Obituary for Hoochie Minh (pics soon)

It’s been a year since she has been gone. My porcine child finally left me just months short of her 18^th birthday, and she will be forever missed.

I was living in the east park in 1991. I was studying film-making at Community College and was working in a bar on the weekends. In order to film a version of Alice in Wonderland, which involved a scene where a baby turning into a pig, I endeavored to find an actor for my movie.

I had seen ads in the back of the daily paper advertising miniature pigs for sale, so I contacted several of the advertisers to find out care and feeding information and cost. As it turned out, the price for a pet potbelly dropped drastically outside of the city. I drove with my ex- to Morgantown, PA to buy my pig for $125 which is the only animal I have ever personally purchased (when I was a kid, my folks bought a dog for me once, but after that we always just found stray animals).

My pig shopping experience was not what I expected--a frighteningly large sow greeted me. Prior that time, I had envisioned miniature pigs to be about the size of a large housecat or small dog, but mama pig was the size of a (smallish) sheep and I was taken aback. There were two litters to choose from and I chose the smallest pig in the elder litter and named her Hoochie Minh, in part because she walked on her tiptoes as if she were wearing high heels, and in part because Ho Chi Minh was the only Vietnamese name I knew, and she was a Vietnamese Potbelly Pig according to her birth certificate. But although she was the smallest in the litter, she was already larger than I had envisioned a miniature pig to be. I was thinking standard poodle vs. miniature and maybe compared to a 1,000 lb farm sow, she was miniature but not compared to the farm hogs I knew as a child.

Hoochie Minh stayed in the living room at first where she squealed and grunted from her hand-me-down playpen (inherited from my oldest niece) whenever she wanted attention. Later, she had run of the five bedroom house and the small brick patio in the rear of that house. Toilet training was moderately simple but also only moderately successful: pigs naturally pick a place to go and return there, but they carry a lot of fluid and we had a very difficult time containing her overflow which resulted in many housekeeping challenges as we moved her from room to room. At night, she slept with me on my futon mattress (which was on the floor) sometimes with my toddler niece (when she stayed over).

I read somewhere that a pig in heat is a destructive force of nature, so I arranged to get Hooch fixed. A friend drove her to the Women’s SPCA for me (which was located in the city at that time) where she was spayed. I picked her up the next day and she was happily munching on an apple.

My housemate welcomed her home with a sampling of ribs, which gave her a thrill that my girl was not adverse to cannibalism (if she were offered a chunk of marinated human meat what would happen?).

I learned that potbellied pigs were true earth critters. In fact over 17 years of observing her habits and proclivities I watched them evolve and change to some degree, but one thing that was constant: my Hoochie Minh liked to have all four feet on the ground at all time.

I learned about her aversion to being picked up (and also to jumping especially in a downward direction) when we began traveling together. Hoochie moved with me when I moved on to West Philly in 1992 and promptly made her way to the third floor of the house. She had to be prodded down the steps more than once, often falling on her front knees at the bottom landing of each stair case. Other times she would stand, in suspended animation at the top of a landing and squeal, refusing to move when coaxed or prodded from either direction. On one such occasion, a housemate tried to prod her and she peed on the landing without moving any of her four hooves. In that house, which I shared with up to seven other people, she spent a lot of time in the yard. We collected and cooked food each week for Food Not Bombs so Hoochie had the pick of any vegetable matter she could possibly want, and she became more picky about what she deemed edible. Cabbage of any kind (including broccoli, bok choi and kale) were out. Potatoes and tomatoes were acceptable. Bread was best of all.

I boarded her at a pig farm in Bucks County for a week one summer so I could vacation with friends in New England where we discovered a pig toy made of pvc tubing with pig chow inside that Hooch could shake food from by butting her head underneath of it. A friend built one for us and she was a happy piggie.

She traveled with me to the Rainbow Gatherings in Alabama in and she more or less managed to adjust to traveling by car. She was terrified of jumping into the back of my station wagon at first, but we got her on board and I sat with her in the back to calm her as she took off. She peed all over me, but once she had done that she was fine for the rest of the trip (I had to suffer the inconvenience of changing my clothes and cleaning up at the first stop along the way). At the gathering, she walked on a leash and actually learned to walk through water (which she hated prior to that time) and to jump over logs. A child at that gathering commented, “she walks like a fancy lady” which was true, though when she had just hopped over a log which is something a fancy lady might have deemed unladylike. As we were leaving that gathering in the humid summer heat, Hoochie found a mud puddle and layed in the middle to sun herself. We walked around her and loaded our camping gear into the car until we were ready to go, and I again traveled in the back with Hooch, this time covered in mud, which was an improvement over pee. That was the one and only time I ever knew Hoochie to wallow in mud.

I would have thought that our camping adventure would have mellowed her fear of jumping into a car or of being leashed, but just weeks after our Alabama camping trip I got married and Hoochie was my maid of honor. She was fine getting harnessed that morning and with driving to my parent’s northeast Philly home, but she wanted no parts of climbing into my dad’s car. She dropped pellets all over his back seat as I (in my wedding gown) tried to prod her into the car without soiling my dress. But she was a picturesque member of my bridal party and the best photo I have of her was taken by my aunt at my wedding.

Soon after my wedding, I moved into a small apartment with my husband. Some of the props I had collected for the purpose of making my movie had gotten destroyed in that move, so it was decided that Hoochie would never be the movie star I had planned for her to be (and honestly I would have had to pair her with a toddler the day I adopted her in order for my original film vision to have worked). I “boarded” her out to a friend but within weeks, they received a citation from the City of Philadelphia stating that farm animals were illegal to keep within the city limits and ordering me to have her destroyed at a shelter or taken to a slaughterhouse. I would never do such a thing to a child of mine, so the search began in earnest to find an alternate “daycare” arrangement for Hooch so that she could stay outdoors during the day and then return home in the evenings to the indoors where the city’s inspection department couldn’t find her. A neighbor saw my sign in the food coop and bartered some yard work for boarding, but his neighbor talke him out of the deal. Hoochie stayed indoors with my friend for more than a month, using a handmade litter box lined with newspaper as a toilet. She moved briefly into a Kensignton warehouse with little access to the outdoors for the summer, then ended up with a friend in northeast Philadelphia where she escaped from the yard more than once and had to be hunted down. In each of these instances, I was able to visit often, bring treats and hang out with her regularly.

She traveled with me to the Wyoming Rainbow Gathering along with myself and five friends. While there she unearthed more than once secret chocolate stash that campers had stowed in their tents. She went on herb walks with me and basically was my personal companion there. She wriggled free of her tether for a number of hours one day but found me at faerie camp when a fire had broken out and the hubbub of hundreds of people passing buckets of water up the mountain scared her away from whatever foraging she had been doing.

When I moved to Germantown with my husband she moved back in with me, though she was no longer permitted to sleep in our bed. She spent her days in the yard and her nights in the kitchen and seemed to quite enjoy herself for the few months htat we lived there.

Soonafter, we won an HUD housing auction bid and bought a house with no fence down the street. Once. Our newly purchased property (where I still reside) is directly across the street from what was an institution for mentally ill persons, and Hoochie attracted a lot of attention. We leashed her to a screw in post in the middle of the yard during the day and brought her into the room that would become our kitchen at night. The residents of the home across the street fell in love with Hoochie, and brought her “treats” from marshmallows, to popcorn, to orange soda to raisins on a regular basis. The treat-giving backfired, though because she saw them in the gardens across the street and found ways to break free and get to where the goodies were. Usually I would find out because somebody would knock on the door to let me know that she got out but one day I left the house and walked the neighborhood for over an hour before I found her digging through a compost heap in a garden two blocks from home (and just doors away from the “Rib Crib” ironically).Again, my piggle was placed in the yard of a family while we tried to create a yard in our new house.

Once we fenced in our yard in 1996, a friend built us a pen for Hooch. My husband and I separated in 1997 and later divorced, but Hooch kept me company, with her prickly bristles (with extra soft spots on top of her snoot and behind her ears). I invited housemates into my house and everyone fell in love with Hoochie. When friends visited they would bring Brahmi oil and Skin-so-soft for her dry skin. When we adopted our first dog in 1997, her pen became her refuge day and night during the summer months and daytimes during the winter (unless it snowed, which kept her inside). Once we took in a second and third dog, Hoochie only made it out of the yard for special occasions.

Mount Airy Day in May was an annual event about two blocks from our house where Hoochie made an regular appearance. She was featured in the local paper more than once as the most colorful guest of the day, gobbling up the carnival fare that fell to the ground. Her last Mount Airy Day was in 2008, and she did have some trouble making the trip. She was fatigued and had to make repeat stops on the way home, but besides that day she seemed her chipper self.

When I first moved to Germantown, I took Hooch to a vet that was recommended by the vet she used to see in west Philly. He recommended a swine supplement for her and explained to us how to clip her nails because he didn’t want to do it himself. So we had pretty much stopped taking her to the vet after about 1997.

In 2009 her hooves had grown long so have been allowed to, so my housemates and I drove her to the University of Pennsylvania veterinary/equine clinic in a remote suburb for a checkup and grooming. When I picked her up from the vet later she wasn’t walking on her front right hoof, which was bleeding slightly. The vet-tech told me that it is normal for them to bleed if they are not regularly clipped because the quick in their hoof grows out. I took her back to the car and had to pick her up to get her in the car. The paperwork from the vet noted that the “pig is lame.” I was incensed because she wasn’t lame when I took her there (although it took some prodding and a few pellets of pooping, she managed to jump into the car and ride with me). When I called the vet to question this, the vet claimed that she saw her after the hoof clipping and that the vet informed her that Hoochie wasn’t walking from the moment she arrived, which simply wasn’t true. The vet also told me that Hoochie was the healthiest 17 year old pig that she had ever examined. I blamed myself for her injury- I never figured out how to get her clipped (she always threw a tantrum whenever I came anywhere near her feet), and I hoped that her foot would heal and we made 2 payments to pay of the more than $300 we were charged for the grooming and checkup, by far the most expensive of Hoochie’s medical bills.

Hoochie’s foot continued to bleed occasionally in the following weeks. A year later and I believe there are still a few bloodstains where she climbed up and down our front stairs to get in and out of the house. Otherwise, though, she seemed like a mellow and happy older fancy pig-lady.

I was working at a convention in Atlanta, Georgia on Easter weekend, when my housemate called me in a panic. Hoochie wasn’t moving, and nothing he could do to get her to move. She still took food, which I thought was a good sign and because it was good Friday, our other roommate was home and they drove her to Swedesbory Animal Hospital, where we had taken our dogs (about an hour away from our home in New Jersey). During this vet appointment, Hoochie was prescribed some antibiotics which she reportedly ate and which reportedly helped as she moved around a bit with help from her guardians (and which notably cost us considerably less than her visit to the U of P vet).

When I arrived home on Easter Monday last year, our entire household took Hooch back to the New Jersey vet. They had called over the weekend because Hoochie’s blood that they had drawn the previous Friday showed signs of liver damage. Hoochie wasn’t moving that morning until I came to her with a rope to harness her. She struggled to try to escape me but fell to the ground. Finally, I lured her with food to the middle of a wool blanket I had spread out on the porch, where she plopped down, allowing us to carry her as if the blanket were a stretcher.

We dropped her off to the vet for an MRI and went home hoping for the best. The next day, I got a call that her liver was irreparably damaged, possibly due to an infection but they couldn’t tell me. I asked the vet what I should do and was informed that there wasn’t much that could be done—I could have chosen to let her stay crippled at until her liver finally gave out or I could have chosen to put her down. When I asked the vet what she would do, there was no hesitation when she told me that she would put her down, which I agreed to, as long as we were permitted to drive up and say goodbye.

We all piled into the car to see Hoochie that last day with some grapes and snacks. She was in a stall not moving but when I came into meet her she stood up on all fours. I wasn’t sure how to interpret her movements and part of me thought she was telling me she wanted to go home and that she would be okay. So I checked with the vet once again who assured me that she essentially didn’t have a functioning liver and restated her belief that euthanasia was the compassionate alternative.

I allowed it to happen, and she is gone. This past year hasn’t been the same. For almost 18 years she composted most of our vegetable matter, cleaned up the acorns in our yard, and greeted us every time we opened the gate. The animal hospital provided us with a hoofprint and her ashes, which sit next to our great dane’s ashes in our dining room, perhaps until I have the heart to pour them all out in the yard where they both once played.

It has taken me a year to write this tribute to her life, and I could have put it off for another, which wouldn’t have been fair. So many people knew and loved her besides me and my immediate household that I feel compelled to testify to her life and times.

Rest in piece Hoochie Minh