Happily Ever Esther Read online

  I remember a vet who came to our farm to see one of the new pigs from Tara’s sanctuary. It was shortly after they arrived, and we were still looking for ways to treat Bear and hopefully get him back on his feet. The regular vet was busy, so he sent a colleague. We had no problem with that—until we told the new vet how old Bear was. He looked back at us, a confused look on his face, and asked, “How long do pigs live?” I couldn’t believe he’d asked that question. I didn’t know how long pigs lived until we met Esther, but I hadn’t spent the better part of a decade getting a degree in veterinary medicine. Wasn’t the natural life span of a pig something they should’ve covered in school? How was this not something he knew—or at least could vaguely estimate?

  A similar thing occurred more recently, when an intern at an animal hospital was looking at Esther. He said, “Well you know, at two and a half years, she’s getting a bit late in life.” I was shocked all over again. All these doctors seem to know are commercial statistics. Yes, two and a half years is “late in life” for a commercially farmed sow. But those are teenage years for a pig who’s been allowed to live a natural life. How could they possibly not know that? But they don’t. So, when a pig gets injured, it’s a really scary proposition, because there’s a good chance the vet has never had to deal with it before, or has done it so few times that it’s still a learning process. I don’t want my pig-daughter to be some doctor’s experiment!

  I was always so scared that Esther would trip on a tree root, or a little hole in the ground hidden beneath the fallen leaves, and that she’d twist or break a leg. (There’s that flair for dramatics again.) I’d get myself all worked up in this terrifying scenario, finding myself thinking of ways I could lift Esther from the bottom of a ravine with her broken leg, so we could whisk her off to Ontario Veterinary College for surgery. I would think all this while she would just be walking toward the forest and hadn’t even attempted to cross the fence. What can I say? My mind gets ahead of itself sometimes. So whenever I actually did have to struggle with Esther to keep her in bounds, my worries would go into overdrive.

  The worst part: After one of these little fights, she would be mad for days. If you think a relative or significant other can hold a grudge, believe me, they have nothing on a pig. After a big fight, she’d snap at Derek or even at one of the guests. Sometimes she wouldn’t let me cuddle with her after a fracas, and I loved to cuddle with her. It was the perfect storm of a teenage pig, with an attitude, in new surroundings. That made it both physically and emotionally challenging for all of us, and we felt the stress all the time.

  This behavior change made it really hard to get work done, because I was constantly on the move with Esther. For a large lady, she covers a surprising amount of territory. Bottom line: we really needed those fences to be up and working as soon as possible. I’d have deadlines to meet, but instead I’d be out in the forest with no cell signal or a dead battery, desperately trying to persuade Esther not to cross the road or visit the neighbor’s house again.

  But as exasperating as her behavior was, I always had to remind myself that she wasn’t being “bad”; she was just being herself. We either weren’t handling the situation properly or weren’t moving fast enough to prevent the problem before it happened. That’s what made us feel so guilty. This behavior was her nature. She was biologically programmed to explore, and she was just doing her piggy thing. But we had to say no and be the bad guys, because she didn’t understand why she couldn’t go to certain areas, and we hadn’t mastered pig-speak enough to be able to explain it to her just yet. (Note to self: Rosetta Stone for Pig Communication.)

  So why weren’t the fences up yet? Well, we knew what we needed to do. There just weren’t enough hours in the day. It had never crossed our minds that with all the space we had at this new farm, it still wouldn’t be enough. Esther’s nature to explore was even stronger than we’d thought. She could freely roam around ten acres, but because she was denied the extra ten acres of the forest, she was livid.

  This experience really brought home how brutal existence must be for an unlucky breeding sow—which under ordinary circumstances Esther would have been; she was just lucky not to have that agonizing life. Commercial pigs live in gestation crates that are two and a half by six feet. All they can do is sit or lie down on concrete floors or metal slats mounted to the crates. They can’t turn around. Many industrialized barns don’t even have windows to offer natural sunlight. The poor animals that live in such barns are completely devoid of any form of stimulation, never mind any chance to explore, satisfy their instinct to root, or build nests for their babies.

  And if you can imagine, these pigs live confined like that for two and a half to three years before finally being butchered. Mother pigs keep their babies for four to six weeks before the babies are taken away to a “finishing barn,” where they’ll stay until they reach market weight around six to eight months of age. Mom will be left without babies for two weeks before being impregnated again to start the whole cycle over. These sweet creatures can literally be driven into madness from lack of activity and just plain depression. Had Esther been a breeding sow, her life would have been over by now, but here at two and a half years of age, her life at the farm was just beginning.

  When Esther was asked to turn around and stop a day’s exploration, she wasn’t just irritated, she was furious. Curbing her impulse to roam was not like dealing with a dog. You yell at the dog, it knows it has misbehaved, and then it’s over. Esther’s drive to investigate and dig was so strong that it led to major physical altercations. To then think about how commercial farm pigs are treated and what they must feel is heartbreaking, especially when you think of how smart these animals are. You have to consider what’s going through their minds as they’re trapped in these prisons.

  Only a few kinds of animals can recognize themselves in their reflection and understand the function of a mirror—pigs, dolphins, chimpanzees, and humans. Dogs think mirrors are windows. (Then again, dogs think poop is food, so it could be worse.) Pigs are so much smarter than most people realize. Studies at Pennsylvania State University have shown that pigs learn to play video games as fast as chimpanzees and more quickly than three-year-olds (children, not animals). The pigs use their snouts to move the joystick and play the games with more focus and success than chimps do.

  We’ve never tried to replicate any of the experiments we’ve read about online, but we can easily see how their results apply to Esther. At our old house, we marveled at her ability to open doors that were completely shut. She figured out how to easily operate a lever-style door handle with just her snout. We had never taught her that; she figured it out on her own. She did the same when we moved. A few days after we arrived, she could fling open the sliding patio door to go outside for a pee. We didn’t even have sliding doors at our old house, yet she mastered these almost immediately.

  We often compare her to the dogs, particularly because of how she plays with her treat ball. The dogs have always had treat balls, and they always did the same thing with them. A dog would roll the ball around for a few minutes, but once the ball would get stuck somewhere, or the dog would get bored, the dog would just abandon it. Or else the dog would bark until we came and got the ball. But Esther would take a treat ball and walk in a straight line from one end of the room to the other until it was empty of treats. There was no comparison in her ability to master toys or solve problems. We had never seen anything like it. It was obvious that pigs are cognitively sophisticated creatures with a much deeper level of thought processing than we ever could have imagined.

  It’s hard to think of all the unlucky pigs out there when we consider how much we love our girl. And that is still a huge part of why we continue our mission. But with this move and Esther’s sudden behavior shift, I was starting to worry that the sweet little girl we knew and loved was gone. Beyond all of the logistical struggles with Esther’s explorations and our disagreements, I was extremely upset about her attitude. This wasn’t
the pig I’d come to know. I worried that Esther was forever changed—or worse, that the rumors about how mean pigs can be actually might be true.

  I must admit there was another consideration as well: We had been presenting this image of Esther online that was nothing but sunshine and roses, and that had been perfectly accurate in her early years. But “teenage” Esther was a serious departure from the Esther everyone else knew and loved. Thousands of people had just helped us get to the farm, and we knew many had plans to visit and meet the star attraction. They’d fallen in love with this sweet girl, just as Derek and I had. It would change everything if they came out to meet her and she chased them. Or, heaven forbid, if she became extremely aggressive toward them—which certainly was a possibility, the way things were going. We wanted people to meet the Esther we’d known all this time, and she was making it really hard to arrange that. If her obstinate—her literally pigheaded—behavior continued, we had no idea what we were going to do.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When you have pigs and cows and a donkey and a horse, you might think to yourself: What I really need is some goats in my life.

  Granted, you probably don’t think that. You probably don’t have all those animals, and even if you do, having the phrase “some goats in my life” cross your mind is unlikely. Hey, I get it. We live an atypical life. And then some.

  I honestly hadn’t been pondering the overall pros and cons of goat ownership. But that didn’t stop the impending goat arrival—or the additional pig who was tossed in for good measure.

  We got them in a somewhat convoluted way. They were coming from a small family farm in Sudbury, a few hours north of Toronto. I thought the farm was closing due to financial difficulties, that the farm owners were going to lose everything and because of that, they had agreed to give us the goats. From what I understood, the farm previously had been operating as a dairy farm, but the owners had fallen on hard times and were going to slaughter the goats themselves or send them to market. I thought we were saving them.

  It wasn’t until later that I learned our volunteers had paid for the goats. Had we known this was the plan, we wouldn’t have let it happen. We never should have allowed those animals to be purchased, for so many reasons. Animals should never be purchased. When you buy an animal from a farmer, you’re just facilitating the purchase of another one. You didn’t really rescue an animal, so much as you took one out and let another be purchased in its place. But we were still learning how to run a charity and didn’t know all the rules yet.

  We had no idea how complicated it was going to be to get our charitable status. We hired a lawyer to prepare our application and spent thousands of dollars, only to get a rejection letter that was literally fourteen pages long. Basically everything we wanted to do was deemed “not charitable” by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), the Canadian version of America’s Internal Revenue Service.

  The CRA even went as far as saying, “You should just register as a zoo; it would be much simpler for you.” They just didn’t get it. A zoo? Seriously? They told us that rescuing an animal that was eligible for slaughter was against the rules. Slaughtering animals is obviously legal, and the CRA wouldn’t let us advocate against that. We couldn’t promote veganism, we couldn’t run a community garden, we couldn’t do almost any of the things we wanted to do.

  So we needed to get creative. We were lucky in that we already had an organization called Esther the Wonder Pig that was completely separate from the charity we were trying to create. We had to ensure an iron wall went up between the two organizations, letting Esther the Wonder Pig do all the things we weren’t allowed to do as a charity. We had to ensure that the charity’s board of directors was not controlled by Derek and me, so we brought in people with an arm’s-length relationship to us—people who shared the same values and objectives but wouldn’t be afraid to tell us no if we wanted to do something that could jeopardize our charitable status.

  The sanctuary was barely up and running, and we were already losing control of it, just to satisfy the demands from the CRA. But we knew we were being scrutinized and that we would continue to be scrutinized even after we got our status. So we had no choice but to do everything we possibly could to meet the CRA’s criteria, while remaining true to our objectives and ourselves. It would end up taking almost two years, but we stuck to our guns, and eventually we became a registered charity as a farm sanctuary.

  But that was later. At the time of the goat purchase, we weren’t quite there yet. We hadn’t learned all the ins and outs of accepting animals, so we were playing it by ear. We were expecting three goats: William, Catherine, and her baby, George. Yes, we named them after royalty because what royal family doesn’t want to be likened to a family of goats? We sent a team to the farm to get the goats, but when our volunteers got there, they found a pig by herself in a barn, which seemed odd to them. When they asked the farmers what was up with the pig, they said she was heading to market. (Those are words we rescue people never want to hear.) One of the volunteers mentioned that the pig looked pregnant, and the farmer agreed, but he couldn’t confirm that (and didn’t seem to care). The farmer definitely wasn’t letting that get in the way of sending the pig to market. Our team couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her behind, so they convinced the farmer to let her go, as long as we would agree to take her.

  The volunteer who called us couldn’t tell us much about the situation, just asked if we could take the pig, presuming the farmer would give her up. Derek and I spoke briefly, knowing time was of the essence, and agreed we could handle an extra head, especially when we knew it was either us or the slaughterhouse. When we got the call that the farmer was in fact giving up the pig to us, we thought, Great. But then when we found out that she might be pregnant, we started to worry a little bit.

  We could handle one pig, but pigs can have litters of upward of fourteen piglets. We weren’t prepared to take on something like that, but how could we say no now? We started to ask more questions, but we didn’t get much in the way of reassurance or even a solid answer as to whether she was pregnant. Regardless, we knew what we had to do: we would have to just figure it out like we always did. That pig was coming home to us no matter what.

  When the new pig arrived and we got a look at her, we weren’t convinced she was pregnant. She couldn’t have been more than two years old, we thought, which would make her just barely able to get pregnant. Nevertheless, we scheduled an appointment with the vet for a few days later. But two days later, on April 1, when Derek and I were taking some friends into the barn to show off the animals, Derek immediately yelled, “She’s having babies!” Of course, knowing full well it was April Fools’ Day, I told Derek to fuck off. I didn’t believe for a second that he was telling the truth. But then Derek held up a slimy little piglet with the most hilarious expression on his face.

  We all started to panic. I immediately grabbed my phone and called the vet to tell him the piglets were coming. He said, “Okay, let me know if you have any problems.” My response: “This pig is having babies. We’ve never delivered babies. That is a problem!” The vet laughed and tried to calm me down, explaining that there was nothing we could do except comfort the mother and help catch the babies as they arrived.

  It was a pretty incredible experience. Eight pigs were born, one of which was stillborn due to a very rare physical disorder. We soon lost two more just because they weren’t strong enough; no matter what we tried, we just couldn’t get them to pull through. But both of the piglets we lost passed away comfortably in our arms, and they knew nothing but love. They were buried together in one plot on the farm, in a small marked grave in the forest where they would’ve played with their mom and siblings. The five surviving piglets have been thriving ever since, and each weigh about three hundred pounds now! And we named the mom “April,” considering the auspicious, if not ridiculous, day she had her litter.

  We were concerned about having piglets on the farm, having heard so many excuses for why commer
cial farms use gestation crates. They say the mother pigs will step on or roll over onto their babies, crushing them to death. The piglets were tiny when they first arrived, and once the vet examined them and April, he said she had likely given birth prematurely, potentially as a result of stress from the move. Since we obviously weren’t using gestation crates, we were afraid April would crush her babies. So we were incredibly careful, keeping constant watch over them.

  For the first few days, we kept the piglets in a large wooden box beside their mom, taking them out every couple of hours to let them feed and walk around. April was always super gentle with her babies… and protective. As soon as we started lifting them out of the box, Mom would come over and lie down. Then she would start making these really funny honks and grunts, which is apparently called “singing” for pigs, although I can’t lie—it’s not the prettiest of tunes. But the piglets know exactly what that means: dinnertime! The whole time they fed, she would keep the noises going. It was incredible to watch, and the look on April’s face was amazing. We weren’t sure how many litters, if any, she’d had before and experienced their being taken away. But we knew she was going to be keeping these babies, and that felt wonderful.

  Eventually we decided to build a small space in the corner of the stall where the piglets could go but Mom couldn’t fit, to give the piglets an area where Mom couldn’t accidentally smother them. There also was a heat lamp in there, and the piglets loved it. They love to be cozy, so we knew the heat lamp would attract them. Mom would still be close, but the little corner area was a totally safe place where accidents couldn’t happen.

  We were under a microscope, scrutinized not only by other sanctuaries that might have been a bit jealous of our success, but also by farmers and industry people who would have loved the opportunity to say, “Look how badly those idiots screwed up.” We were trying to dispel myths about pigs, and we wouldn’t be doing anyone—particularly the pigs—any favors if we screwed up and cost those piglets their lives because we hadn’t done the right thing. It’s hard to live under so much surveillance. You know the vast majority of people are cheering you on, but there’s always someone in the shadows who can’t wait for you to fail. We weren’t going to give them the satisfaction.