For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for July 21, 2012

Since when are pigs carnivores?

I guess this is a learning vacation for Michael and Elizabeth.

Who said they fell off? Those sides look low enough, the pigs could have grabbed them off the side.

psychlady.. this series of comments on pigs is a learning vacation for me! :)

if you ever saw what pigs and chickens eat, you’d nevertouch ham or KFC again

Yet another good reason not to eat meat…..

Not to change the (ew) subject, but I’m going to work in the comment that I don’t think hogs are pink. Piglets can be, but not hogs. By hog-time, their hair has come in. With white-haired pigs, the pink skin underneath may show through, but they’re still not going to be a blaring, shocking pink. (Just looked at a pig primer to review: http://www.kidcyber.com.au/topics/farmpiggies.htm )Correct me if I’m wrong.

There have been cases of someone becoming disabled in a pig pen (heart attack, usually) and being eaten by pigs. Pigs, well fed will not attack other animals.Pigs, in wild state are scavengers and that is probably why they were banned in the Bible.

I thought that the uncle was just telling a story to cover for having put them in his freezer for future meals!

Michael learned a valuable lesson today.

My dad told me that the pigs on the farm where he grew up would purposly scatter corn from their trough to lure chickens into their pen and eat them.

Terrorists in Northern Ireland have used pigs to deal with inconvenient corpses – the foolhardy Captain Nairac of the SAS is said to have gone this wayafter his capture and killing by the IRA.

My daughter’s free-range chickens have been picked off by raccoons, red-tailed hawks, and maybe other animals. It’s a zoo out there!

BURP

A story is told about Rattlesnake Island in Lake Erie.Heavily populated with rattlesnakes, it was uninhabited.A small herd of pigs was released on the island in the 1800’s.Twenty years later, lots of feral pigs, no rattlesnakes.The pigs ate them all.

Seems that a healthy pig has a thick fat layer that slows the venom form a rattlesnake enough to give a good chance of the pig surviving a bite.

Pig gets close, snake rattles, pig thinks “Lunch!”Snake either strikes, misses or tries to flee.In any case, the pig stomps it to death and eats it.

Rattlesnake Island is now a VERY expensive private resort.

You can usually tell when a Law and Order program (from any of the series) is basing a story on a real event when they put a large disclaimer at the beginning indicating that it is fictional and not based on real events. I look forward to those ones, to see how much I recognize and how much they change to avoid the (real) lawyers.

Yes, pig farmer Robert Pickton of Port Coquitlam (part of the Vancouver, BC region) was convicted of killing 6 women, and accusedof killing 20 others, over a period of years and disposing of the bodies by feeding them to his pigs. He confessed to an undercover police office to killing 49, which jibs with other unaccounted for prostitutes, drug users, and other low-status or homeless women the police did not put much effort into finding until families pressed them to look for a serial killer.

The pigs disposed of the evidence very effectively, it took a vast amount of effort to comb the farm for fragmentary bone and tooth remains and DNA sequence them, hence why only 6 cases were initially prosecuted, and 20 more deferred after his initial conviction and life sentence. The CSI episode cribbed heavily from this case, down to the bizarre aspect of the team traveling to Canada as lead investigators.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton