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.

Humans seemed to me a rather bullying species, and I was on the side of the underdog.

To get the weight of a pig, you measure the animal’s circumference just behind the forelegs, called the heart girth. Then you measure the pig’s length, from the base of the ears to the base of the tail.

Square the heart girth, then multiply it by the length, and divide the total by four hundred for weight in pounds.)

To link correlations as cause and effect (even incorrectly, as is the case with much of

medicine) is considered a very sophisticated intellectual ability—one that many scientists would prefer to claim animals don’t possess.

Tom got a loop of rope over Christopher’s snout, and to my amazement, Chris’s reaction—a known reflex among pigs—was to stand as if frozen in his tracks, screaming but eerily unable to move, enabling Tom

That is the gift that the darkness brought: the knowledge that sometimes you really can love someone back to life. PIG VISITORS THAT SUMMER