The Great Pig Escape of 2024

Newsletter 2024-10-06

I unlocked the front door and walked inside my house, my keys in one hand and my ten-pound diapered dog in the other. I had just dropped five hundred dollars for the vet to diagnose him with an acute case of being old as hell. That’s not an exaggeration. Niko was born the same year Satan established the Great Below. Despite his advanced age (he’s sixteen going on infinity), Niko is in perfect health, bladder issues notwithstanding. The vet said there’s no telling how much longer he might live. Distracted by the daunting prospect of paying for annual checkups for an immortal dog, it took me a second to register the sight before me: There was a pig in the front room.

That might not sound shocking at first. In my house, there are pigs everywhere. The issue was timing. The pigs are only supposed to be out when there are people home to watch them. The rest of the time, they’re locked in the pig room, separated from the rest of the house by a steel pet gate screwed into the wall. It’s like the electric fences at a dinosaur park; it simply can’t fail. Their escape would be worse than any t-rex attack. It would be more like unleashing a thousand toddlers with permanent markers. In my eight years of swine ownership, the pigs had never once breached containment. They solely came out when we deliberately released them. Now, they had let themselves out. I had come home to a whole new world. There was no telling what they had been up to.

As with raptors, it’s not the one you can see that you need to worry about. My oldest pig, Gilly, stood perfectly still in the middle of the wood floor. She was busted, but she didn’t care. She was a distraction. Above me, I heard the distinct sound of hooves on wood. The most depressing fact about my life is that that’s a noise I recognize. There was a mobile porkchop on the second story. It had to be the rescue pig, Onyx. He was the only one with the strength and intelligence to lead this kind of jailbreak. It was the second day in a row that he made it up there. The first time, I had been home. I managed to stop him within a few minutes of his ascent, yet it was still enough time for him to eat half a bag of guinea pig food. Who knew how much he could have done in the hour I had been gone? (It took the vet a very long time to diagnose Niko as being old. They didn’t have a calendar.) I’d be lucky if I had a second floor left at all.

I set down my elderly dog and headed upstairs, terrified of what I would find. The tap dancing performance I heard when I came into the house abruptly stopped. Onyx knew I was coming. At the top of the stairs, I looked to the left. Betsy and Mae’s room was closed tight. I breathed a sigh of relief. That’s where Onyx had enjoyed his guinea pig pellet feast the day before. If he was anything like my other pigs, he would attempt to check that spot every day for the rest of his life. This time, he was thwarted. Betsy and Mae had heeded my warning and pulled their door closed before they left for school. They have the unique privilege of having one of the only doors in our old, slanted house that latches shut. Onyx might be able to break through a pet gate with brute force, but he still can’t turn a doorknob. The day he figures that out, the house will officially be his. I’ll give him the deed and move. 

The upstairs was eerily silent. I checked Lucy and Waffle’s room. Nothing. I peeked in the bathroom. No pig. I poked my head in the laundry room. There was nothing in there, other than a horrifying amount of dirty clothes. I’d hate to be the person who has to wash those. Oh, wait. I am. I had checked every spot on the second floor. Onyx is nowhere to be found. I turned my eyes to the staircase leading to my third floor attic bedroom. My blood ran cold.

I joke a lot about pigs potentially leading to divorce, but this was truly a relationship-ending scenario. No couple can survive an ambitious pig being left alone for an hour in their master bedroom. Our room is filled with expensive snacks amassed for various low-key date nights at home. We’re talking hundreds of dollars in accumulated birthday and Christmas chocolates. Lola is a slow eater. If Onyx had gotten into that sacred stockpile, he would be gone—and me with him. I ran up the stairs. The room was empty.

I questioned my sanity. I was positive that I had detected a pig above me when I walked in the front door. Was I hearing things? Perhaps it wasn’t a pig at all, but merely a poltergeist. I would have been relieved to discover my house was haunted. That was much less dangerous than having a pig on the loose. Perhaps after Onyx broke through the pig gate, he got bored and returned to the backyard. If he was smart enough to break containment, he might also be smart enough to realize he had finally gone too far. That seemed unlikely. Pigs aren’t known for their graceful restraint. He had to be on the second floor. If he wasn’t in any of the open rooms, there was only one other place he could be.

I returned to Betsy and Mae’s room. I checked the doorknob again, confirming that it was latched as snuggly as I originally assessed. There was no sound coming from the other side. I wasn’t fooled this time. I opened the door. Onyx looked up at me from the middle of his debris field. On this raid, the guinea pig food had been too high for him to reach. He found something even better: snack-size bags of chips from an assortment pack Betsy got for Christmas. My kids make the best wish lists. Onyx hadn’t so much eaten the bags as exploded them. There were crumbs everywhere, caked to the ground in a healthy layer of pig slobber. Onyx looked at me and screeched. I lunged.

Onyx shot past me. He thought he had the upper hand, but I actually let him slide by. He might have been unstoppable in the overgrown backyard where we first tried to catch him, but in narrow hallways, I’m the king. I don’t have to wrestle him anymore. I just have to spook him in the right direction. There’s a reason he pulled off his great escape when I wasn’t home. I shooed him towards our grand Victorian staircase. Onyx refused to go down. He ran the length of the hallway toward the laundry room—and the back stairs. He had never seen that staircase before. It leads from the kitchen to the second floor. A hundred years ago, it was used by servants who were supposed to be neither seen nor heard. Now, it would be a pig causeway. The stairs are extremely steep in defiance of all modern building codes. Onyx didn’t know that. He plunged ahead—and down. Still shrieking uncontrollably, he descended step by step, bunching up like an inchworm before moving his feet one level lower. He came out in the kitchen, a room he’s not allowed to enter, which was why he hadn’t seen the back stairs before. I chased him out. He fled into the pig room and on to the back yard. The Great Pig Escape of 2024 was over.

It was up to me to stop it from ever happening again. After vacuuming Betsy and Mae’s room and cleaning up a landfill’s worth of wrappers, my mind turned to how to prevent this sort of disaster in the future. I had had a feeling something like this would eventually transpire. Months ago, the old gate broke under circumstances I have since forgotten. If only I had a newsletter where I kept a written record of such things. The prior pet gate had held firm for years thanks to a steel peg at the bottom that ensured it could only swing inward. Pigs can push but not pull. Not well, anyway. The replacement gate had two plastic pegs on swivels that allowed the gate to swing either inward or outward depending on which one was pointed down. I rotated the peg for the gate to swing inward. Onyx had evidently moved that peg with his snout, then pushed the bottom corner of the gate until the top latch popped open. When Lucy and Waffle got home from school, they said Onyx had tried the same trick right before they got on the bus that morning. I was already at the vet by then. They pushed him back in the final seconds before they had to leave. As soon as they were gone, he did it again and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

As for the door to Betsy and Mae’s room, Onyx hadn’t opened it. That was a relief. Betsy and Mae had pulled it closed as I instructed, but Lucy opened it to check on the guinea pig before she left. Onyx must have pushed it closed as he twirled around the room in his feeding frenzy, trapping himself inside while also creating the perfect hiding place. As long as he can’t open latched doors, there’s still hope for this house. I just had to make the first gate capable of stopping him again. I headed to the basement to see what trouble I could make with power tools and whatever other junk we had on hand.

I got lucky right off the bat. On the bottom shelf in the back corner of the basement, I found an ornate metal bracket. For a century, it held up a marble sink that we’ve since replaced. Before you flame me for disrespecting history, know that the sink had two different spouts for hot and cold water. Washing your hands required moving back and forth between the two to switch from third-degree burns to frostbite. We ditched the basin but saved the brackets that held it to the wall in the hope of one day making a shelf. Like most non-pig-related projects in this house, that never happened. It’s a good thing, too. The bracket was sitting there unused when I needed it most. It was a perfect fit for the corner of the pig gate. I anchored it to the door jam to stop the gate from ever swinging outward again. It fit perfectly over the corner of the gate without blocking the cat door Niko is supposed to use to go outside. At this point, that’s strictly aspirational. I refuse to give up on the concept entirely. I’m sure that, over the next thousand years, there will be at least a few times that Niko visits the yard to go to the bathroom.

That left the grand staircase. Friday, I wrote about my extensive attempts to keep Onyx off of it. To the shock of no one, my efforts failed. Once again, the basement had the answer. I found a spare metal pet gate I had forgotten about. We likely used it when the pigs were young and we first evicted them from sleeping in Betsy and Mae’s room. The gate didn’t have a cat door, so we couldn’t use it on the pig room, but it could still work on the stairs. Friday, I had been thinking too narrowly. I couldn’t figure out how to attach a gate to the bottom of the stairs without drilling. The trick was that I didn’t have to attach it to the bottom. Using tension mounts, I put the gate on the first landing. Normally, nothing held in place by pressure alone would stop Onyx. If it’s not anchored with steel, it might as well not be there at all. The secret this time was that the gate had the old design that only swung in one direction. I put it directly next to a step, which blocks the bottom six inches of it. A human can easily unlatch it and swing it out, but Onyx couldn’t push it in. The entire weight of the staircase would be working against him. That was the theory, anyway. There was only one way to test it out.

I unleashed Onyx—on purpose this time. He went straight for the stairs. He expected to get lucky for a third time. At the pet gate, he stopped. He sniffed. He poked around. He pushed with all his might. The gate held firm. With much sadness, he descended from the first landing. I had won.

Not quite. Onyx sprinted for the kitchen. The door was open. He remembered the back stairs. His mental map of this house is incredible. He had only been back there once, and that time to go down, not up. I shooed him out and closed the kitchen door. It’s one of the few in the house that latches firmly. As long as we keep it closed, he’s powerless to get upstairs. The day was mine. Tomorrow will be another story. Onyx is a delightfully cunning nemesis. I’ve loved every second of battling him. I can’t wait to see what hijinks he throws at me next. Lola is less eager to find out. Maybe Onyx should take it easy on the shenanigans for a while so he doesn’t get evicted in the near future. Winter is coming.

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

James