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 who are tasked with catching them. They can grab, sit on, hang upside down, or do anything else in order to catch a piglet and stuff it in a sack. There is of course no regulation to what happens to the piglet next, and many live short lives of neglect and starvation. That is what happened to Arthur, who had been left in a back yard with no food or water for months. Farm animals have very few legal protections, and despite neighbors calling the police when they heard his cries of hunger, the owner only had to assure the police that Arthur would be fed soon in order to avoid trouble.
When we were invited to rescue him, he was extremely undersized for his age, and was starving to death. He was also starving for attention; someone had taught him how to sit, and each time we approached he would sit desperately in hopes of receiving praise and food. Arthur is the most personable of all our pigs; no matter how deeply asleep he is, he jumps up and greets us whenever we enter the barn. He is friends with all pigs, even the introverts, and he will snuggle with anyone. He began to grow so quickly that it was clear that he was much older than we had first thought: starvation in pigs presents as slow growth. He is now bigger than all the pigs we thought were a year his senior. It is desperately sad that he suffered for so long, but it is even sadder that so many piglets like him continue to suffer instead of living lives of love and safety.
