Reflection: Other Related Research
Lil Orphan Hammies
By Jeffrey Jacobs (05/12/09 12:03:23)
Related animal: Pot Belly Pig

Lil’ Orphan Hammies

We recently took a class trip to a place in Solvang where a woman named Sue Parkinson adopts the pot-bellied pigs of people who cannot take care of them after they get to be too large. She currently is in the care of over ninety pigs and has recently decided that she can no longer accept new ones. The very idea of why a place like this should need to exist in the first place is puzzling. Why is it that so many people are buying pot-bellied pigs as pets when they are young, without doing any kind of research into what they are going to grow up to be like. Sue told us that people are told by the piglet solicitors that they will not grow much more, and they will stay the size of a small dog. However, if anyone was actually considering purchasing a pig as a pet, you would think that they would want to do the minute amount of research that it would take to discover that their pig could potentially grow to be three hundred pounds. Instead, they purchase the piglet on what would seem to be an impulse buy and feed it for a year or so before they realize they have a problem. Sue told us that to make matters even worse, there are a few old ladies who live near by who by hordes of piglets at a time, simply because they think they are cute. When the piglets grow up, the ladies try to get rid of fifty or more full grown pigs all at once. Sue explained to us that she helped in one of these situations years ago, adopting almost fifty pigs at once, but she no longer is capable of saving so many. In many ways I felt bad for Sue. Here was an incredibly nice woman with a big heart who wanted nothing more than to give these pigs a new chance at a good life and to show them love. I think that lately she has come to a realization that this problem is continuing to persist no matter how hard she has tried in the past to stop it. However, her work has not gone unrewarded. She can rest easy with the satisfaction of knowing that she has saved over two hundred of her favorite animals in her lifetime by doing work that she seems to enjoy. I just hope for her and future pigs’ sake that people will start to think a little more before they purchase an animal that they will not be able to care for.



A distinguished creature
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