The year Chris was born was a record one for piglets. Because we were beset and
frantic, we didn’t visit the barn that February or March. But that year, unknown
to us, George and Mary had twenty sows—more than ever before—and almost all of
them had record litters.
“Usually a sow doesn’t want to raise more than ten piglets,” Mary explained to
me. “Usually a sow has ten good working teats.” (They actually have twelve, but
only ten are usually in working order.) When a sow has more than ten piglets,
somebody is going to lose out—and that somebody is the runt.
A runt is distinguished not only by its small size and helpless predicament.
Unless pulled from the litter and nursed by people, a runt is usually doomed,
for it is a threat to the entire pig family. “A runt will make this awful sound—Nynh!
Nynh! Nynh!” Mary told me. “It’s just awful. It would attract predators. So the
sow’s response is often to bite the runt in half, to stop the noise. But
sometimes she can’t tell who’s doing it. She might bite a healthy one, or
trample some of the others trying to get to the runt. It isn’t her fault, and
you can’t blame her. It screws up the whole litter.”
Every year on the farm, there was a runt or two. George would usually remove the
little fellow and bottle-feed it goat milk in the house. With such personalized
care, the runt will usually survive. But the class of 1990, with more than two
hundred piglets, had no fewer than eighteen runts—so many that George and Mary
had to establish a “runt stall” in the barn.
Christopher Hogwood was a runt among runts. He was the smallest of them all—half
the size of the other runts. He is a particularly endearing piglet, Mary told
us, with enormous ears and black and white spots, and a black patch over one eye
like Spuds McKenzie, the bull terrier in the beer commercial. But Mary was
convinced he would never survive. It would be more humane to kill him, she
urged, than to let him suffer. But George said—as he often does—“Where there’s
life, there’s hope.” The little piglet hung on.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
Full Story
