About eight years ago, I was on a day shift and I received a call for an abandoned pot bellied piglet.  Someone dumped off a baby Vietnamese pot bellied pig and it was running around a neighborhood, so some do gooder thought, “Hey, I’ll call the police.”  Great, now I’m animal control.  Well, here in Arizona we have different departments to handle animal problems: Rabies Animal Control for the dogs and cats, Arizona livestock for horses and cattle, Game and Fish for all the wildlife and the Humane Society for injured domesticated animals.  Well, needless to say I called every agency, and none of them wanted to help, so I thought I would just drive through the neighborhood and pretend I didn’t see the little varmint.  Yeah, that didn’t work, I pull down the street and there are at least 20 people standing outside and when they spotted me, they all pointed in the direction of the piglet at the same time.  So much for selective vision.  I park my squad car, get out and I see this tiny little piglet happily munching away on a bowl of goodies that someone set out for the poor little guy.  This little thing is wagging its little tail and actually grunting little piglet grunts of pleasure.  How the hell am I going to blow this call off now?  I can’t, so I come up with the brilliant plan of using someone’s fishing net to try and snag the little thing.  Let’s see, two hours later and I still haven’t caught the damn thing.  Now, it’s a personal challenge to my over inflated cop ego.  That stupid little thing wasn’t very fast, but he could turn on a dime.  Did I mention that it was raining?  Yeah, I live in Arizona, it rains maybe 20 – 25 days out of the year, and that’s a wet year, but it happened to be raining that day.  So, this little piglet is running hither and yon, and I am slipping and sliding on wet grass and in mud, and to top it off I have about a thousand neighborhood kids following me trying to help.  Finally after two hours of frustration, we catch it.  Man can those things scream loud and bite hard.

About two years later, I am sent to a house, because the front door is hanging wide open and nobody is home.  Naturally the police are called, and my back up and I enter the home.  Nothing out of the ordinary, but as I am walking by the back sliding glass patio door, I see a very large Vietnamese pot belly pig sleeping out on the back patio.  Gasp!!!!! Is that my friend that I helped rescue from two years before???  It very well could be.  Well, we clear the house, and everything is fine, so then we go out into the backyard to make sure nobody is hiding out there.  Everything is cool.  Now, I walk up to the pig and I say to it “Hey there little piggy.”  Well, it was sleeping and I must have startled it, and I also learned that pigs are very territorial.  When I turned my back to walk away, I hear this loud squeal, and the next thing I knew this damn swine bit me on the back of my leg, right on my calf.  What the hell!!??  I turned around and the stupid thing was coming at me again, so I smacked it upside the head with my flashlight, but of course, pigs are thick sculled (literally) so my heavy metal flashlight had very little affect on the thing.  I am running around this back patio being chased by a pot bellied pig, and my back up comes around the corner and says, “What are you doing?” “Quit fooling around with that pig.”  Are you kidding me?  Needless to say, I didn’t want to shoot the thing, but I was having trouble keeping it away from me, so I was shoving patio furniture at it and some exercise equipment that was out on the patio as well.  Finally I was let off the hook and I saw my chance to escape, the pig had now set his sights on my back up and it goes after him.  Hell, I run for the fence and hop it like a high jumper.  As I am standing on the other side, I can hear my fearless back up yelling at the pig and I can now hear him throwing patio furniture at the pig as well.  So, I yell at him for playing with the pig, and all I get in return is a slew of profanities.  To this day I wonder if that was the very same piglet I chased for two hours on that rainy day, and it recognized me and decided to get me back.  Who can say?  Oh, and spare your comments about “pig bites pig” and all that.  I have already had my fair share of them from my family and friends.

Thanks for reading.