Residents

Viola and The Empress were the first pigs to come to Darrowby, and they came from a commercial pig farm. While The Empress came to us because she didn’t provide her farmer with offspring to sell, Viola came to us…

The Empress, named for P.G. Wodehouse’s Empress of Blandings, is a Gloucester Old Spot who was born in March of 2016. She and Viola were the first pigs to come to Darrowby, and her name became a self-fulfilling prophecy.​The Empress…

Gilbert was our first piglet and our first male pig, and he changed our entire world. One morning in June 2021 I received a phone call from an unknown number; it was a woman who told me that she had…

Charlotte is another one of our pigs who came to us because her bad fortune ended up saving her life. When she was born, she was rejected by her mother. Robbie, a man who was working at her farm, found…

Violet was a pig scramble piglet who was won but unwanted, and was posted on Craigslist being held up by one hind leg. A local man took her in immediately, and as a piglet she slept in a bed on…

Miss Honey began her life as a backyard farm project in a suburban home. She and her sister were bought to be raised as meat, but after her sister died as a piglet, she was left on her own in…

Petunia’s story is the hardest for me to write about, because it could have ended so differently, and because it has ended differently for countless other Petunias.​Petunia was either born or sent to a backyard butcher with a not-very-secure fence.…

Beatrice came to Darrowby on the recommendation of our vet, who came across her living in the second story of a house she’d never seen the outside of. Her hooves had grown so long that she could not walk, and…

Kavalier and Clay, named for Michael Chabon’s escape artist and his partner, came to us because their favorite hobby was escaping from the hobby farm that was their home.​Brothers who were bought from the back seat of a car, they…

In October of 2022, we received a call about a piglet who had been won at a pig scramble at a local fair. Pig scrambles are incredibly inhumane events in which infant piglets are released into a pen with children…