Hog Heaven can wait

Alex Coolman

Hector the boar, all 600 pink pounds of him, was settling down for a

little nap.

The white-haired pig, an animal about the size of a well-stuffed love

seat, had already taken care of his other tasks for the day: wetting in

the mud, snuffling around in the hay with one of the sows, and letting

out a few snorts for the benefit of visitors.

Now it was time to relax -- something Hector does very, very well.

Though you couldn’t tell from the drugged, blissful look on his snout,

Hector was at the center of a minor controversy: his caretakers at

Centennial Farm at the Orange County Fairgrounds had been very close to

shipping him off to the slaughterhouse.

At the last minute, Gloria Kelly, a volunteer docent who has led tours at

the farm for about three and a half years, stepped in to prevent Hector’s

demise. Kelly called in the media to witness the plight of her porcine

friend.

“He’s fathered practically all the piglets here,” said Kelly, who works

as an interior designer in Westminster. “I want him around.”

Hector, who is 14, has held the position of Centennial Farm’s stud pig

for about eight years. Mating with six or seven sows twice a year, he had

produced hundreds of piglets over the course of his virile existence.

But these days, said Jim Bailey, who runs the farm, Hector is getting a

little long in the tooth to be the stud. There are dozens of strapping

young porkers at the farm who could do the job more effectively.

“I think most people understand that farm animals, when they reach a

nonproductive point, they move on to something else,” Bailey said.

“They’re not pets.”

Treating Hector as just another pig proved difficult for Kelly, though.

She was initially so upset by the thought of Hector being killed that she

considered taking the boar home with her and turning him into a kind of

enormous, filthy pet.

“I have a yard. I have a pool,” she said. “I felt that strongly about

him.”

Becoming emotionally attached to Centennial’s animals has been a problem

for her since she started, Kelly admitted.

“I didn’t realize that the animals would be killed,” she said.

For Bailey, who was raised on a farm and doesn’t find himself bonding

with the animals much, so much fuss over an old pig is a bit of a

nuisance.

“If all the farm animals in the world were kept, we wouldn’t have room,”

he said, staring somewhat grimly through his gray aviator glasses. “It’s

just not animal production to do it that way.”

However, Bailey is willing to go along with Kelly’s request. He’s

declared that the old stud can have a home at Centennial for the rest of

his days.

“I guess I’m backing down,” Bailey said. “Sometimes that’s the smart

thing to do. I want to keep things positive.”

Hector, snoring happily away in the hay, would no doubt agree.