The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood

by Sy Montgomery

Although pigs are generally good-natured, more people are killed each year by pigs than by sharks. (Which

“Where there’s life, there’s hope.” The little piglet hung on.

WHAT WOULD WE DO WITH A PIG? PEOPLE WANTED TO KNOW. HE was certainly not for the freezer, we would quickly assure them. I am a vegetarian and Howard is Jewish.

That first night, we couldn’t picture him growing much bigger than the shoe box in which we carried his shivering, emaciated form. We couldn’t see that far ahead—and I didn’t want to. That spring, it seemed I woke every day to sorrow, as every day carried me closer to my father’s death. I could barely allow myself to hope Christopher would survive the night.

a 1980s Gone with the Wind poster parody (Margaret Thatcher in the arms of Ronald Reagan), a

It was not that I disliked people; some of them were interesting and kind. But even the nice ones were no more compelling or important to me than other creatures. Then, as now, to me humans are but one species among billions of other equally vivid and thrilling lives. I was never drawn to other children simply because they were human. 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.) Each time they saw Howard, the beer store employees would calculate how much beer they thought the pig could drink before getting drunk. “Oh my God, he could drink two six-packs!” came the realization after Chris topped 250 pounds. Before long, our pig was an object of some envy. Eventually, they figured with awe that he could do half a keg. That

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. But those of us who pay attention to animals know better.

“If there’s ever been an example of a Libertarian pig, that’s Christopher,” he said. “He’s his own person, he doesn’t want overregulation—all the things that Libertarians look for. He’s a free spirit.” That he was. One time Howard looked out the upstairs window from the spare bedroom he uses as his office. “Ah, there goes so-and-so,” he thought, noting a passing jogger. “There goes such-and-such in her car…. There goes Chris.” Wait! Chris? We both ran outside.

Hampshire.) Meat, I would explain to my fascinated audience, makes pig manure smell bad. A vegetarian pig’s manure has a nice earthy smell to it, as well as a pleasant shape and texture, rather like a small loaf of braided bread. But add meat to the diet, and it stinks, gets all sticky, and falls through the tines of the pitchfork. It also ruins the compost pile. Do you add dog droppings to the tomato patch in the summer? Of course not. But a vegetarian pig’s manure is garden gold.

But generally, Liz showed me, if you rub a pig along his inguinal region—the area of the belly just in front of the back legs, particularly along the nipples—he will almost irresistibly drop to his front knees, and then, with a thud, fall over onto his side, succumbing to a swoon of pleasure.

BORDER COLLIES ARE DOGS WHO SHOULD COME WITH A WARNING label.

“TIGERS THAT EAT PEOPLE,” HOWARD SAID, WHEN I TOLD HIM MY book idea. He was not thrilled. “Oh, that’s just great. Why can’t you stay home and get eaten by your pig?” (We did sometimes wonder whether Chris would eat us. We decided that, given the opportunity—if, for example, one of us suddenly dropped dead into his pen, and if he was hungry—he might. We didn’t hold this against him. He would miss us afterward.)

But the wild card in predicting the outcome of porcine aggression is this: pigs are extremely emotional. They can be deeply devoted and intuitive. But like people, they are also prone to sulks, irrational fears, and tantrums. The behaviorist Ivan Pavlov once worked with pigs but gave up on them. “All pigs,” he concluded, “are hysterical.” With their tusks and great bulk, their omnivorous diet and sometimes frightening voices, it is easy to forget that pigs are ungulates. But hooves don’t lie. Hooves are the heritage of flight: eons of running away sculpted the hardened tiptoes that define the ungulates, from antelopes to horses, from goats to pigs to giraffes. Deep in their genes, pigs remember. Forty million years of porcine evolution says: somebody is trying to eat you. Forty thousand years of barnyard history says: somebody is going to eat you. Who wouldn’t be hysterical? Howard and I simply could not afford to be responsible for an hysterical 350-pound pig blunderbussing through Hancock armed with razor-sharp tusks. For the good of the community, we had but one choice: tuskectomy.

Christopher remembered people was obvious in his greeting grunts. His grunts were low and soft for Kate and Jane, deep and manly for Howard; there was one distinctive grunt he used only for our friend Ray Cote. The president of a software company, Ray’s busy schedule permitted only rare visits. But each time he came to his pen, Chris emitted deep, loud, long, fantastically appreciative greetings he offered no other person. Why? Ray and Chris had much in common: they were both smart and strong and funny. But what Chris may have liked best was that Ray weighed about four hundred pounds. Chris may have thought he had finally found one of His People.

The stories reflect a sophisticated understanding of ecology. The tiger protects the forest: fear of the tiger keeps woods-men from cutting down all the mangroves. The mangroves protect the coastline: their limbs and leaves soften the winds of cyclones. Their roots form nurseries for fish, which feed the people. The people understand that without the tiger, Sundar-bans could not stay whole.

But what is wholeness? How do we come to recognize it, and to realize when it is lost? I know how wholeness feels. It feels like the soft summer evenings when I would close in Christopher and the chickens for the night. It feels like when Tess would lie on our bed and roll on her back to show us her white belly. It feels like the times I would linger by the barn as soft clucks and gentle grunts would wash over me like moonlight, and fill me with peace. Wholeness feels like gratitude. Gratitude that we are safe and happy and together. And for that, I must thank equally the foxes and the weasels, the tigers and the crocodiles. For the peace of the barnyard, I am grateful to the dangers and jaws of the jungle. For the belonging that is home, I can thank, in part, the exile that is travel. Though they seem like opposites, they are more like twins—two halves of a whole.

“We had this couple up from New Jersey,” the agent told Ray. “They were looking for a nice, quiet place, sort of out of the way, so I showed them this house. We did the entire inside of the house and they liked it. They were very happy with it. We went outside and there was this beautiful garden back there, with flowers in bloom, and they were really enjoying it. They were really looking like they were interested in the house. I thought they were going to make an offer. The husband was just about to say something to me—at which point we heard this yell. “And I looked over to this other yard, next door. And there is this little, skinny, five-foot-five woman, wearing these huge floppy boots, and she is running as fast as she absolutely could. And she is carrying this bucket, which is obviously heavy, and running like mad. Why on earth is she running? “So we look behind her. And what we saw was this: The head of an enormous black and white hog. And then we saw the body of an enormous hog. And then some more of the body of this hog. This hog is thundering out of nowhere. And it’s running after her making loud, snorting noises. Snort, snort, snort! Snort, snort, snort! And then the woman goes flying into the barn. And the pig goes flying into the barn. And then the door slams. And then there’s silence.” “So what did you say to the couple?” Ray asked. “I turned to them and said, ‘So it’s a nice neighborhood.’” The couple left in stunned silence. They never called again. HOWARD A...

Ever since Sunday school, I’d been intrigued by the notion of Eden. It irritated my Methodist teachers that Eden appealed to me far more than heaven. Heaven you might get to after your death, if you were good—but there was no hope, I was told, of finding Eden. Heaven seemed boring, though. There is no mention of plants or animals there, whereas Eden was full of them. In Eden, the animals spoke (at least the snake did), and we understood what they said. In heaven you had to live in a building (“In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” Jesus said), and I wanted to live in a hollow tree. In Eden, there were not too many people (only two), whereas heaven sounded like it would be miserably crowded, considering everyone who thought they were going there. It would surely be even worse by the time I got there, if indeed I were headed that direction—of which my Sunday school teachers weren’t so sure. 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. Ever since we

With the events of March, we had left those days behind. Never again did Tess play Frisbee with us. It was weeks before she could even walk. She had the heart of a lion. The same way my dying father had struggled for that last, delicious breath of air, Tess—deaf, wobbly, and now nearly blind—had fought for a life she still found full of joy and meaning, rich with scent, full of tasty treats, and secure in the company of those she most loved. By

There would be much darkness in the months ahead. Often—too often—despite medicine and prayer, despite faith and strength, the ones we love are torn from us, sometimes viciously, for reasons no one can fathom. But sometimes God, or luck, or the universe itself allows you a rare opportunity. That is the gift that the darkness brought: the knowledge that sometimes you really can love someone back to life. PIG VISITORS THAT SUMMER GOT QUITE A DIFFERENT SHOW FROM years previous: as we left the house, out would stumble a fifteen-year-old deaf and mostly blind border collie, holding her head at a forty-five-degree tilt. Sometimes I’d carry Tess part-way to the barnyard, where we’d be greeted by a flock of hens composed partly of menopausal birds so aged that some of them had grown spurs on their feet like a rooster. Then, armed with the most tempting of slops, we would coax the arthritic Chris to limp from his pen. Sometimes he just couldn’t be bothered to step over the threshold, knowing that usually he could just stay in the nice, cool barn—which Howard had recently upgraded by installing a rotating fan—while a crowd of admirers gratefully placed pastries in his open mouth.

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. One

Christopher’s success was fourteen years of comfort and joy, given and received. Christopher was a gift who kept on giving. For me, his greatest gift was simply his presence, the pure delight of his company. But he had given me so much more: He had introduced me to my neighbors. He had helped me overcome my shyness with people. He had showed me how to play with children. He had even brought me a garden. And his success didn’t end with us. This huge, adored pig, who had given so many people delight, was proof that no matter what nature or history hands you, with love, anything is possible. And now, with spring soon to flower, I was grateful. Soon there would be tulips, and then lilacs, and then strawberries. Feeling loved and lucky, I stood on the tender lip of spring, open to the healing summer.

“So go out into the world where your heart calls you. The blessings will come, I promise you that.” I had never made a promise so public. This was the largest audience I had ever addressed: six thousand people. But I was certain this was the deepest truth I knew. “I wish for you the insight to recognize the blessings as such,” I said, “and sometimes this is hard. But you’ll know it’s a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by the experience. So be ready. There are great souls and teachers everywhere. It is your job to recognize them.” AS

fossicking

Christopher Hogwood has taught us yet another lesson in his passing—stay close to your friends because, although they may seem endless, tomorrows are finite.”

Gretchen does not feel that homestead farming is wrong; many animals live good lives on family farms. The cruelty happens on giant, crowded “factory farms,” where living animals are treated like industrial products, and where 80 percent of America’s sixty million pigs are raised for slaughter each year. “Of course, Christopher’s story doesn’t cancel out all the horrors pigs have suffered all over the world for so many centuries,” Gretchen admitted. “But you and Chris created a different reality: of honoring a pig’s life for the length of his natural life.” It was a reality that gave hope and peace in more ways than I could then imagine. For I had not yet spoken to my pastor, Graham, after Christopher’s death. Actually, Graham wasn’t my pastor anymore. Much had happened since the early days at fellowship, when Graham would introduce me to new members by announcing I lived with a pig. The month after my father had died, Graham’s wife, my friend Maggie, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. She died the following April. Since then, Graham had left our church, having been called to a new congregation. He is now happily remarried to a beautiful and accomplished art professor with three wonderful, now-grown children—all of whom, when they were smaller, came to know and love Christopher, bringing him slops and marveling at his size and gentleness and the spectacle of his greedy joy. But Maggie’s relationship with Chris had had a special intensity. It was not until thirteen years a...

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. At the moment, the Pig Palace stands empty. People ask, “Will you get another pig?” This I don’t know. But one thing I know for sure: a great soul can appear among us at any time, in the form of any creature. I’m keeping my eyes open. Photo Insert Christopher Hogwood comes home—in front of our barn, as a baby.