By Jim Hagarty
Pigs have a bad name.
Not a bad reputation. A bad name.
How would you like to be called a pig your whole life?
There is something about the word itself that is demeaning. Pig. The namer of the pig must have been holding a grudge.
We need to substitute the name with something else.
How about swine?
On second thought, forget it. To be called a swine is almost worse than pig.
Sow? As in, “You sow!”
Nope.
Hog.
Never.
How did it happen that such a benign, clean (yes, they are clean, they only roll in muck to kill the bugs), curious, happy creature end up with such swinish names?
Has to be the grudge theory.
I have a long association with pigs. We raised them for a while on our farm. And I always kind of liked them. There was a perpetual friendly, hopeful look on their faces. And as kids, we got to ride the bigger ones. In the absence of horses, they were our steeds. They would put on quite a rodeo before they dumped us in the biggest pile of pig manure they could find.
To this day, not a fan of pig manure.
And while friendly, they could be annoying. One summer, on my break from university, I worked on a pig farm. Being chased around a pen by an angry sow is fun for about, no seconds.
But what sealed my own little grudge against these guys was the little tango we had when I was out on assignment as a newspaper reporter, sent (as punishment, no doubt) to do some sort of farm story. Always one to try to get the best, most realistic photos I could, I decided to climb the gate into a pig pen. Unfortunately, I dropped my camera case in the pen before I could get in there myself.
As it turned out, 10 half-grown pigs who were about to be paparrazied, had been waiting all their lives for a camera case to play with. Best toy, or maybe the only toy, they had ever had.
I wouldn’t say this was the low point of my journalism career, but chasing 10 lively pigs around a manurery pen, trying to retrieve their very first football from them, can tend to make a fella rethink some of his life choices. At least, later. At that moment, salvaging that increasingly dirty, smelly case was the priority.
I didn’t get my case back right away. Turns out, pigs are great at camera case soccer. And they had home pen advantage.
I don’t know what their fascination with my formerly classy camera case was, but they definitely hogged the ball that day.
I wonder, and this thought just occurred to me four decades later, if that camera case was made of pigskin.
Youch.
My bad, I guess.
I eventually won the day, got some sort of photo, interviewed the farmer and drove back to town, probably crying in my car all the way.
So you will understand if my fondness for a lot of things swinish took a major hit that day.
I mean, these guys were nothing but a bunch of pigs.
There, I said it.
