The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood

by Sy Montgomery

That pigs occasionally eat people has always struck me as only fair, considering the far vaster number of pigs eaten by humans.

(Howard was a proponent of the theory that dogs bark at delivery people believing that otherwise these shifty characters would take something away from your house. But because dogs bark, they leave something instead—a sequence of events that proves to dogs that their barking is indeed effective.)

To their dismay, I also stubbornly refused to blame the snake for all the trouble with Adam and Eve. I suspected God did, too. After all, He kicked the people out of Eden, but He let the snake stay.

By the time the wood frog chorus swelled in April, Tess was strong enough to walk outside with us again. Now she would stay close by, following our heat and scent. I remembered the lost magic of her younger nights, how she’d leap through the dark to catch the unseen Frisbee. But then I realized she had not lost that gift; she had simply brought it back to us, like the Frisbee. Now it was our turn; now we would lead her through the darkness.

The word compassion means “with suffering.” To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering—to show those you love that you will not let them suffer alone. And this is the most you can do: offer your presence.

But he showed us another truth as well. That a pig did not become bacon but lived fourteen years, pampered and adored till the day he died peacefully in his sleep—that’s proof that we need not “be practical” all the time. We need not accept the rules that our society or species, family or fate seem to have written for us. We can choose a new way. We have the power to transform a story of sorrow into a story of healing. We can choose life over death. We can let love lead us home.