Harriet, Sweet Harriet
I take full responsibility for Harriet, our first pig. I don’t remember if it was a phone call or a text, but a woman reached out to me wondering if we would be willing to take in a piglet she found running down the interstate on her way to Brookings. She was in no position to keep the piglet and didn’t know what to do with it. I messaged Jeff and told him to get ready for the new arrival. One of my earliest memories of the farm I grew up on was chasing our escaped pigs back into their pen. My memory is of total chaos--pigs and people running every direction, the dog trying to herd the pigs and the people, mud and swear words flying--it was great fun! Adopting a pig seemed like a natural next step for the farm.
Piglets are weaned between 3-4 weeks old and then moved to a nursery where they will spend the next 6-8 weeks with piglets from other litters. After this stage, when they weigh between 60-80 pounds, they are moved to a finishing barn where they will stay 16-17 weeks or 280 pounds. This is market weight and their next stop is the slaughterhouse. The life cycle is about 6 months from birth to death. The little piggy that was about to arrive at the farm had escaped this fate by jumping out of her transport to the nursery. The girl that found her heard through the grapevine that our farm was a safe place. How could I say no to this pig? She was a fighter at 3 weeks old! Blazing her own trail down the interstate. We were kindred spirits.
Harriet with a bit of road rash and her stuffed lamb.
She arrived the next morning, July 13, 2016, in a cat carrier. Her first few days here were pretty low-key. She stayed in her carrier with her stuffed animal hardly making a peep. In hindsight, she was probably traumatized from her great escape and needed a few days to recover. I was thinking, this is going to be easy--all she does is sleep. We named her Harriet after the butcher in the Mike Meyer’s movie So I Married an Axe Murder. Mike Meyer’s character, Charlie, tries to woo Harriet with this poem.
Our Harriet recovered from her escape and soon began to terrorize everyone, especially Buck. Pigs are incredibly social and Harriet was no exception. We let her have the run of the place during the day. She would follow us out to the fields, running as fast as her little legs would carry her, snorting and squealing at you when she wasn’t fast enough. She loved Buck and wanted to be around him as much as he would tolerate. To Buck she was the annoying little sister that was too cute for the humans to scold. He put up with a lot during those first few weeks and was incredibly relieved when a facebook friend, Heather from Dalarna Farms, reached out offering up another piglet about the same age as Harriet.
Charlie’s back foot had been injured, so Heather had taken him into the house to nurse him back to health. Once his foot was healed, he had very little interest in going back to live with his litter mates. Heather messaged us to see if we would want to take Charlie on. She raised heritage pigs and suggested that it would be good for Harriet to have a pig friend. Charlie and Harriet were like peas and carrots. There was no fence or enclosure that we had that could contain them, so they roamed around the yard, rooting through the garden, tearing up the lawn and adding comedy to our lives.
Pigs are smart. They have personalities and their human-like eyes show expression unlike any of the other animals on the farm. Harriet seemed genuinely happy to see you. To this day, if you scratch on Charlie’s side, all 800 (?) pounds of him will flop down so you can scratch his belly. Jeff started the Sunday pig pancake tradition because it brought him as much joy as it brought Harriet and Charlie.
Harriet and Charlie were never more than a few feet apart.
August of the following year Harriet got sick. She had spent the night outside during an unusually cold rain and we think she caught pneumonia. I called our local farm vet who gave me penicillin and some other meds to give her, but nothing worked. We went to bed that night with dread in our hearts. Jeff went out early the next morning to check on her. I could tell by the way he was walking back to the house that she had died. Jeff was heartbroken. I called our friend Brian to help us bury her.
Brian Stamp is the greatest friend. He created this to mark Harriet’s spot.
Death on the farm is eventual, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Losing a presence like Harriet is hard. We provided her with a great life, but you are left wondering what you could have done differently. She lived twice as long as she would have had she not jumped from that truck. In the weeks after her death, Charlie was sad and lonely. Jeff reached out to Heather to see if she had another pig. Weird Harold showed up the following evening. He was so little and we were nervous as to how Charlie would react so we put Harold in a large dog carrier for the night. I got up the next morning to check on him and found an empty crate. My heart sank. On a whim I went to Charlie’s barn. That’s where I found Harold curled up beside his big half brother.
