Sassy. All he could think about all night was the fact that there would be no marriage in The Great Pig Pen with Mythos recycling one of his love songs. No little Sassies. No Pig Junior.  The one sow who could love, understand and nurture his soul was gone from the face of the earth. Pig was so upset that he didn’t attend the memorial service for Sassy. Mythos (Clarence) the Pig Laureate pulled out all the stops and composed a new song called “Mortal Sailors in Time” for the occasion. It was really about a hot but very insincere pig that had spent time on a farm near the sea who only stayed with Mythos long enough to tell him about watching ships in the distance. But it would serve the purpose for Sassy’s service.

     The song overwhelmed many of the pigs, especially the sows. But not as much as the song’s inspiration—the studly pig that had two-timed him—had overwhelmed Mythos.

     The herd was so grief-stricken about Sassy that in addition to having Elder Finito The Closure Pig work the crowd, Wise Porcine Elder Gunther, who normally handled bioethical psychological and epidemiological matters, was asked to employ his miming skills to try and cheer up the despondent swine. But the truth is that with the one possible exception of Cuchi-Cuchi, the one thing pigs and humans have in common is that both species really can’t stand mime.

     Three days later, on an autumnal day in which leaves were flying out of the forest and across the farmland, there was tremendous ruckus at the house and police cars and an ambulance had come and then all kinds of relatives. Teddy had walked away from the house and before anyone in the family could find him, he had fallen into a pond and drowned. It wasn’t just the Boss family that was devastated. The death had a tremendous impact on the whole herd, especially Cuchi-Cuchi.

     After Teddy’s death, Mrs. Boss didn’t come for a while at twilight to sing “Oh Piggy Boy.” When she commenced singing it again, her new rendition was sadder than all the previous ones. It was almost too much for some of the sows to bear.

     Teddy’s death had such an impact on the herd and caused such porcine stress that the Council ordered their first memorial service for a human.

     That night, when Pig informed Gable IX of Teddy’s untimely demise, the Professor said, “Well, at least he is no longer trapped in his family’s hopeless labyrinth of politically mysterious illnesses.”

     The next morning, Omni reported to the Council that he had learned, while listening to Mr. Boss, why two of the pigs had been mysteriously taken away the prior week. It turned out that the herd they had come from was now coming down with Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome. Omni said, “Mr. Boss is very worried that they might spread it here.” Luckily, the disappearance of the two pigs had not shaken up the herd very much because the two pigs had been kind of standoffish and had failed to become assimilated. Some in the herd had started referring to the two strangers in their midst as “illegal alien immigrant pigs.”

Two Weeks Later

     Omni The Total Information Pig came rushing in to the morning briefing of the Council oinking breathlessly. “Breaking news! Breaking news!” he squealed. There’s a terrible new disease in the state.” Omni then warned the Council about “Post-Weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome, or PMWS.” Elder Pigbottom said the name was “a real mouthful.” (Some in the Council immediately wondered if they should be concerned that there would be a Post-Post Weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome, and maybe another Post one after that.)

     Omni had listened to several men in suits talk to Mr. Boss at the fence that morning. He told the Council that Post-Weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome involved a dramatic loss of weight in piglets that were six weeks of age. He said, “The men said they have swollen lymph nodes and they can’t even walk straight. They also get pneumonia. The men with Mr. Boss also said that the disease destroys the immune systems of pigs. They said the pigs subsequently develop all kinds of additional infections because they have no immune system to protect them.” He paused, “The USDAer with them said the USDA is terrified that people won’t eat pork when they hear about Post-Weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome. But, as usual, he insisted that the USDA would have everything under control and develop a vaccine. He also told Mr. Boss that he should try a new antibiotic in the slop.”

     “Oh that’s why the slop has been having more of an aftertaste than usual,” said Wise Porcine Elder Neanderthal.

     The Council was quite concerned, and after once again swearing Omni the Total Information Pig to complete secrecy (which lasted an hour), they immediately formed a Committee on Post-Weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome.” The Council was the only authority that could establish which diagnoses were allowed in The Great Pig Pen. They argued for a while about what fake disease diagnosis to create in order to keep the herd calm. The choice was between two carefully invented diagnoses: Porcine Malaise Syndrome and Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome. Thanks to some intense lobbying from Wise Elder Mason Jar The Opinion Leader Pig, the latter won out. The hastily put together Post-Weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome Committee, consisting of a few of the Elders themselves, met later in the day. They decided to have Elder Gunther, the psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime, tell the herd to ignore any rumors they heard of serious disease spreading on farms, that the only thing the herd had to worry about was the harmless disease diagnosis the Council had concocted themselves, Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome. If any of the pigs developed any symptoms of Swine Mystery Disease, or Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Disease, or the brand new Porcine Post-Weaning Multisystem Syndrome, they were to be told in no uncertain terms that they were actually suffering from the very benign, (and fruity sounding) Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome. They were to be informed that it was a problem that wasn’t even physical, and was less concerning that a passing headache on a summer’s day or a stomach ache caused by eating too much at The Old Hilda Slop Center. It could also be caused by excessive sauntering, or the overindulgence in small talk and in many cases it was just a correctible Porcine Personality Disorder. Gunther, the herd’s psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime said that Porcine Personality Disorder was a reportable medical and psychological issue and any member of the herd with it should report to him promptly, and he would give them the counseling they would need to recover from Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome. He told the herd that there was no shame in having a Porcine Personality Disorder and needing professional help from someone who is a psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime.  He said, “I don’t know why any reasonable pig is ashamed to admit that he or she is crazy. Not admitting that one is crazy is crazy!” As could be expected, Cuchi-Cuchi suspected she might be at risk for the new illness and was especially excited about the idea of personal counselling for any personality disorder she might have that would lead to Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome, until Pig let her have it. Other than her, most of the herd was hesitant about self-reporting a personality disorder to such a powerful and well-connected pig as Elder Gunther.  

     The Council of Wise Porcine Elders decided that one way to control any worries that the herd might harbor was to involve all the pigs in a major awareness campaign. They decided to schedule a weekly Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome Awareness March around The Great Pig Pen and they issued a directive that every pig had to take part. All of the pigs were encouraged to look concerned about Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome. Jasmine The Yodeling Pig was selected to march at the head of the parade while performing her best porcine Swiss yodels. All the pigs were urged to vigorously chant a protest slogan especially developed for the marches and soon the entire herd could be heard shouting over and over, “Silence about Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome equals death! Silence about Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome equals death.” It made all the pigs feel like that were participating in very important cause. Elder Stanley The Disinformation Pig was delegated with planting the idea in the herd that all of this marching and chanting “Silence about Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome equals death” was actually the beginning of a new porcine civil rights movement.

     The Council ordered every member of the herd to participate in consciousness-raising courses on Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome given by Wise Porcine Elder Gunther. They asked Omni The Total Information Pig to report any pig who didn’t take the course as a threat to porcine public health.

     After class at Moonlight University, when Gable IX heard about Post Weaning and Multisystemic Disease from Pig, he said that it just sounded like a new contrived human euphemism for Montgomery’s Disease. He said to Pig, “It’s probably mutating as we speak. Somebody must know what it is even if the flunkies they send to the farm don’t. Perhaps it’s a blessing that the USDAers and the rest of them either don’t realize it’s Montgomery’s Disease or they’re lying about it, said Gable IX. They’d immediately start killing all of you and try to find some pristine, uninfected pigs from some other country to replace every pig in the herd. Or they’d try some outrageous genetic experiment on you. Luckily, humans never test for any disease they don’t want to find. And if they do find it, out come the euphemisms!”

     Pig shuddered.

     Gable IX also made sarcastic fun what of he called “the Council’s crazy concoction of Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome.” Gable IX told Pig that he thought The Council of the Wise Porcine Elders was the worst example of pigs adopting the sleazy word games of humans. He thought that Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome was the craziest euphemism he had ever heard of Montgomery’s Disease. It was just as bad as the laugh-out-loud cockamamie diagnosis of Swine Mystery Disease. He was certain that it was as bad as the euphemisms that the humans were using to hide the truth about their own epidemic of Montgomery’s Disease.

     Gable IX quipped, “So what exactly is Montgomery’s Disease?  Is it Acute or Terminal Porcine Fatigue and Stress Syndrome?” The humans were planting terrible untruths in the brains of pigs. The more pigs listened and learned things, the worse it would get. It would get them all killed. It would only further increase their persecution and humiliation. Even if the only thing pigs had between each other was honesty and truthfulness, at least it was something that made life considerably better for them than it was for the humans. Professor Gable IX’s mantra was, “If it walks like Montgomery’s Disease, and it swims like Montgomery’s Disease, and it oinks like Montgomery’s Disease, it’s Montgomery’s Disease.”

     Gable IX told Pig that twice he had used porcine probability theory to calculate the likelihood that Montgomery’s Disease had made it from Brazil and Haiti and after doing the calculations two different ways, he came up with a 95% probability. When he did the numbers for a third time, it was even higher.

The Next Month

    

     When Omni the Total Information Pig showed up on the third Monday morning briefing that month, he looked totally exhausted, as though he was carrying all the cares of the entire porcine universe on his shoulders. All the Wise Porcine Elders could tell that they were about to hear some very bad news. Omni took a deep breath as he began, “This is a big one,” he said. “Mr. Boss was talking with seven men—two of them bald—at the fence earlier this morning. This time the disaster is called Porcine Dermatitis and Nephropathy Syndrome. One of the symptoms is the sudden appearance of very ugly skin lesions. Purple lesions with red scabs and black centers. Most prominently on the rear legs.”

     Wise Porcine Elder Pigbottom gasped.

     Omni then went into the medical word salad that he had overheard. He remembered hearing terms like “systemic vasculitis,” and “necrotizing and fibrinous issues in the kidneys.” The whole Council nodded knowingly even though they didn’t understand a thing he had just said.

     “What causes it?” asked Wise Porcine Elder Bubba.

     “They don’t know,” replied Omni. “They said that all kinds of viruses and bacteria are involved. The USDAer said that the pigs’ immune systems were such a total mess and the pigs were infected with so many things that it was going to take a long time to sort everything out.”

     “Sounds like another Swine Mystery Disease,” said Wise Porcine Elder Mason Jar.

   “Well, I guess that would make it Swine Mystery Disease number two or is it three?” chimed in Elder Bubba. “They all sound like they’re Swine Mystery Disease. I can’t keep any of these mystery diseases straight.”

     Wise Elder Bubba said, “I think all these diseases and vaccines are threatening indigenous porcine cultural identity.” The rest of the Elders nodded in agreement and hoped Bubba was not going to elaborate on that and bore them for the rest of the briefing.

     Then Omni told the group about a symptom that sounded all too familiar: “The vets also said that sows with Porcine Dermatitis and Nephropathy Syndrome give birth to mummified piglets of all different sizes.”

     The Council became eerily silent and shot shifty side-glances at each other. Omni, The Total Information Pig knew exactly what they were all thinking. It all too clearly explained an unfortunate development that had occurred while the herd was asleep the previous night. Mabel, one of the more gossipy sows in the herd, was on the brink of giving birth to what, given her size, everyone assumed was going to be a very large litter. Mabel never gave birth to small litters.

     Mr. Boss had taken her to a pen on the other side of the farmhouse that could not be seen or heard from The Great Pig Pen. From information gathered the next morning, Omni learned that Mabel had dropped a large motley litter of totally mummified piglets. Omni reported to the Council that Mr. and Mrs. Boss were clearly very upset and Mabel was promptly sold to a local veterinary college for a great deal of money. The Council, fearing that a vision of a future dominated by mummified pigs would panic the whole herd, subsequently decided that Elder Gunther would inform the herd that Mabel had given birth to a very healthy litter and had been sold by the Boss family to an even nicer farm in another state where she and her new family would get even better slop because the new farm was not having the same kind of money troubles that the Boss family was subject to, due to all their mysterious illnesses.

     When the briefing was over, Omni was reminded that what he had just told the Council was very secret information and it stayed that way for at least fifteen-and-a-half minutes until Aunt Mathilda approached him and asked what was going on in her usual threatening manner.

     To be proactive, the Council formed a Secret Committee for the Concealment of the Porcine Dermatitis and Nephropathy Syndrome consisting of three Elders, with Wise Porcine Elder Mason Jar as its director. At the committee’s first official meeting the next day, it was decided that the herd would never be told about Porcine Dermatitis and Nephropathy Syndrome, but instead they would try to distract all the nervous pigs by trying to increase awareness of Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome, and by organizing colorful CPFS rallies, dances and marches around The Great Pig Pen.

     Everyone was urged to join a Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome consciousness raising group, and to wear the special CPFS solidarity ribbon (created from one of Mrs. Boss’s shabby old housedresses found in the dump) that denoted unity and concern about the syndrome. Soon The Great Pig Pen was filled with all kinds of Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome activities, which, as could be expected, began to totally exhaust the entire herd. And that set off a wave of anxiety that the entire herd was getting Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndome.

     When Gable IX heard about Porcine Dermatitis and Nephropathy Syndrome, he said to Pig, “You Domestic Pigs have so many supposedly different actual diseases, and an equal number of fake euphemistic diseases, that I’m surprised humans are brave enough to put you between two slices of rye break with a slice of Swiss cheese and a dab of mustard.

Later that Month

     Eros, one of the pigs who was the same age as Pig and JoJo, a bright, extremely handsome hunk of a swine who almost made it into Moonlight University (and was always a big hit at the Boss’s Sunday Petting Zoo) had been taken away by the Miracle Porcine Transgenic Laboratories and creatively worked over cell-by-cell—by scientists whose heads were covered by patchworks of hair transplants from pigs—in a cutting edge genetic engineering lab involving all kinds of stem cells that had been provided by the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. When he was returned to The Great Pig Pen, he certainly looked like Eros, but genetically he now was more than half human. His appearance didn’t disturb the herd one bit, but when he opened his mouth, he had an eerie human voice and he talked about things totally alien from the porcine lifestyle. They had never heard some of the very strange words Eros uttered, like “extraordinary interrogation techniques,” “false confession,” “rendition,” “waterboarding” and “Quick, he’s not dying, insert the intravenous into the prisoner’s groin.” He didn’t talk about any of the ordinary what’s-in-the-dump things that barnyard pigs discuss. He didn’t oink about the designs of the clouds in the sky or the heat of the sun or what the mysterious ingredients were in the slop that the Boss family provided that day. The jarring human sound of his voice and the disturbing content of what he said made the whole herd wary of him. The Council of Wise Porcine Elders was very concerned and by the next morning all that was left of Eros was half of his snout which was regurgitated by one of the pigs who was part of a small group that had been given the important and necessary assignment to deal professionally and efficiently with the matter.

     The next night at Moonlight University, after Gable IX was informed about the case of Eros by a very shaken Pig, he gave one of his most frightening talks about the future of porcine genetic engineering in which pigs were being changed into what he called “Pigensteins.” Sadly, he told the class, “We are at the beginning of the ghastly era of Human Pigs. Consider every day that you are still one hundred percent pig a good day.”

The Next Month

     On the second Thursday of that month, Omni brought the Council some slightly less threatening news from spying on Mr. Boss and the country vet. In the morning briefing he informed the Council about what the vet had said about “Porcine Stress Syndrome.”

     “Now, that sounds like something we might be able to live with,” said Wise Elder Bubba. “Or at least the information may be easier to control with our public health efforts. What is that, Swine Mystery Disease number one million?” asked Wise Porcine Elder Pigbottom.

     Omni The Total Information Pig told the Council that Jackson, a rather large pig that probably spent a little too much time at the garbage dump, had been sold by the financially struggling Mr. Boss a few days earlier to a factory farm and, while being transported, died suddenly on the truck before he reached his fatal destination. The factory farm was demanding their money back, but Mr. Boss was saying that a deal was a deal. The management at the factory farm had decided that Jackson had collapsed and died in state of shock on the truck full of frightened pigs because he must have had Porcine Stress Syndrome, which the factory farm insisted was caused by a genetic mutation that they had not been informed about. They said that such pigs could not handle the stress of being transferred to a place where they would die and they wanted their money back for having been sold a genetically defective pig. The factory farm management said that Mr. Boss should have known that Jackson had the offending gene that led to a sudden death by Porcine Stress Syndrome. Omni said, “Mr. Boss told the factory farm at first that he didn’t know what they were talking about.”

     “I think this could be very helpful,” said Wise Elder Gunther. “I know just how to use it. There’s nothing like a mysterious and frightening new disease threat to help shape porcine public opinion. I’ll need the help of both Elder Mason Jar The Opinion Leader Pig and Wise Elder Stanley The Disinformation Pig.”

     The next day, after holding an all-night public health seminar with himself, Gunther, the herd’s psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime, with the assistance of Wise Porcine Elder Stanley The Disinformation Pig, organized an all-herd meeting at which he warned all the pigs that Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome could lead to the Porcine Stress Syndrome that had killed Jackson. And that meant that one of its causes, namely Porcine Personality Disorder needed to be attended to, pronto. He complained that not a single pig in the herd had reported their Porcine Personality Disorder to him, and that in such a large herd, there had to be at least a few who were not fessing up.” As Gunther was making his imperious public health pronouncement, Pig could see that Cuchi-Cuchi was seeing a delicious opportunity for attention in all of this hoo-hah, and he gave her such an intense, dirty look that she knew immediately to keep her dangerous little mouth shut. When she later confided to Pig that she thought she might have Porcine Stress Syndrome, he snapped, “Cuchi, you’re giving me Porcine Stress Syndrome.”

Two Months Later

     The first Tuesday in the month was the date of the worst briefing ever. It had been a rainy, windy morning when Omni The Total Information Pig diligently performed his surveillance activities at the gate of The Great Pig Pen. Mr. Boss stood in the rain and talked with great intensity to three men holding black umbrellas. When Omni arrived at the gathering of Elders, he looked exhausted and sick, like he had caught a quick but inappropriate breakfast earlier at the garbage dump. He clearly was not in a joyful porcine mood. The darkness of his brow seemed to flow into the news he had for the Wise Council of Porcine Elders.

     “Okay, what is it this morning?” grumbled Elder CamChow.

     “Please don’t scare us this morning,” chimed in Elder Bubba. “Please give us some good news.”

     “I wish I could,” responded Omni. “But, I know you all want to know the whole truth—and it’s my job to give it to you—so here it is. It’s an absolute nightmare. The USDAers showed up this morning and they really terrified Mr. Boss. They told him about the most devastating disease yet. It’s called Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Disease.”

     “That doesn’t seem to leave much to the imagination,” said Wise Porcine Elder Pigbottom.

     “But the good news, at least for the humans, is that as usual, the USDAer said it doesn’t infect them. I wish I could say the same for us. Oh, and I should tell you that one of the USDAers had on a t-shirt that said “IT’S SAFE TO EAT PORK.” He had a whole bunch of t-shirts for the whole Boss family to wear. Everyone in the state was being urged to wear the t-shirts, especially children with diabetes, AIDS, autism, asperger’s, ADDH, and all kinds of autoimmune disorders. The campaign was to get more humans with mysterious ailments to eat more pork from pigs with mysterious ailments that were utterly safe to eat because of the huge amounts of cutting-edge antibiotics, antivirals and antiretrovirals that was added to their slop.

     Who cares if it doesn’t infect humans!” shouted Elder Mason Jar. “Maybe we’d be better off if it did.” (When Gable IX later heard the business of it not infecting humans, he said to Pig, “Nothing infects human except when the USDA says it does. And good luck with that.”)

     Wise Elder Pigbottom said, “It seems like the more diseases we get the safer they say it is to eat us. I don’t get it.”

     Omni filled in the details: “Older hogs infected with it get sick and lose weight. And the most vulnerable are the little piglets. Many die. There is always a great deal of diarrhea and violent vomiting . . .”

     “How bad?” interrupted Elder CamChow.

     “Apparently, all over the pen. The sick pigs practically have to swim in it.”

     “Yuck!” squealed Elder Mason Jar.

     There was a moment of stunned silence before another word was said.

     “Where exactly is it?” asked Elder Bubba.

     “They said it’s already devastated many of the farms in our county and they expected it to hit this farm in a short time.”

     “We need to form an emergency committee and a working group and an interagency task force!” screamed Mason Jar. He got no argument from the rest of the Wise Council of Porcine Elders.

     Elder Pigbottom asked how the humans thought they were going to deal with it this time.

     Omni said, “The USDAer said they have everything under control and there would soon be a vaccine.”

     It was getting harder and harder for the Council to keep track of all the promising vaccines that were supposed to keep endlessly emerging the mysterious swine diseases—that were constantly evolving—under control.

     Omni’s face looked drained of all blood when he said, “They told Mr. Boss to make all the pigs who had symptoms drink plenty of water and, if that didn’t help, then he should just dispose of them.”

     “Dispose of them,” was not a phrase that the Council of Wise Porcine Elders enjoyed hearing. Suddenly all of the Elders were thirsty. “Maybe we should take a water break,” quickly responded Elder Pigbottom.”

     When word travelled through the very efficient network of porcine gossip and reached Gable IX that night, he said to his informant (Pig, of course), “Well, finally they have something that looks so much like Montgomery’s Disease, they might not be able to hide behind their self-deceptions, lying, euphemisms and cockamamie vaccines. A massive epidemic of explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting in The Great Pig Pen might be a little difficult to conceal.”

     When Gable IX heard about the “IT’S SAFE TO EAT PORK” t-shirts, he quipped, “Well, given what’s going on in the bodies of the Boss family, I’d say it’s certainly safer to eat pigs than to eat humans.”

     The next day a large truck arrived and several workmen got out with all kinds of equipment. The men installed small video cameras all around The Great Pig Pen, and while most of the pigs were unnerved by them and found them prying and intrusive, Cuchi-Cuchi treated them like they were there to record every single one of her increasingly agile porcine dance steps. She loved to stand prominently in front of the camera showing the creative choreography that she was developing and hoped to teach to all the other piglets for memorial services or their next performance at a future all-herd meeting called for by The Council of Wise Porcine Elders. She wasn’t the only one putting on a show, because Coppelia saw the cameras as a major opportunity to show the world all her seductive modeling poses. She was always careful to show only her good side, the one without the hairy mole sticking out prominently from her snout. Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig also saw the cameras as her chance to show the world what a truly attractive sow looks like.

     It took a while, but once he grasped what the video cameras were all about, Tiggly-Wiggly started doing a little of his circular running in front of each one of them. If his father didn’t appreciate his talents, perhaps somebody out there would.

     Omni The Total Information Pig wished he had access to everything that was caught on the cameras, because it would have made his job so much easier. He just had his considerable porcine memory. And the eyes of his Senior Bowel Movement Total Information Officer, Aunt Mathilda. And speaking of that, Omni also reported that Mrs. Boss was telling her older sister earlier in the morning, in a rather proud tone of voice, that she was carefully collecting bowel movement samples from her whole family to be sent to a very sophisticated study called “The Totally Genius Microbiome Research Project” which was being conducted by one of the world’s leading disease-hunters at one of the leading university’s in New York.”

     “They want to see all my children’s bowel movements,” she said excitedly, as though all her children were about to become international celebrities.

     “You don’t say?” was her older sister’s response, according to Omni. He said, “I sense that she was quite envious. She told her sister that she was going to have to make a few phone calls when she got home.”

     Omni told the Council of Wise Porcine Elders, “Mrs. Boss was clearly very excited that sophisticated scientists in New York City were taking an interest in her entire family’s bowel movements. They even asked for a sample from their pet dog and cat. And from any close friends who visited regularly. They even wanted one from the Boss’s mailman. Mrs. Boss was not sure how she was going to make that request.”

     This was something that Omni was especially eager to pass on to Aunt Mathilda, given her public responsibilities in The Great Pig Pen. When Aunt Mathilda heard the news, because she liked clear lines of authority and wanted a piece of the action, she requested that her title be formally changed to The Great Pig Pen Public Health Director of the Porcine Bowel Movement Microbiome Project.

     The next morning Omni overheard Mr. Boss talking to a man named Big Don who owned a neighboring farm. He said “Big Don, these professionals don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground.” Omni told the Council that Big Don, the neighbor, just nodded nervously and said to Mr. Boss,” You haven’t heard the half of it. Now they’re talking about porcine superbugs,  resistant strains of bacteria in pigs called MRSA, and brand new viruses like Hepatitis E as future threats to our herds.” Omni diligently tried to keep tabs on all of Mr. Boss’s conversations with his colleagues about the wide array of disease threats to the herd but sometimes he confused them with the discussions heard between Mrs. Boss and her other sister about all their illnesses and the illnesses of their combined ten children who were still provisionally alive. It was like trying to keep track of everything that is flying around in a tornado.

The Next Day

     “What’s the latest on the human disease front, Omni?” asked Wise Porcine Elder Neanderthal at the morning briefing.

     “I can barely keep track of all the developments,” replied Omni. “Mr. Boss has started to become visibly annoyed with the steady stream of vets, USDAers, mystery men in ill-fitting suits and the occasional nurse. He could not keep PRRS, PNWS, PDNS, Swine Mystery Disease or any of the other ones straight. When they are gone he immediately calls them fools and refers to their vehicles as clown cars.”

     The Boss family was forced to cancel the Sunday Petting Zoo because of fears that people would bring pig diseases onto their farm from all over the state in the muck that was on the bottom of their shoes. With that line of revenue lost and with the costs for the medical care of their children increasing on an almost weekly basis, Mr. and Mrs. Boss were forced to sell more pigs to institutions that did medical and military experiments. Mrs. Boss and her unwell children had so much trouble controlling their emotions when the beloved pigs were, one-by-one, taken away that they hid in the house whenever Mr. Boss accompanied men in white coats and yellow boots into the pen. They all knew it was being done for their welfare, but it still was too much to bear. And every time a pig disappeared it sent a wave of stress through the herd and required yet another porcine memorial service. Mythos was almost running out of ex-lovers to base his memorial anthems on. And because the Boss children loved the pigs, whenever they lost one, they became as stressed as the pigs themselves, which only made their own mysterious human illnesses worse.

     One memorial service was cut short by the arrival of a team of vets who had come to vaccinate the herd again. Omni was never able to gather reliable information on what they were being vaccinated for, so he faked it and told the Council the next day, “My sources tell me it was a new Swine Mystery Disease vaccine.”

     To make matters worse, the Boss family did not do a good job of keeping track of which pig had been vaccinated for what disease. Some pigs ended up getting vaccinated multiple times and some not at all. Given the mess the vaccines were creating, it was never clear whether they were just making things worse. Some of the pigs who got sick after the vaccines began to panic, but the Council tried to calm the herd’s nerves by saying it was just a flare up of Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome.

     About the vaccines, Professor Gable IX said to Pig, “They’re so confused that they’re believing their own lies and doubting their truths.”

The Following Day

     Slightly after dawn the next day, the sky filled with the ominous sight of a huge flock of ravens that seemed for just a split second to blot out what the early risers in The Great Pig Pen could see of the sun. The flock swooped down, and just for a minute they alighted on the fence all around the pen, almost equidistant from each other like a sinister choir about to sing something funereal. Just as quickly they were gone, but not without registering in the wary consciousness of Cuchi-Cuchi. It might have had a more dramatic impact on her if it hadn’t been superseded by the fact that when she looked at the place to her right in the nest in the place where Bambino usually slept, and noticed, to her alarm, that he wasn’t there.

     She looked in every direction, and seeing only sleeping pigs, she started screaming “Bambino, Bambino!” That ended any hopes any pigs in the herd had about sleeping in that morning. When Mother and Father realized that Bambino had disappeared, they started running hysterically around the perimeter of the pen. To no avail. They were horrified at the possibility that they might never see their beloved little Bambino ever again. Mother Gizmo began to sob uncontrollably.

     An unwanted partial answer to what happened to Bambino came in the form of a police car arriving with sirens blaring and lights flashing. While no hard information was forthcoming, every adult pig in the herd knew it had something to do with the fate of Bambino.

     What actually happened to Bambino was clarified in a dreadful manner a few days later when Mrs. Boss came running out to the pen with the county newspaper that had a huge photo of Bambino on the cover. But it was not all of Bambino. It was just Bambino’s head, at the center of a crèche in a church in the space where the Baby Jesus had been. Three teenagers had been apprehended and were facing charges of kidnapping Bambino and cutting his head off. And to make matters worse the Baby Jesus they had taken from its rightful place had subsequently been thrown into a local pond. The teenagers were contrite and claimed they were victims of bad parenting and low self-esteem, the story said. But Mrs. Boss was not forgiving. She used all kinds of unprecedented language in telling Mr. Boss what should be done with the culprits. She couldn’t even look at Mother and Father Gizmo. All the grief for Teddy that Mrs. Boss still harbored seemed to rise from a grave within her. She loved Bambino almost as much as any of her unwell children.

     Mother and Father Gizmo leaned against each other, weeping constantly for many days after that. And they tried to never let Pig or Cuchi-Cuchi out of their sight.

The Next Month

     It was a Thursday morning when Cuchi-Cuchi, after imperfectly hearing a conversation of Mr. Boss’s at the fence, came running to Pig, squealing “Pig, Pig, I think I have Porcine Biomedical Industrial Complex.” Pig took a deep breath and tried to undo the damage.

     Omni reported that next morning on a very grim exchange he had overheard at the fence. A very angry man in a business suit with cheeseburger grease stains on his jacket had come to the farm and told Mr. Boss that the state had decided that the Wild Boars might be the source of all the mysterious swine epidemics and they were going to try and exterminate all of them in the state by paying a generous bounty to hunters who killed and turned the bodies of the Wild Boars over to the state’s health department for research purposes. He said “those damn Wild Boars are the problem. They’re carrying something mysterious that is making all our pigs sick. They’ve got to go.” He said that the state was planning on using newly developed anti-Wild Boar drones to identify, laser tag, and kill all the Wild Boars in the state.

     It didn’t take long for the information to pass through The Great Pig Pen’s Top Secret classified network from Omni to Aunt Mathilda to the Gizmos and thanks to Pig, Professor Gable IX was made painfully aware of the precarious situation after that night’s class. Some members (maybe all) of the Wise Council of Porcine Elders, who were jealous or wary of the influence of Gable IX on the young pigs, had a sense of schadenfreude about the drones which they barely tried to conceal.

     The afternoon the when the first drones started buzzing over the farm, the piglets stared up in fascination, although some secretly feared they had something to do with The Invisible Evil Pig Devil. Pig anxiously shivered because he knew only too well what they were looking for.

The Next Week

     Given the number of impending health problems on the county’s troubled pig farms, The Council of Wise Porcine Elder Pigs suspected that the Boss family might sell the whole farm and move away. Omni had heard Mr. Boss say to Mrs. Boss that he felt like his own mysterious health problems were being made worse from having to deal with the many new swine mystery diseases that seemed to be doing impressions of the family’s illneses. Mrs. Boss, who was convinced that Mr. Boss was not well, was constantly chided by him for suggesting he should see a doctor. He said “I don’t have time to be sick.” It broke her heart, because she could see that he was constantly fighting to hide how he was really feeling and that he was terrified of not being well enough to provide for the family. Omni heard her tell her older sister that she sensed that Mr. Boss didn’t really want to even get out of the bed in the morning, that she thought Mr. Boss had caught some “wackadoodle form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” from her or the children. She also said, “It’s all so helterskelter, who knows who gave what to whom and when? And you know what, I’m convinced that Aunt Bessie who got brain cancer and Uncle Festus who died of thyroid cancer both were victims of whatever this is, even if they live in the western part of the state They were pig farmers, too.” Omni heard Mrs. Boss say that, given the precarious health of the family, maybe they would be better off in Iowa City where there were a number of hospitals in the vicinity.

     The threat of the sale of the farm jeopardized all the efforts of the Council to keep the herd calm. Who knew what the herd would have to deal with if there was a new owner and a brand new family full of crazy, unhappy or unwell children to deal with. The Council, to its great horror, had gotten quite an earful from a small group of visiting Wild Boars (who were not particularly fond of their eccentric colleague, Gable IX), about what was going on in the world of domestic pigs around the country.

     Most of the members of the Council of Wise Porcine Elders didn’t want the responsibility of telling the whole herd exactly what was going on either. They tried to pawn the task off on Wise Porcine Elder Gunther, the herd’s psychologist, epidemiologist bioethicist and mime, but he, like most public health and leading porcine bioethical officials everywhere, felt he had a moral responsibility to alter the truth appropriately in order to avoid panic and dismay. The Wise Porcine Elders, in consultation with him, decided to release a very watered down version of what was going on, but only over a long period of time in dribs and drabs. They decided to do it on Friday evenings which was known in The Great Pig Pen as date night. (Fridays, for some reason, were considered by the Council to be “slow panic days.”) The sows were usually too busy procuring treats from the garbage dump for the weekend to pay close attention to what was going on. Basically, all that Gunther told the pigs at an all-herd convocation was, “Things were happening all over the place, but everyone should be calm and not panic because the Council of Wise Porcine Elders had everything under control.”    

     The Council of Wise Porcine Elders issued a confusing official statement which was read to the entire herd. The Council had concluded that what was going on in The Great Pig Pen was not one unified epidemic, but may little epidemics which they called “subsets.” The Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome subsets weren’t even really mini-epidemics, but what they called spontaneous porcine genetic happenings.” “Subset” was a word that certainly got Cuchi-Cuchi’s attention. And Aunt Mathilda wondered immediately if she would be expected to divide the herd’s bowel movements up into subsets. The Council insisted that some pigs with the emerging weird symptoms which the Council was attributing to Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome, had only themselves to blame for being sired by the wrong kind of sows. The directive noted, “Some pigs in this herd have very defective genes and those genes are perversely acting up on their own and making trouble for the whole herd. If it’s not Porcine Personality Disorder, you have only your genes to blame, or in some cases the Invisible Evil Pig Devil.” (They always liked to throw in a little theology for good measure. The theology always sounded more believable to the herd than the science.) At first, all the pigs nodded in agreement because it sounded like it had been well-researched by the Council and they were glad that everything seemed to be under control. But Pig stood in the back of the herd rolling his diminutive eyes in disbelief and exasperation. Under his breath he made a remark that involved animal droppings from cows. But subsequently, because they were no different from all  the rest of the sentient creatures on the planet, something didn’t smell right and such a reassuring advisory set off an unprecedented wave of fear, anxiety and porcine rumor mongering.

     Under the present circumstances, a number of pigs decided that maybe the best bet was to get on the good side of the Council was to self-report themselves to Gunther as having Porcine Personality Disorder.  They had better visit Gunther for counseling. It only took a few to get a large number of pigs to line up for self-reporting and to receive counseling for Porcine Personality Disorder with Gunther, the psychologist, epidemiologist, bioethicist and mime. Gunther used all kinds of cutting edge psychoneruotherapeutic techniques including past porcine life regressions, rotational spinning to reduce brain congestion and something called “induced proactive swine hysteria” that was carefully controlled so that it didn’t create a worse situation.

     The very informed Gable IX didn’t present the class with every bit of information he himself was hearing from Wild Boars all over the state, because he was afraid of starting an epidemic of stress in his own advanced students and they would not be able to concentrate during their forthcoming final exams. He intended to tell them more in his planned farewell speech after graduation.

     Like the visiting Wild Boars who had surreptitiously informed the Council, he had learned that many Domestic Pigs on farms all over the state, as well as the rest of the country, were not residing on picturesque, peaceful and accommodating farms, but were living lives of gruesome, humiliating confinement and abuse. Gable IX learned that all kinds of undercover reporters from TV networks were getting themselves hired on farms all over Iowa to record what looked like a statewide gulag porcine torture chambers.

     Pigs on some farms in the state were sometimes slapped, kicked, and thrown down on the ground as though they were expected to bounce. Some pigs had their eyes poked out. Others were hit with sticks, boards and all kinds of bizarre human objects. Most were left to die after they were tortured, or incinerated while they were still alive. And it wasn’t just the day laborers or the criminally insane employees who had experienced troubled childhoods. Even some respectable farmers and their church-going families got into the anti-porcine fun. Some families even brought out cameras and recorded the treatment for posterity and posted the videos on the internet, as though they were really proud of what they were doing and wanted to watch the big doings for entertainment at holiday parties.  Some people were treating pigs as though they were terrorists. When some media outlets got a hold of some of the disturbing footage, the public was outraged. But Gable IX pointed out that nobody was horrified enough to take the kind of revolutionary pro-pig actions that really should have been taken. The day for porcine civil rights had not arrived.

     Despite the Council’s tight rein on information, word of the atrocities happening around the country somehow spread throughout the herd and when Mother Gizmo heard stories about these atrocities she fainted and had to be revived by Pig and Cuchi-Cuchi. Tiggly-Wiggly, once he fully understood what was happening, had his own version of a porcine meltdown and started giggling hysterically and running in circles at a speed that make him look like he was a pig on skates doing spins on an ice rink.

     The Council of Wise Porcine Elders immediately formed a commission to investigate which pig had leaked the information to the herd. When the trail led them to Aunt Mathilda, the commission was immediately disbanded.   

     The Council could conceal everything from the herd until Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Disease came in all its symptomatic glory. It was the final straw which caused complete panic in The Great Pig Pen. And there was parallel distress in the Boss family when one of Mrs. Boss’s own children started to also have uncontrollable diarrhea, Mrs. Boss started putting two and two together. Even though it waxed and waned in her children, it concerned her and made her wonder. Omni The Total Information Pig overheard Mrs. Boss telling Mr. Boss, “People and pigs. Pigs and people. All very mysteriously ill at the same time. It’s so curious. Something is going on. I can just feel it.”

     Gradually most of the piglets started developing bloody bowel movements and couldn’t even make it to the area officially designated for evacuation. The bowel movements were now exceeding Aunt Mathilda’s ability to inspect, analyze, and chronicle them for Omni’s detailed reports to the Council. It was even too much for The Great Pig Pen’s Public Health Director of the Porcine Bowel Movement Microbiome Project.

    When Gable IX heard about Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Disease, he told Pig privately that he thought it was the final act of unrecognized or covered-up Montgomery’s Disease’s. He said to Pig, “Even if this mess isn’t Montgomery’s Disease, it certainly is doing a great impression of it.”

     All the pigs in the herd increasingly suspected that something serious was going on. The Wise Council of Porcine Elders made an effort to calm things down by issuing directives which were delivered by Gunther to the herd insisting that any diarrhea they saw was just harmless symptom of Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome. Wise Porcine Elder Stanley The Disinformation Pig was enlisted to spread bogus calmative stories throughout the herd, which sometimes resulted in erroneous reports coming from Omni the Total Information Pig. This created a kind of information gridlock in the Council which was called “porcine blowback.” It sometimes made decision making very difficult.

     As events escalated, The Wise Council of Porcine Elders decided that they had to become proactive. Any pig who disagreed with any of the directives of the Council of Wise Porcine Elders was labeled a “denialist” or a “conspiracy theorist” (or both) which was the worst kind of stigma that could be imposed by a member of the herd. They were called a “denialist” because they were denying the supreme wisdom and authority of the Council if they questioned it, and they were porcine conspiracy theorists because their disagreement showed that they were spreading the idea that the Council of Wise Porcine Elders—which met in secret and made up laws in private, rewarding themselves with the crème de la crème of the garbage dump, were actually conspiring against the herd in bad faith and not acting in its best interests. The Council equated disobedience and disagreement on the part of any members of the herd as a form of “destructive paranoia” which threatened the cohesiveness of the herd, and therefore the porcine public health. The Council had its ways of making sure such pigs paid a price for their “denialism” and “destructive paranoia.”

     Pig had been reported to the Council several times by Omni the Total Information Pig for what was diagnosed as “disorderly porcine thinking,” “predatory skepticism,” “subversive sarcasm”and “criminal cynicism.” Pig was very close to formally being labelled both a criminal “denialist,” a felonious  “dissident,” and a “conspiracy theorist” by the very irate Council of Wise Porcine Elders. The Council was on the brink of officially declaring him a “fringe pig” who should be shunned by the rest of the herd. This was getting serious. Some of the heftier pigs who were employed to take care of such situations were put on high alert that the Council had its eye on “a pig of interest.”

     The criminal trials in The Great Pig Pen were affairs in which the Wise Council of Porcine Elders appointed themselves the judges the juries and, when necessary, the executioners. Whenever Pig’s name came up, Wise Elder Neanderthal screamed, “Force him to testify, force him to testify!” Even though every member of the Council knew that there could be no fake public trial because it would cause panic and stress, and there could be no truly secret trial in the dark because Mythos (Clarence) The Pig Laureate was usually out and about in the pen looking for love and ever-vigilant Aunt Mathilda, the Senior Bowel Movement Total Information Officer, seemed to sleep with one beady—but very focused—eye open.

     The Council had heard from Omni that information gathered from JoJo (who was only too willing to betray his rival ) indicated that, several times during class at Midnight University, Pig had questioned the very right of the Council to hold all of its meetings in secret, or as secret as they could be in a pig pen. Because Pig was the nephew of Aunt Mathilda, the Council had to tread very carefully. They began to consider the possibility that Pig was not the real, underlying problem. It was his teacher and subversive mentor. They began to wonder about the wisdom of allowing any Wild Boar, even one that had great knowledge of “The Real World,” to oversee advanced porcine education at Moonlight University. Elder Pigbottom called for an educational porcine paradigm shift.” We need reform. We need quality control. We need standards,” he oinked at his fellow Council members. As per usual, the Council considered organizing a commission consisting of two of the Wise Elders to determine if Moonlight University should be replaced by what they would call “Wise Council of Porcine Elders University.”

     At that point, the Council of Wise Porcine Elders had created so many commissions, subcommittees and working groups, that it was all getting very confusing. A kind of porcine commission fatigue was setting in, not to be confused with the phony Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome. Wise Elder Bubba suggested they start an Emergency Commission on Porcine Commissions to sort it all out.

     It was becoming painfully clear—to every pig in the herd with a working brain—that something very strange, of a medical nature, was happening before their very eyes. Pigs began openly wondering about the effectiveness of Gunther’s porcine personality counseling in preventing them from developing Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome, whatever that really was. The same kind of despair that occasionally showed up on the faces of Mrs. Boss and her older sister when they talked about their children, started manifesting itself in all the adult pigs in the herd who had piglets. The fear started setting in all over The Great Pig Pen when the Hognacious piglets started developing rashes and scabs, which the Council told the herd was just a passing phase of Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome in emotionally disturbed and genetically inferior piglets. An outraged Pig told Hermione Hognacious and her husband that anyone who believed that those scabs were caused by Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome in piglets who were clearly way too young and perky to be fatigued, was out of their porcine mind. Hermione and her husband were very upset by what Pig had told them, and they started to get angry at the Council for suggesting that their recently born piglets already had porcine personality disorders or that their bad Hognacious genes were acting up. They had heard troubling rumors (from “friends” of pigs like JoJo) that Pig was badmouthing the Council and they now started to wonder if Pig was actually right in questioning the intentions and honesty of their leaders.

     The Council had no intention of having its authority undermined by an upstart like Pig, especially in the face of public health crisis that they had not let the herd know about. Given their concern about what Pig seemed to be instigating, the Council issued a new public health directive, based on a novel reading of the ever-changing Porcine Constitution, making it a crime for pigs in The Great Pig Pen to be publicly angry or peevish and even worse, disgruntled. One of the Wise Elders had wanted to also outlaw private anger and even porcine irony, but the fear was that it would add too much to Omni The Total Information Pig’s workload, since he would be the one tasked with identifying pigs who were angry, sarcastic, petulant, ironic or cynical in secret. It was a lot to ask Omni, given that he was already keeping a list of “Borderline Pigs of Interest” that included members of the herd who were closure denialists, or disinformation obstructionists, as well as those who in any way challenged the conventional wisdom that was set down by the Wise Council of Porcine Elders.

     That night, after class at Moonlight University, Pig said to Professor Gable IX, “I think porcine society is turning against me.”

     To which the Professor responded, “Pig, porcine society is an ass.”

The Next Night

     If the students had known that Gable IX’s lecture that night—which was very expansive and challenging—was going to be his last, perhaps they might have paid even closer attention to every word of it. But their minds wandered towards the upcoming exams and graduation from Moonlight University. Even though Gable IX seemed to be a bit on edge, the Professor’s ambitious lecture attempted to synthesize all the troubling events in The Great Pig Pen the previous year with all the timeless knowledge that Gable IX had accumulated in his lifetime. The lecture was ambitiously titled, “The Unified Montgomery’s Disease Theory of Intertwined Human and Porcine History and Health, Part One.” He said he would give Part Two the next night after which exams were scheduled to begin.

     Professor Gable IX began with a reassertion of his now familiar premise that humans always make simple things ridiculously complicated and totally confusing through a combination of masterful self-deception, acute dishonesty and chronic euphemism. He then tried to get the students to envision a universe in which Montgomery’s Disease was the sun and all the planets were either humans or pigs. He said, “It’s all so very clear and simple if you just remember that Montgomery’s Disease is at the center, affecting all things, creating all kinds of unnecessary mystery and havoc throughout that entire planetary system because those planets, humans and pigs, don’t recognize what is happening. I should say don’t want to.  Each sick pig in your herd and every chronically and acutely ill member of the Boss family is a sad little planet haplessly rotating on a doomed axis in the galaxy of a unified disease. Everything that has happened in The Great Pig Pen in the last year has participated in that planetary event. Got it?”

     The students tried desperately to grasp—with their newly educated minds—the image of a grim cosmos of intertwined and interacting porcine and human diseases that the Professor seemed to desperately want them to see, but their thoughts were spinning (or fleeing) in all directions. Pig’s perhaps a little less than the others.

     Professor Gable IX closed his lecture with a discussion of the nature of deep porcine thinking, something he felt was necessary if Domestic Pigs in general, and his students in particular, were to deal with this threatening new universe of diseases that either were like Montgomery’s Disease, or worse, were the real deal itself. He reiterated what he had told the students about the nature of porcine thinking in a long lecture the previous summer. First he said, “The key to great porcine thought is the ability to keep as many metaphors in the air as possible. Especially when you are eating.” He continued, “Students, remember, serious, original thinking is the dance between anecdotalization and de-anecdotalization. Between filling the mind with too many stories and too few. Most Domestic Pigs wonder aimlessly in a dense mental and social forest of pointless personal anecdotes forever circling aimlessly around story after story, never seeing the big picture. “

     This, of course, had been one of the most difficult lectures in the entire term, one that reminded the students of the Professor’s genetic roots in the pensive Black Forest of Germany and everyone—especially JoJo—was hoping that there would be no questions about the nature of deep porcine thinking on any of the exams. But now they were all worried that he was giving them a hint the size of a barn about exactly what they would be quizzed on. “Remember,” the Professor said, “the path to deep porcine thinking can be summed up in five words: Circle. Observe. Totalize. Condense. Repeat. And one more thing. Always strive to make the disparate undisparate.” Pig looked over at Jojo and even in darkness he could see that JoJo’s eyes were slightly crossed in total confusion. The sows were trying to act sophisticated like they understood every word that was just said, but Pig knew they were faking it.

     And, as if to wrap up everything he had ever taught them in one inspiring sentence, he said, “Class, we should never stop dreaming of flying to the stars but at the same time never forget that we are pigs.”

     As the students left the professor and stumbled home to their family’s nests to sleep, each one of them said to themselves, over and over, “Circle. Observe. Totalize. Condense. Repeat. Circle. Observe. Totalize. Condense. Repeat.” and “Thinking is the dance between anecdotalization and de-anecdotalization, thinking is the dance between anecdotalization and de-anecdotalization. Always strive to make the disparate the undisparate. Always strive to make the disparate the undisparate.” Pig was almost certain he finally understood what his teacher was saying. He thought, “If I just keep repeating his wisdom over and over, it will one day sink in and I’ll be a serious thinker. At least for a Domestic Pig.”

     Any questions that Professor Gable IX’s difficult lecture raised would go unanswered because they had heard his final brilliant thoughts. There would be no second half of the final lecture.

     When Gable IX did not show up the next night for class the students were totally puzzled. But when the members of the council learned of the disappearance, they immediately knew what had really happened. They connected his disappearance with a parade of little airplanes that Omni had reported seeing flying over the farm towards the forest. The Council didn’t even have to retire the Professor to make way for a huge educational reform in The Great Pig Pen. Things had taken care of themselves.

     The next night when the class returned to Moonlight University, hoping that Gable IX had only been ill for a night, they found a totally new Wild Boar professor who looked quite agitated as he tried to give one final lecture and administer the exams that would lead to graduation from Moonlight University.

     Pig, who had actually been looking forward to the final exams and graduation, felt, like all the students, that he was on the brink of sobbing uncontrollably. This new professor seemed distracted, probably by something unthinkable that was going on in the Wild Boar world and he didn’t address the class with the passion, focus, or conviction that characterized Professor Gable IX. Plus, what they could understand of his rambling, nervous lecture seemed to be focused on the importance of pigs coming to grips with the fact that eventually they are all going to die. They all wondered what that was about. Pig couldn’t concentrate very well himself, because he kept thinking about all the dire possibilities of what might have happened to his amazing and inspiring teacher. The Professor had such a commanding will and limitless mental energy that it had seemed like he would live forever. The substitute was simply not in the same league as Professor Gable IX.

The Next Day

         That morning, Mr. Boss started donning yellow gloves whenever he came into the pen. (Cuchi-Cuchi thought they were a stunning fashion accessory, and immediately wanted to wear one on each hoof.) Outside the gate there was a small plastic bucket with something that smelt like bleach in it. Mr. Boss wore yellow boots and stepped into the bucket before he walked into The Great Pig Pen and also upon leaving it.

     Aunt Mathilda, the Acting Senior Total Bowel Movement Information Officer, had shaken up the Council with all kinds of descriptions of bloody bowel movements she was starting to see all over The Great Pig Pen. The Council went into emergency mode.

     A startling directive was handed out by the Council later in the day. Talking back to the Council of Wise Porcine Elders was declared a major threat to the public health of the herd. The directive, read by Wise Porcine Elder Neanderthal, declared, “All pigs are urged not to become annoyingly political about serious public health matters that the Council of Wise Porcine Elders are responsible for controlling. Challenges to the Council’s authority could lead to stress and confusion and very bad information in the herd. Anyone who spreads doubt about the authority and wisdom of the Wise Council of Porcine Elders will be deemed a conspiracy theorist and a denialist and the Council will take all appropriate steps to deal with it. Especially repeat offenders!” The directive made the whole herd shudder. And it turned out to be just another porcine public health strategy that made things worse. Wise Porcine Elder Neanderthal also spoke to the herd about the total insignificance of the strange symptoms showing up in the herd, After hearing Elder Neanderthal get more specific and declaring that the Hognacious piglets—who were now covered in scabs and were starting to have bloody diarrhea which had kept Aunt Mathilda busy putting together all kinds of reports—merely had a very new harmless form of Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome, Pig had finally had enough.

     “They’re sick! The whole herd is getting sick! You think all of this is unrelated? We may be pigs, but we’re not dumb as humans!” Pig screamed.

     “You must not challenge the Wise Council of Porcine Elders,” reprimanded Wise Elder Pigbottom.

     Pig’s snout was turning redder and redder, “Council of Wise Porcine Elders, my pig’s ass!” he squealed back. “Maybe the Council of Dumb as Chicken Elders or the Council of Lying and Cheating Elders,” he responded in his most explosive nearly-adult voice.

     “Omni, I hope you’re keeping track of all this,” said Wise Elder Pigbottom.

     “Of course, I’m not missing a thing,” said Omni The Total Information Pig.

     “The porcine system works, the porcine system works,” responded Wise Elder Mason Jar, although it seemed apropos of nothing.

     “What system?” snarled Pig.

     “You’re stressing the herd, Pig. You’re becoming a threat to the entire herd’s public health!” oinked Elder Mason Jar.

     “Prosecute him,” snorted Wise Porcine Elder Neanderthal. “Prosecute, I say! We can’t be soft on porcine crime.”

     “Diagnose him! Classify him! Public health demands it!” chimed in Wise Porcine Elder Stanley The Disinformation Pig.

     “What public health?” squealed Pig. “Every pig in this herd seems to be getting sick in one way or another. Your public health is public lying!”

     “We need emergency closure!” squealed Wise Porcine Elder The Closure Pig.

     “Closure is human nonsense!” snorted Pig right back at him, sounding like the spirit of Gable IX had taken over his very being.

     Both Mother and Father Gizmo rushed to Pig’s side and tried to push him back into the herd. Yes, Mother Gizmo was concerned about the harmony of the The Great Pig Pen, but she was a mother first and a member of the herd second. All Mother Gizmo was concerned about was the welfare of Pig. She couldn’t let herself be sucked into the matrix of porcine group thinking. “Son, son, this is not the time or place for this, said a frightened Father Gizmo. “I’ll invent something to solve this problem, I promise. Maybe something to help the porcine microbiome, even though I’m not sure what that is. But never mind. I’ll come up with some cutting-edge invention to cure it. I know the trick! Please, everybody believe me! I have lots of ideas!” Father Gizmo always thought that his bizarre technological breakthroughs would save the day, but now he felt an extra responsibility to come up with some stunning invention because the welfare of his entire family might have been put into jeopardy by Pig’s all too spontaneous and frank outburst. Pig thought he had never seen his father in a more pathetic light. His bottomless depression about Bambino and his fear of what might happen to Pig were taking their toll.

     The entire herd stared at Pig and trembled in astonishment, rage, and terror. It was as though all the eyes of the herd had created one big spotlight that was on him. The quickly escalating stress reached a tipping point and suddenly total mayhem began to explode in the herd. A psychological wave of despair and terror swept through the herd like a fever and every pig began to act out their own versions of barnyardxzc hysteria. Suddenly, almost no member of the herd was under their own control. And each pig’s public eruption of madness was making his neighbors even crazier. They all started racing around, some of them running in the kind of endless circles that Tiggly-Wiggly was famous for.

     The thing that the Council had tried to prevent—by lying and cheating in every possible way—was finally happening: a total porcine apocalypse. There was loud hysterical squawking, squeaking, snarling, oinking and even an eerie threnody of yodeling which must have been coming from a terrified you-know-who. Gradually all the pigs started crashing violently against the rails of the wooden fence of The Great Pig Pen, which under normal circumstances was quite sturdy. But what was happening now was anything but normal. The pandemonium caused the ground of The Great Pig Pen to tremble like the beginning of some kind of earthquake. This was the kind of multisystemic porcine breakdown that the societal structures of civilized Domestic Pigs were organized to prevent. It was the actualization of the worst nightmare of the Council of Wise Porcine Elders, who themselves were starting to lose it.

      Every few seconds a three-hundred pound pig crashed him or herself against the fence with an insane fury. Each crazed, rotund pig was like a guided missile hitting every surprisingly vulnerable rail in the fence. It was like something that held the fabric of the herd together had disappeared and now everything was coming apart at the seams. The porcine center could not hold. It was way too late for the Council to set up a secret working group on Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Disease.

    The unified spirit of the herd was imploding. There was pig blood everywhere. The ground they had all lived on so peacefully (relatively speaking) was turning red from the deep flesh wounds being caused by all the violence that was occurring in every direction. Just about every pig threw him or herself up against the fence and it started to come apart in several places.

     What was going on in Pig could only be described as shock, awe, and determination. The spectacle of what was happening all around him was practically unfathomable. Everywhere he looked, his fellow pigs were suddenly becoming totally demented, so out of sorts that some were losing control of their bodily functions.  Even JoJo and The Mean Pigs were hurling themselves at the fence, perhaps driven by some deep self-sacrificing guilt for everyone they had bullied or betrayed in The Great Pig Pen. The cascading stress in the herd seemed to be activating and exacerbating every imaginable form of Swine Mystery Disease, PRRS, PNDS, PMWS and ABCDEFG Disease, that clearly had infected the herd while they were being told they only had Chronic Porcine Fatigue Syndrome. The Great Pig Pen was getting messier and more disgusting by the second. Porcine public health was turning into tooth-and-claw pandemonium.

      Pig was amazed that himself wasn’t sick in any way, at least not yet. He couldn’t believe that in the middle of the chaos his father was just standing still, numbly watching the horrific event unfold before him. To Pig it looked like there was not  a single positive life-affirming thought left in his father’s eyes. There was no sign of any emotion in his father’s visage. Was his father looking at all the wonder of the world being drained away in an instant?

     Pig was learning on the spot that one can never predict what different pigs will do when their world is collapsing around them.  In a way, the one pig who wasn’t changing in this catastrophe was Tiggly-Wiggly. He was, as usual, running in circles. But Tiggly-Wiggly’s consistency was cold comfort. In the distance, to his horror, Pig could see Mathilda’s oldest daughter, not eating her own young, but rather somebody else’s young. The real mother was viciously fighting with Mathilda’s daughter over a half-dead piglet that was squished but still struggling and squealing with all it’s might in Mathilda’s daughter’s bloody mouth. As he looked around, piglets in all directions were being devoured by stressed-out adult pigs. Not only Claudine, but all of Aunt Mathilda’s well-behaved daughters were scarfing down piglets like they were at some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet.

     In the middle of the mayhem was the perpetually bullied Mythos (Clarence) The Pig Laureate being mauled and gnawed on by JoJo and The Mean Pigs, totally undetermined by the manner in which Mythos was defending himself, namely manically and hysterically oinking out every song about lost love that had worked so well to call the porcine nerves at the Great Pig Pen’s memorial services. No ditty could save him now. The hopeless sounds that seemed to indistinctly be coming out of the mouth the Mythos can only be described as a long porcine diva death scream. The squealing all around the besieged Mythos was deafening and it seemed like it was raining pig blood from every direction.

     From Pig’s vantage point, it appeared that Omni The Total Information Pig was having his snout torn apart by both Elder Mason Jar The Opinion Leader Pig and Elder Stanley The Disinformation Pig. Everywhere he looked bits of snout seemed to be airborne. The herd’s tight control of information was turning in on itself.

     Pig looked again at Father Gizmo. It no longer was his father standing in the middle of all the savage, bloody mayhem. He was clearly in a state of total porcine amnesia. It was like all that remained of his father was a mound of dead meat with a death gaze drained of all hope. Perhaps the demise of Bambino had wiped out one half of his brain and now this was destroying the other. It was as if he had already “passed into ham.” Pig’s mother was standing beside his father desperately trying to arouse him, screaming “Do something, do something.” It was strange that she expected anything grounded in reality from him, because she had never known Father Gizmo to really do anything practical in his entire life.  He literally looked like he had given up and was just pathetically waiting to disappear into the vortex of porcine violence that seemed to be closing in on him and Mother Gizmo.

     A screaming cacophony of bestial execration was drowning out the calls for closure from Wise Porcine Elder Finito. There was blood and loose, bloody bowel movements all over The Great Pig Pen, from the porcine diarrheal disease that seemed to be coming more and more acute as it was being aggravated by the wave after wave of horror and stress that was sweeping through the herd. The herd was trapped in a massive self-perpetuating feedback loop of stress-disease-stress-disease-stress-disease ad nauseam. And with the amount of porcine regurgitation going on it was literally ad nauseam. It was a hopeless cyclone of violence that seemed like it could only end up in a mass grave of decimated, forgotten swine.

     Pig was trying to fight the sense of denial and absolute stillness that can take over the porcine mind when reality starts to come flying apart. There was something deep in him, a strong kernel of resistance, the will to regroup and survive. Mysterious forces were setting his whole being in motion. In his porcine consciousness, a determined, rational voice kept repeating the question, “What would Professor Gable IX do? What would Professor Gable IX do?” He was also thinking “Get me out of here!”

     Nearby, Pig could see Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig doing what she did on a regular basis, but now it wasn’t strange because all the pigs in the herd around her were doing it too. The confluence of all the Swine Mystery Diseases had turned the herd into a kind of group version of Skinny Mimi The Vomiting Pig.

     As Pig directed his attention back toward the farmhouse, he could see the whole Boss family running and screaming toward The Great Pig Pen. They all had on “IT’S SAFE TO EAT PORK” t-shirts. Even the family dog, who was running around barking, had been fitted with one of the t-shirts. The children’s arms were all flailing and they seemed to be in various states of conniption, which almost matched what was going on in the herd of Domestic Pigs. The children were crying and one was vomiting as if he were a member of the herd. From where he was it sounded to Pig like the Boss children were snarling and squealing and oinking in terror, too. Mrs. Boss looked like she was pulling out her hair as she screamed for the herd to stop throwing themselves destructively up against the fence and trying to bite, maim, and devour each other, having already torn most of the piglets apart. She commenced singing “Oh Piggy Boy” at the top of her lungs, but that did nothing at all to end the commotion. And perhaps the scariest sight was Mr. Boss, who had brought a rifle from the house and begun to fire it into The Great Pig Pen, vainly trying to restore some semblance of order. His bullets weren’t killing what he mistakenly thought were the porcine ringleaders. There were no leaders in this cataclysm. In the equalizing blur of the mayhem, he couldn’t accurately tell which pig was an authoritarian leader and which pig was a servile follower. All he seemed to be hitting were the half-eaten piglets or the ones who were trying to escape their inevitable fate. Mr. Boss may have been determined to restore some semblance of order to his herd, but Pig knew that porcine business as usual was over forever in The Great Pig Pen. He sensed that all the individual pigs running hither and thither and impaling themselves on the sharp splinters of the broken fence were about to become one big dead porcine blob. It was as if they were all about to “pass into” one humongous ham.

     In the distance Pig saw a shard of light coming through a small hole in the fence caused by the mindless slamming from the herd’s total breakdown and he immediately got the most important idea of his lifetime. As the herd got crazier and more violent, the jarring of the fence caused the small hole to grow into a gaping invitation. The creative and imaginative side of his father and the practical side of his mother seemed to be joining forces in him. Or maybe “The When of Destiny” (as Gable IX referred to it) and the miraculous sun shining through the hole in the fence were summoning him. Or maybe it was the unlikely mercy of The Almighty Hog. Or whatever. He found himself saying a half-serious prayer, perhaps based on a form of porcine theology called “Justincaseism.”

     He gingerly made his way through the chaos to the hole, and practically without giving it any more thought, he began to squeeze his ample porcine girth through the fence’s aperture in the kind of struggle in which the past willfully fights to become the future. Yes, even with all its flaws, he totally loved his herd, but the herd had found its way onto the path of total stupidity, folly and death. He could no longer be a part of it and live. When he finally made it through, covered in bloody scratches and the broken fence’s wooden splinters, it was as though he had become a new creature, had virtually left his species behind him. Before him was something that, for his entire life, he had only glimpsed though the tiny crevices in the fence. He was doing something that had been dangerous to even imagine. Beyond the farmland was the forest of possibility, “The Real World,” a beckoning place which the herd, now tearing itself to pieces, behind him, in The Great Pig Pen would never experience. He started running toward it and he kept on running. Was it really possible, that he was free, totally free? That the doting tutelage of a brilliant Wild Boar had fully prepared him to enter a brand new life, one that so many other creatures experienced as their birthright?

     Wherever he was going, he just hoped he would never have to live in a boiling alphabet soup of euphemistic porcine and human diseases that were epidemics of endless lies. Pig could feel Sassy in every beat of his heart, urging him onto something great and brand new. Pig looked up at the sky, and even though he felt he was finally free from the fate of an abject, sycophantic and misguided herd of medically confused, stressed-out and lied-to pigs, there was only one qualification to this new freedom, one asterisk on four little hooves. Behind him, there was a familiar figure gaining on him and his journey into his new reality. It was the irrepressible Cuchi-Cuchi, screaming, “Pig, please don’t leave me behind! Pig, please, please don’t leave me behind!” Pig realized that his exhilarating new freedom would come with at least one responsibility, and that would be okay.

Notes

#1

According to Ask.com, “Pig slop is made of a variety of foods and is usually a mix of grains and produce. It often includes foods like melon rinds and stale bread. Pigs are omnivores and require a diet that's rich in variety. They primarily eat high grains, but farmers will supplement their diet with pig slop. Pig slop varies based on the ingredients that are available. Some farmers will drop buckets off at public places, such as nursing homes and schools, to have the kitchen fill with their leftover foods. Leftover foods that make up pig slop may include scrap foods that humans don't eat. From cucumber peels to apple cores, the foods still include important nutrients for pigs at a fraction of the price.”

#2

“In terms of cleanliness, pigs are very particular. They are the only farm animals that make a separate sleeping den (which they keep spotless) and use a latrine area. They just don’t look clean.” (Source:

The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson (Faber & Faber,) is available from Telegraph Books.

#3

“The ability of ASF virus to infect and destroy cells of the reticuloendothelial system leaves a defenseless host that succumbs to an infection which may be described as an acquired immune deficiency disease of domestic pigs.” Source: Yechiel Becker, African Swine Fever Virus, Martinus Nijhoff Publishing, Boston, 1987)

#4

“The main problem with these attenuated viral strains is due to biosafety issues, since they retained some virulence and produced sub-clinical infections in pigs, occasionally becoming chronically infected.” (Source:  “DNA Vaccination Partially Protects against African Swine Fever Virus Lethal Challenge in the Absence of Antibodies,” Jordi M. Argilaguet, et. al. September 26, 2012

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040942)

#5

Source: “Why do pigs oink in English, boo boo in Japanese, and nöff-nöff in Swedish?” The Guardian , by Gary Nunn, November, 17, 2014

#6

“Pigs are highly intelligent, social animals, and very protective of their young.  In nature, a pregnant sow will make a nest of soft leaves, grass, and straw, creating a private, comfortable place to give birth and nurse her young.  Mother pigs even sing to their babies while nursing.  A sow will take great pains to keep her piglets warm and safe from harm.   By nature, pigs are fastidious and clean, and won’t soil their nest.” (Source: Compassionate Citizen.

https://compassionatecitizen.wordpress.com/about-pigs/)

#7

“Pigs wallow in mud to cool themselves.” Source: “5 Ways to Cool Off Pigs this Summer,” Jodi Helmer, HobbyFarms.com.ellmer, HHH

http://www.hobbyfarms.com/livestock-and-pets/5-ways-to-cool-off-pigs.aspx

#8

“Pigs have a matriarchal family unit where piglets are cared for by the female relatives. Pigs are good mothers and develop strong bonds and love for her children, just like human mothers do.” (Source: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/phenomenal-reasons-to-love-pigs/)

#9

“Most pigs love: cooked broccoli, pitted apricots, cucumbers, dark green lettuce, cooked potatoes, beets, grapes, pumpkins, all squashes, zucchini, snow peas, spinach, yams, kale, tomatoes, chard, carrots, pears, apples, berries, oranges, grapefruit, melons, pitted cherries, pitted peaches.”

(Source: http://www.pigspeace.org/main/didyouknow.html)

#10

“Despite their stubbornness pigs can be trained somewhat the same way you would train a dog.  The most important thing in training any pet is the bond you have formed with them that makes them want to please you and this will help with the training. It is no different with pigs, and bonding is a very important part of the training. (Source: http://www.second-opinion-doc.com/how-to-train-a-pig.html)

#11

“Domestic pigs average a top speed of about 11 miles per hour.”

(Source: http://www.speedofanimals.com/animals/pig)

#12

“The hardest part of cooking pig snouts and lips may be finding them. Most independent and chain-store butchers can special order snouts and lips, though you may have to request a considerable amount to make the order worthwhile for the butcher. The taste of pig snouts is similar to fatty pork or bacon. As for texture, pig snouts and lips have a rubbery, slightly crunchy taste. Filipino and Chinese methods of preparation can give snouts and lips special flavor.”

(Source: http://www.livestrong.com/article/488727-how-to-cook-pig-snouts-and-lips/)

#13

“The pig has four toes on each foot that are pointed downwards as the pig walks on the tips of its toes rather than its whole foot.”

(Source: http://a-z-animals.com/animals/pig/)

#14

“In pigs, females on heat produce a scent that makes the male foam at the mouth.” (Source: Richard Gray, The Telegraph, September 11, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/8771138/How-to-flirt-what-animals-teach-us-about-charming-the-opposite-sex.html)

#15

“Occasionally sows will attack their own piglets - usually soon after birth - causing ... where feasible, outright cannibalism will occur and the sow will eat the piglets.” (Source: http://www.nadis.org.uk/bulletins/savaging-of-piglets.aspx)

#16

“The typical life span of the domestic pig is six to 10 years, but certain problems can reduce longevity. Farm and yard pigs are much larger than their ancestors and wild pigs. Domestic pigs, bred to gain weight rapidly, can develop leg and joint complications, as well as other health problems associated with excess weight. These complications can reduce a pig’s lifetime by a few years.”

(Source: http://animals.mom.me/life-span-domestic-pigs-7920.html)

#17

“In addition to overcrowded housing, pigs also endure extreme crowding during transportation, resulting in rampant suffering and deaths, even before they arrive at the slaughterhouse.  At the slaughterhouse, at the first station, pigs are supposed to be 'stunned' and rendered unconscious, in accordance with the federal Humane Slaughter Act. The stunning is done prior to being hung upside down by their back legs and having their throats sliced open with a knife so that they may bleed out.  However, stunning at slaughterhouses is terribly imprecise, and as such, often conscious pigs are left to hang upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker attempts to slice their throats.  If the worker is unsuccessful at this first station, the pigs will be carried to the next station on the slaughterhouse assembly line, the scalding tank, and boiled alive fully conscious.”

(Source: http://www.mspca.org/programs/animal-protection-legislation/animal-welfare/farm-animal-welfare/factory-farming/pigs/pigs-on-a-factory-farm.html)

#18

“At theUniversity of Texas Medical Brance at Galveston UTMB), pigs are subjected to third-degree burns on up to 40 percent of their bodies, with the open flame of a Bunsen burner or a scorching-hot metal rod.” (Source: http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation/pigs-laboratories/)

#19

Thousands of healthy animals are mutilated and killed by the military for trauma training exercises every year—even though superior non-animal alternatives are available. In the current training exercises, live pigs are shot, stabbed, and burned

(Source: http://features.peta.org/traumatraining/#ixzz3lrjslLLE)

#20

 Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands:

The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico Princeton University Press,  Princeton, New Jersey 2006

(http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8185.html)

#21

“Pale pig syndrome also known as navel bleeding is found in piglets at birth or a few hours after birth. Like the name, the piglet will become extremely pale and in many cases the piglet dies. There is only three circumstances that a piglet can essentially be diagnosed with pale pig syndrome or navel bleeding. The first circumstance that a piglet can get pale pig syndrome is if there was a shortage of oxygen inside the mother’s womb during farrowing. This often causes the piglet to pool its blood into the placenta. If it is born and the cord happens to be separated at this point, then it will be born pale and anemic. It is often seen when piglets are delivered by hysterectomy and they are removed from the womb at a critical time essentially before the piglet has time to recall its blood from the placenta. Piglets that get pale pig syndrome from this circumstance are usually from old sows and often in large litters.”(Source: http://www.second-opinion-doc.com/pale-pig-syndrome.html)

#22

“Porcine Stress Syndrome (PSS): This term covers a group of conditions associated with a recessive gene. The group includes acute stress and sudden death (malignant hyperthermia), pale soft exudative muscle (PSE), dark firm dry meat, and back muscle necrosis. Heavy muscled pigs are more likely to carry the gene than leaner pigs. The gene is called the halothane gene because of the adverse effect halothane anesthetic has on pigs carrying it. Each pig is homozygous (i.e. possessing a pair of halothane genes), or heterozygous (i.e. possessing one normal gene and one halothane gene) or two normal genes. Homozygous pigs or their meat may show any of the four conditions.”

(Source: http://www.thepigsite.com/diseaseinfo/89/porcine-stress-syndrome-pss/)

About the Author

Charles Ortleb was the publisher and editor-in-chief of Christopher Street magazine, the New York Native newspaper, and Theater Week magazine. He is the author Iron Peter: A Year in the Mythopoetic Life of New York City, a novella, The Last Lovers on Earth, a short story collection, and The Closing Argument, a novella. These three works of fiction have been published together as Silence, Exile, and Cunning. He is the co-director of The Last Lovers on Earth, an independent film which is based on three of his short stories. He is the author of Truth to Power, a critical history of the AIDS epidemic and the New York Native’s coverage of it. He is currently completing two more volumes of Truth to Power, a prequel that pioneers a political philosophy of epidemiology which grew out of his thinking about the unacknowledged HHV-6 epidemic and a sequel that covers the surprising and disturbing events that occurred in the two decades after the demise of the New York Native. From decades of thinking about the nature of the HHV-6 epidemic, he has concluded that, in the current age, citizens need to become political philosophers of epidemiology, in order to protect themselves from the abuses of biomedical state power and the realpolitik of “public health.”

Charles Ortleb currently runs HHV-6 University and African Swine Fever University.

The print version of Pig: A Memoir is available at Amazon.

All of Charles Ortleb’s books are available at www.CharlesOrtleb.com