When Your Pig Makes the Police Beats...

A week or so ago I was sitting down to feed Penny her lunch when I started getting messages on Facebook about a black pig in the road. Our driveway is about 2/10 of a mile from the main road... so it seemed far for Franklin to travel... but he is an escape artist and ridiculously fast...

I packed up Penny and drove the half mile to where I was told and to my surprise I see a police SUV and multiple cars with their hazards on. I was not expecting this! Then I see Franklin running in the middle of the road! I pull my car over, turn on my hazards and try to herd him to the side of the road... then since I had Penny in my car I asked the neighbor who messaged me (who luckily we know well) to stay with her.

Franklin darts across the road as someone steps toward him from their car and up a hill into the woods. The deputy and I follow him, trying to get ahead of him and chase him back down, which we were finally able to do.

Now the deputy and I (25 weeks pregnant) are running down the road after him, trying to get him to my road. Just before it he spooked and darted back between us and up another driveway, but at least this time he was on the right side of the road. He runs across a field and into the woods. Luckily our property is just a little further through the woods... but he had to cross a creek (which was mostly just mud).

We ran back and forth and all over those woods. The deputy asked me if I could get a leash around Franklin.. which I said was impossible. Then he mentioned tackling him if Franklin got stuck in the mud... which I also advised against. I knew what kind of damage this pig could do.

After over an hour of these antics the deputy mentioned his taser. After another 30 minutes he asked how long we wanted to play this game. We had been at it for about 2 hours. My neighbor was driving my car up and down our road to keep Penny asleep, she hadn't had lunch. And did I mention I was 25 weeks pregnant? I told him to go for it. He gave me a run down of what was going to happen, that I would only have 5 seconds and that when he came to he was going to bolt. And I had to watch out for the wires. He shot, I sprinted and slipped the leash around his neck and up he jumped. It took both of us to hold him at first and he was not happy. In fact he wanted my blood. We tied him to a tree so the deputy could go call in help. We still had no way of getting him out of the woods. The whole time he was gone Franklin was trying to attack me. He'd catch his breath and lunge at me, almost slipping his leash quite a few times. I'd have to get behind him, push him forward and readjust his leash.

Our animal control officer showed up about half an hour later with a giant jet sled, took one look at Franklin and said, 'Well, that's no farm pig... not quite sure how we are going to do this.' We tried to brainstorm, then I called Brendan to see when he was coming home from work. We have really big metal crates, but I had no way of getting it without him.

He had a few things to wrap up at work but said he could be home in 30 minutes. We were already over 2 hours into this mess. The deputy asked if he was a pet or for food, then offered to put him down. We have been toying with processing Franklin anyway as he is unhandleable... so I said ok. But since Brendan very strongly disagreed we waited for him and the dog crate.

We were able to get a giant ratchet strap around Franklin and work him most of the way into the crate... but he was going to fight us on it.. so I used a trick we do at work with cats and pushed the crate up on its end so Franklin had no choice but to slid in.

We managed to get him back to the farm safely, with him lunging and trying to bite at us the whole way. A week later we got a screen shot of the town paper... Pig isn't listening to recommendations for social distancing.. Thanks for that Franklin...