Some pig

The story of a piglet who thought she was a horse

Cleopatra keeping company with Vicky

[This column was originally published in 2017. To answer your question: I don’t know what became of Cleopatra. But as well loved as she was, I suspect it was on, rather than at, someone’s breakfast table.]

Come the New Year we can’t help but look ahead to the next twelve months and wonder about the ways our lives will be different or the same a year from now. Personally, professionally, politically. But it’s the unexpected twists and turns, the defining events you can’t predict, that make the exercise so challenging.

For example, this time last year, Cheryl Jones – she’s a financial policy advisor with the U.S. Department of Transportation; she lives in Hillsdale, NY -- had no intention of acquiring a pet. That is, in addition to the two horses she already owned. But then Cleopatra came along. Cleopatra isn’t a cat. Or a dog. Or a third horse.

Cleopatra is a pig.

She was born last March and lived briefly at the farm across Cheryl’s dirt road. But in May the piglet escaped, along with her six littermates. Cleopatra was the only one who refused to return. She wandered onto Cheryl’s property. And it didn’t take her long to decide that life was better on that side of the road.

No amount of cut apples, her favorite food, could lure her back home. “She’s had multiple opportunities to join the other pigs,” Cheryl reported.

Cheryl believes that part of the pig’s thinking is that she doesn’t have to compete for space at the trough with a half dozen other pushy porkers. But that probably only begins to explain the pig’s calculus. Also insufficient a reason is the abundance of acorns on Cheryl’s property, a prized treat for Cleopatra. She’s a handsome Tamworth pig, with reddish fur, descended from Old English forest pigs.

No, the main attraction, more important than any food source, seems to be the company of Cheryl’s horses, Image and Vicky. Cleopatra took to them instantly. Indeed, so fast did the trio become friends that Cheryl spent the summer and autumn wondering whether the pig, who arrived at a young, impressionable age, thinks of itself as a horse.

She even canters like a horse. “It is adorable watching her canter,” Cheryl told me. “I didn’t know pigs cantered.”

However, the pig’s owner conceded that as Cleopatra has grown – she’s now over 300 pounds – cantering has become a greater challenge. By the way, Cleopatra is only one of the names the pig answers to. Or more accurately doesn’t, since pigs have forceful minds of their own. Others are Miss Piggy and Bacon, employed when the animal turns destructive. She does things like digs up the garden and she ripped up a trellis by the front door of the house.

However, she earned the name of the Egyptian queen from the way she enjoys being pampered, particularly having her back stroked with a manure fork. It’s unlikely the horses, being of an advanced age, started to think of themselves as pigs. But they almost instantly displayed a maternal instinct toward the piglet as she foraged under their feet.

“Both of them have responded to the pig as if it was a baby horse,” Cheryl said. “They sensed its vulnerability.”

One time they comforted the unruly pig after Cheryl stunned and quite possibly insulted it, by placing its food bucket over its nose to control the animal when she charged her. “The younger mare came over and started nuzzling her back,” Cheryl remembered. “It’s like, ‘Don’t pay attention to that nasty woman.’”

And when the pig recently made a return visit to the farm next door during a snowstorm, no amount of food could convince her to come home. That required bringing over the horses. Whom she obediently followed back to her enclosure.

With the arrival of the New Year, Cheryl has a painful decision to make: whether to turn the pig into ham, pork chops and bacon -- its original destiny -- or let the pet live on. Cheryl had a processing date in November, which she cancelled. “He was supposed to come on Saturday,” she said of a company that provides the on-site service. “I started weeping on Wednesday. I thought she was too young.”

That’s not the issue in January. It’s more what Cheryl describes as her sense of betraying the animal after Cleopatra entrusted Cheryl with her destiny. I asked her whether pigs are as smart as they’re alleged to be. But there’s probably no greater sign of intelligence, or at least shrewdness, than finding the perfect home.

“Home is where you feel safe,” Cheryl observed.

But that connection must be weighed against the pig’s growing size and destructiveness. Also, much past three hundred pounds and pigs become less desirable for meat, Cheryl said. Whatever Cheryl’s decision, Cleopatra has changed her attitude towards food.

“Most of us have lost touch with the reverence for what we eat,” she said. And then she added, “Sometimes in life, something comes along and changes your whole perspective.”