sheblogs
Babette:
Just one of the animals now
Pampered pig faces life in the barnyard By ELEXIS HAYS
Editor’s note: For those who have followed the big, fabulous life of Babette, the precocious piglet belonging to blogger Elexis Hays, here’s another chapter.
T
Babette, bottom left with a dirty nose, poses in the barn with Gracie the horse, Tiki Hut the emu and a few chickens.
20 | northsidewoman.com | june2013
here are reasons why people shouldn’t be tempted to buy sweet little piglets, even when they are tiny enough to wear a sock as a sweater. Sadly, like many of us over the past miserable winter, Babs has grown large. Quite large. She’s a big girl with big appetites and those who know me know I have trouble with the word “no” and even more trouble with that hateful buzzword, “moderation.” If giving a pig a Hershey’s kiss and some cheese ravioli is wrong, I don’t want to be right. I’ve tried. Believe me. I am helpless when she bats her long eyelashes at me and oinks that lovable oink. We’re about equally matched in size now and no force on earth can keep her from my cabinets. She can now nudge the refrigerator across the kitchen. Using her heart-shaped pink nose, she has systematically plowed up 3 acres of grass and pulled out every expansive perennial, some over 25 years old. I had a beautiful peony of the most delicate ballerina pink that
was planted by the original owner of my house years ago. It must have been delicious. If only I had planned to go into farming, she’d have been a great employee hired to plow. But, I’d rather not look like the white trash we are rapidly becoming, and so I am being forced to introduce her to the barnyard. Babette is not popular there. At the house, she was the undisputed queen. Once she won the dogs over by showing them how to get into the kitchen cabinets, she reigned supreme. At the barn, she is hated universally. Our large, old rescue pig Orson has twice tried to kill her, even though he has not been seen standing up in three years and is usually rendered invisible in the barn because of the constant array of chickens using him for a warm perch. My genius old sheep, Clementine, who literally walks on only two legs, has also arisen and bitten her repeatedly while Babette cries and wonders how she dropped into this nightmare. One of Babette’s tricks is turning around to get a treat. Usually, I have to ask her several times while she blinks and looks at me as if to say, “Really? Why waste the energy? You know you’re going to give it to me anyway.” When she saw I was leaving, she commenced to spinning like a top to get my attention. Walking away from her squealing was worse than leaving my daughter on her first day of preschool. At the end of the day, I went down and brought her back to the house to sleep in her bed. She ran into the
► See BABETTE, Page 33