Excerpt from The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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.

But he didn’t grow.

Excerpted from The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery Copyright © 2006 by Sy Montgomery. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.