Captivity
The day after my husband brought our first batch of piglets home to our farm, they escaped. The forty little black creatures that had seemed so content gamboling in our barnyard throughout the morning had, by noon, slipped out of their fencing and assembled under the ornamental crab apple tree on the lawn. Nosing their way through the mulch, the piglets looked ridiculous beside the mown grass. Being the first to catch sight of them, I rounded up help from my husband and our farm assistant. Oddly, completely mysteriously, when the piglets saw human beings, they trotted back to the barn. Did they understand where they were supposed to be? If so, why had they left? Why did they go back?
Pigs were a new venture for us that summer, July of 2012. My husband, Will, had decided raising pigs was a valuable adjunct to our cattle business and plunged into the preliminary research whole-heartedly. He devised a plan in which we’d buy eight-week-old piglets after they’d been weaned – cute little thirty-pound toddlers – and raise them in the barnyard until they seemed sturdy enough for outdoor living. Then, we’d move them to a section of electrically-fenced woods.
I hadn’t wanted pigs. I hadn’t wanted to be a farmer, for that matter, but had long ago succumbed to Will’s zeal for agriculture. My husband’s midlife conversion from professional to farmer had been thorough and deliberate, a choice and commitment. My conversion happened by subterfuge, largely outside of my consciousness. I surrendered in unsuspecting moments to the animal joy of walking amidst the cow herd. I found myself captured off guard by the mesmerizing beauty of green hay spilling out from beneath the tractor’s rake. By my mid-sixties, I’d come to find pleasure in cows wrangling and haying and muddling. But pigs were one species too many in my book. I had managed to not have enough time to read up on pig rearing and steeled myself against the cuteness of their nosing, bobbing busy-ness.
After the piglets’ escape to the crab apple tree, Will secured their fencing but, somehow, a few hours after their initial escape, they were out again. This time they located themselves in the daffodil foliage by the pond. They dug busily until Will appeared. And then, once again, they mustered themselves into a herd and trotted back to the barn. Perhaps they had some built-in homing instinct activated by the sight of two-legged creatures?
My ignorance invited fancy: maybe the piglets were playing some sort of joke? Perhaps the piglets, like myself, were ambivalent about playing their designated role on the farm. Enticed by the open world, they raced out only to race back home, seemingly unable to resist the lure of domesticity, some unknowable penchant for safety of home alternating with their lust for freedom.
When the piglets escaped yet again that evening, I was alone, my husband having driven off to the Tractor Supply store. Once again, all forty formed a throbbing herd, this time snuffling under the spruce tree in the back yard. I started out the door into the July heat in bare feet, imagining I needed simply to remind the piglets of the location of the barn. As I left the house, however, the screen door slammed shut with a loud bang and, instead of assembling themselves into an orderly herd, they scattered, exploding in all directions. Some ran uphill, some dashed down the lane toward the cow pasture, and some tore across to the woods. By the time I got my boots on, they’d formed into a single herd but were racing away, their curly tails facing house and barnyard. They’d committed to life in the wild, it seemed. Whatever their plan, if they had one, they’d completely disappeared into brush in a matter of minutes.
“The pigs have taken to the hills!” I yelled into the phone to my husband.
Will responded calmly, assuring me he was on his way back to the farm. I climbed onto our motorcycle-styled ATV, my ambivalence about pig farming obliterated by this state of emergency, and searched for the piglets. I moved slowly at first, fearing the brambles, then speeded up as I realized how far away the piglets had gotten. I gasped at the angle of the western hill, hoping it wasn’t steep enough to topple my vehicle. The briars scratched my arms, low hanging branches pulled at my hair, and mosquitoes sang in my ears whenever I paused to redirect my search. I saw no trace of the piglets. Five minutes lengthened into half an hour.
Somewhere in the pain of sweat mingling with the blood on my scratched arms, my heat-drugged brain stumbled onto a new understanding of my situation: the piglets were deliberately sending me on this chase. I could almost hear them:
“Duck! She’s headed this way!” “Stay down!” “Run behind the ridge!”
My frustration got fuzzy and faded as the image crystallized: I was living in a children’s book! The piglets were, in fact, plotting their mischief. They were watching me careen around on my little vehicle. Certainly, right now they were stifling giggles.
The charm of this image got me through another fifteen minutes or so of rocky hills and brambles. I paged through memories of Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Little Red Hen, and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle until I reached the pastel illustrations of Beatrix Potter and stopped short. In children’s books, the animals always win. Peter Rabbit was the hero, Farmer MacGregor the fool. The piglets had turned me into a pathetic Mr. MacGregor waving his hoe fruitlessly as Peter Rabbit wriggled under the fence. The piglets were laughing at me, and they were going to win!
Thighs aching from the effort of holding onto my vehicle, arms scratched bloody and stinging, I paused. I scanned the brush, looking up at the ridge and across the rocky meadow. In bodily pain, in July heat, my frustration boiled over. I stood upright on my mount and addressed the invisible piglets at the top of my voice: “OK, piglets! All right! Go! Run free! Go get eaten by coyotes!”
Tears started down my cheeks when I heard the sound of the farm’s pick-up truck. My husband arrived and circled back behind the hill I’d covered. The truck moved at a very slow speed in my direction. I wasn’t sure Will had seen me until he put his arm out the window and made a “stay put” motion. I sat at the side of the lane and watched as he moved past me. Trotting behind the pick-up, still assembled and moving as a single herd, were the forty piglets.
What luck my husband had! With perfect timing, he’d appeared just as the piglets decided to surrender their liberty. Furious at their selection of my husband as their hero, I refused to look at them as they walked down to the barn.
This proved to be the piglets’ last escape. By the end of their first full day at the farm, we’d figured out how to keep them confined: every two-inch gap between post and fence needed to be closed lest a piglet’s one-and-a-half-wide inch nose gain purchase. They remained thereafter within their designated abode, first in the barnyard and then in their twelve-acre pigwood. Over the first few weeks I watched the piglets mature, careful not to succumb to the charm of their busy snuffling, nosing, and foraging. Cows had captured my affection years ago, probably during childhood visits to my uncle’s dairy farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. But I needed no more masters, no more animals tugging my heartstrings and drawing me into their lives, no more captors.
When the day came for the piglets to move from the barnyard to the pigwood, we opened the gate to the meadow whose 300-yard long length they needed to traverse to get to the woods. I led the way, watching over my shoulder as the piglets tripped along behind me, their first taste of open terrain in front of them. They seemed more or less willing to follow me at first, but then drifted, stopped still to – do what? sniff the breeze? – then moved forward for a bit, then flopped down on their tummies in the muddy ditch mid-meadow. I waited and moved toward the open gate only as they moved, so I was leading them but they were pushing me. Their path was a meandering one, their timetable lengthier than my wished-for span, but they eventually walked through the red metal gate and into the pigwood.
“Never let a hog know he’s being driven,” advised a 19th century pig drover, according to Mark Essig in Lesser Beasts. I stumbled upon this sage advice quite some time after our miniature pig drive from barn to woods. The quoted drover was one of hundreds who’d collectively driven as many as 150,000 hogs each winter for half a century from the farms of Tennessee to the plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. Pigs were easy to raise on fertile farmland in Tennessee and Kentucky. Since southern plantation owners needed to feed their slaves and families but wanted to preserve their farmland for cash crops, the solution was to have pigs grow up in the mountains and walk hundreds of miles east and south. The distilled wisdom of the pig drover quoted by Mark Essig told me clearly there was some negotiation involved in pig herding. In addition to not letting that hog know he was being driven, the drover counseled, “Just let him take his way and keep him going in the right direction.” There was no escaping the fact that the pigs were going to wield control over certain moments in their lives – and mine, it seemed. I was going to live in some degree of captivity to hogs despite my dogged refusal to find them cute.
“Captivity is consciousness,” wrote Emily Dickinson. “So’s liberty.” Uncertain about pigs’ consciousness, I’ve observed the piglets’ experience of their lives in the pigwood. They operate as a herd: sleeping snuggled together and deciding collectively which parts of the day to spend eating, drinking, ploughing up the ground for grubs and other edibles, mud bathing, and traversing the hills for new resting and foraging spots. They share the rhythms of their daily activities, occasionally biting a fellow herd member’s ear, but otherwise living in apparent peace.
Watching them drop to the ground in hollows they’ve dug, I note how their legs flop loosely. Their forms relax so thoroughly that they are shaped solely by gravity and the contours of the holes they’ve made. Perhaps, for all their early attempts at escape and their refusal to be led in a straightforward fashion, the piglets are content with captivity. Perhaps they are content through ignorance, lacking consciousness. Or, let’s for the moment credit the piglets with decision-making capacity, mischievous or not, perhaps they have found some porcine equivalent of Emily Dickenson’s liberty inside their fenced woods.
My notion of the pigs’ well-being is pure imagination, but I can speak with knowledge about my own experience. We recently added sheep to our livestock collection and, observing the expanding size and diversity of my charges, I have come to understand that liberty lives in the same space as captivity. I see how it happens, the flipping of liberty-to-captivity. Though I can’t always get my hand on that switch, I know, somewhere, there’s delight to be had even while deviled by a herd of recalcitrant piglets. Delight, a very reliable source of liberty, lies around me on our farm, requiring consciousness, of course, and the ability to flip that switch, but it’s there.
-Barbara Felton
Barbara Felton is a farmer and writer in Warwick, New York who began writing creative nonfiction in 2014 following careers in psychology (NYU; Department of Psychology) and mental health administration. Her personal essays, on matters of farm life, grief, and mental illness, have been published in journals including: Psychiatric Services, skirt! and Dirt magazines, Duende, Pulse, Tupelo Quarterly (contest finalist) and The Southampton Review.