Hogwash

Newsletter 2025-08-18

Pigs don’t stink—unless they take a bath.

Specifically, they smell bad if they bathe in the water they’re supposed to drink. My small herd of small swine doesn’t have its own bathtub, but it does have two plastic water troughs. Those are apparently the perfect places to take a dip. My hoofed friends wash off their grime and leave the dirty water behind to bake in the heat, resulting in an odor that measures somewhere between sweaty feet and a decomposing whale. Don’t ask me how I know what both of those things smell like. As someone with many unfortunate and unexplained scents in my house, I’m qualified to rank them. It’s like having my own indoor stagnant pond. Lucky me.

The pigs have other options to stay cool. They could hang out all day in the pig room, which is fully air-conditioned. There’s also plenty of shade in the backyard. Instead, they choose neither. They like to hang out on the enclosed back porch. Usually, I leave the door open for better ventilation. It’s cooler than a sauna, but not by much. The pigs like to heat themselves up and then splash around in the water they’re supposed to drink. Yet, if I try to spray them with the hose to cool them off—or, heaven forbid, to clean them—they run away like I’m trying to send them to market. They only want to play in the water if they’re not supposed to. The disobedience is what makes it fun. I’m raising pig sociopaths.

I’ve made at least three separate attempts to give the pigs a kiddie pool of their own so they can stop wading in what they’re supposed to drink. My efforts were about as successful as when I tried to introduce a new food to the kids. If it’s not some form of a chicken nugget, it might as well be poison. The pigs had no interest in stepping in any of the plastic pools I bought. I moved the pools into the shade. I put food in the bottom. I cut down the sides so stepping in and out would be easier. I pushed the pigs in. None of it worked. They could sense that I wanted them to have fun and did the opposite. I should have tried reverse psychology. If I had posted a “no swimming” sign, I’m sure they would have done swan dives.

Finding an external source of cooling is supposedly a high priority for pigs. They don’t sweat. For animals that are at risk of overheating, mine certainly sun themselves a lot. I might have the rare cold-blooded variety. Beware of the lizard pigs. Their natural instinct is to dig mud wallows. Equally naturally, I would prefer they not do that. My yard has suffered enough. Only my smallest and nicest pig, Luna, is a digger. She roots in the spot where we cut down a dying ash tree and ground down the stump. She can’t resist commemorating the tree by creating the biggest crater possible. She doesn’t lie in the hole. She just digs it and then walks away, fully satisfied with the destruction she’s wrought. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing edible down there. If there were, the other pigs would fight her for it. Gilly and Onyx ignore the spot. Yet, whenever I give Luna access to that half of the yard, she immediately recreates her depression, no matter how effectively I filled it in after her last excavation. Through all that, she never sticks around in it when it gets wet. She doesn’t want mud to stay cool. She just wants to commit an act of violence against my lawn. I can’t be mad. She’s adorable when her face is covered in dirt. She knows she’s cute enough to get away with murder. That makes her the most dangerous animal of all.

My pigs seek out extra heat, avoid mud, and never, ever get in swimming pools. That makes their sudden obsession with jumping in their own water troughs all the more perplexing. I have two twenty-six gallon troughs. I originally positioned them outside, where they grew algae, no matter how many tablets I used to kill it off. It was the only thing on my property to actually grow, probably because algae are protists and not plants. If they were reclassified as greenery, they would have died like everything else. The troughs were also a death trap for birds. My feathered guests would land for a quick drink or bath and never get out. Apparently the plastic sides were slippery. Somehow, it never occurred to the birds to just fly away. Maybe the standard dinosaur descendant can’t handle a water launch. That seems like an important fact to consider before landing.

Eventually, I got tired of scooping out algae and dead birds. I moved the troughs onto the enclosed back porch. The roof and walls kept out the unwanted lifeforms. Recognizing that I had solved two problems, Onyx decided to create a third. He began eagerly and aggressively tipping over the troughs. The water cascaded across the wood floor, soaking the boards and peeling the paint. I’d refill the troughs, and Onyx would repeat his vandalism. Maybe he just hated hydration. Not everyone believes in drinking eight glasses a day. Besides the inconvenience of refilling the troughs, the spilled water was damaging the porch. My house is falling apart fast enough on its own without the help of the pigs. I had to do something, which is always my least favorite course of action. I reluctantly pulled out my tools and got to work.

In the basement, I found towel rods and some fancy brackets meant for a shelf. I screwed them into the floor to hold the troughs in place. The water containers couldn’t move a millimeter front to back or side to side. I forgot that the world exists in three dimensions. Unable to budge the troughs along the ground, Onyx simply used his snout to tip them up. The water spilled as easily as ever. Worse, the towel rod in front kept the trough from falling back into position. Once Onyx dislodged them, the troughs stayed tipped for the rest of the day. Not for the first time, I had been outsmarted by a pig. I would have to try again.

The only thing stronger than a miniature hog is cold, hard steel. (Pig iron need not apply.) To defeat Onyx, I chained the troughs to the ground. I ran a string of links along the top of both containers and fixed it to a point at either end. I thought that would be the end of my troubles. It wasn’t even close. The chain wasn’t tight enough. There was enough give for Onyx to tip up both troughs. I tried adjusting the chain a few times, but I could never get the tightness right. I’m only good at creating tension in relationships, not metal. The chain didn’t slow down Onyx, but it got in the way when I tried to put the troughs back in place. I had made my life more difficult while having no effect on the pigs. I’m an expert at thwarting myself.

If I wanted to win, I needed to block Onyx’s snout. I went into my basement again and scrounged up three pieces of scrap wood that fit perfectly along the sides and front of the trough with no cuts necessary. That was key. My goal is always to avoid using a saw. I’d like to keep my pigs and my fingers. I went to the hardware store and bought small brackets to secure the boards to the ground. The pieces of wood were tall enough to completely block curious snouts from getting under the lip of the troughs without stopping the pigs from drinking. For added insurance, I screwed in a second set of brackets upside down at the top of each board to pin the troughs in place. There was no possible way a pig could dislodge them. It also wasn’t particularly easy for me. If I needed to dump out the water because it was dirty, I had to bend the boards and wiggle the troughs free. Luckily, I wouldn’t have to empty them out very often—except that I did.

Note the spilled water from a recent piggy swim.

If the pigs couldn’t spill the water, they had to mess it up where it was. Gilly led the charge. When it got too hot outside for her comfort, she walked onto the sweltering back porch and had a relaxing sit in the water. Plopping a hundred-pound pig in a full plastic tub displaces more than a little liquid. The flooding was back without budging the troughs an inch. Pigs really are evil geniuses. Gilly is shameless about it. If I catch her in the act, she looks up at me like she has no idea she’s doing something wrong. More often, I only see her afterwards when she walks into the house with only her back portion clean. There’s a clear line on her skin showing where the water stopped. All that dirt and grime had to go somewhere. She transferred it from herself into the trough. Without a pig lounging in it, the water will stay crisp and clear indefinitely. With swine intervention, I have to change it almost daily. That’s made all the more challenging by my excellent defenses. I have to empty the troughs with a bucket, dumping scoop after scoop onto the nearest flower bed, until the containers are light enough for me to wiggle them loose. Then I toss the remaining water in the yard and rinse them out with the hose. Finally, I squeeze the empty troughs back into place and refill them there. All the while, my pets watch me, waiting for their chance to defile the troughs again. I work for them, and they know it. I miss the days when my only bosses were children and not pigs.

If the pigs insist on using the troughs as a pool, I’m tempted to give them a pool again. Only this time, I could disguise it as a trough. I could buy another plastic container identical to the other two and leave it in the middle of the yard. I wouldn’t do anything to prevent the pigs from tipping it over or swimming laps in it. I suspect they like the plastic troughs better than the plastic kiddie pools because the troughs are less slippery on the bottom. Then again, the only difference might be spite. There likely wouldn’t be any algae because they would empty it so fast. Hopefully, that would also prevent more avian deaths. The Council of Birds already views me as the chief suspect in past disappearances. If any crow detectives knock on my door, I want a lawyer.

With the pigs distracted outside, they might leave their actual drinking water alone. They also might see through my ruse. It’s possible they would dump the outside decoy trough while continuing to bathe in the inside ones. Either way, I would have to refill the outdoor trough all the time. The spilled water might finally make my grass grow. It also might turn the barren dirt into barren mud. I’ve been in a prolonged, months-long water fight with a group of pigs. If they don’t watch it, I’ll start using water balloons. Who knows how they’d retaliate? My Super Soakers did mysteriously disappear a while back.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James