That’s the first time I’ve seen someone walking a pig. It was well behaved, walking on a leash with a harness. I saw it at a distance and went to the edge of the sidewalk by the railing and squatted down with my dogs and held them both by their harness’s. I wasn’t sure how they’d react so I chose to play it safe. They just watched it walk by and turned to watch it go the other way. My former neighbor had 6 partial wolf dogs. Two 1/2 husky, 1/2 wolf which he bred with a Norwegian Elkhound and kept 2 of these. Then he bred one of 1/2 wolves (the white one) again, this time with a white GSD, and he kept 2 of these as well. Someone gave him a 1/2 pig, 1/2 wild boar which he was keeping and fattening up to slaughter.. His pack regularly got into the poor pigs pen.. They had a stapler and would patch him up, poor thing. Knowing this I wanted to make sure I had good control of my dogs.. Anyone else ever encounter a pet pig while walking your dogs? If so how’d they react?
Poor piggy. Given the right conditions they are rather sweet creatures, and some breeds can be as intelligent as dogs. I have never known a farm dog attack a pig, but some more rugged breeds have been used to hunt boar in the past, so the running game instinct must still be there.
Some people have Vietnamese Pot-bellied pigs as pets, and apparently they are easier to house train than puppies!
Many animals are a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for. When I was at college, part of the course was training an animal other than a dog. Between the students, there was ferrets doing agility, sheep doing twirls, pigs on leads, geese taught tricks and even the big lizardy thing taught to 'touch'.
Sounds fun Chris. My first pet was a Dutch rabbit who would show jump in the house, and walk on a cat harness and lead outdoors.
Ferrets are very clever and quick to learn, I often walked mine around the village, and pop into local pub, took ages to get anywhere as they were forever exploring but on the way home they ran like mad.
I’m very happy that the person is no longer my neighbor. I hated knowing that the wolfdogs were terrorizing the poor pig. If they weren’t getting into its pen I’d imagine they were circling around it’s pen. These were not farm dogs, they were there to scare people away. He was a very antisocial person.
Koko the gorilla recently passed away. That night, or the night after I watched many clips of her on YouTube. It was fascinating. I stayed up way too late, almost until 3am.. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, she was born at the San Francisco zoo, and was taught sign language and understood spoken language. Just amazing and inspiring as well
