[Gpdd] ANNOUNCE New Piggyfriend for Pigmas

[Penny Charlesworth]

I went to collect my new little Piggyfriend this afternoon. The weather was awful with freezing fog and I could hardly see the entrance to the shelter and almost went past the gate. I wrapped his carrier in a car rug and had the heater on full blast all the way home but now he is safe and warm at home and tucking into some tasty veggies.

He is mostly black, with some white around his face and a white stripe going halfway around his middle. He has small ginger patches here and there, mostly around his rear end. I hope that Janneke and Mieke will continue their wonderful album next year and I will be able to send in his pigture. He is certainly a cuddle pig and waits to be picked up. He had a lot of attention at the shelter even if not at his previous home.

Jemma at the shelter copied all of his vet's notes for me, not only from the shelter vet but the one used by his previous owner, who had kept him with another piggy.

For some reason the two piggies were fighting and my piggy was taken to the vet to have an injury to his nose attended to. Here is another example of the incompetence of many vets in England when it comes to our little friends. This vet advised that my piggy, the submissive one of the two, should be neutered!  Whatever difference would that have made apart from lining the vet's pocket?  Reading further down the notes, I discovered that both piggies were taken to be neutered as the owner could not decide which one was dominant. A month later and they are back at the vet because they are still fighting and my piggy has another injury, to his mouth this time.

Jemma said that the owner ( I cannot call her a slave because she did not have the sense to buy another cage ) did not seem to have much idea about how to care for her piggies. The second piggy, called Phil, was rehomed and my piggy was brought to the shelter, the reason given on the admission form being that the owners were moving, didn't have time for pets and couldn't afford them anyway. A new cage would have been considerably cheaper than all of those vet bills but at least the piggies ended up in new homes.

At the shelter, he has been treated for an eye injury, which has now healed up completely and he has a little stiffness in one back leg. Various remedies have been tried and the leg is much improved but I will keep an eye on it. The shelter vet even tried some acupuncture.

I have him in my hospital cage at the moment as I want to introduce him to some girls when I am going to be home all day to supervise but he has had a run around on the carpet and talked to various piggies through the wires. He has already completed his quarantine period at the shelter. I carried him around and told him everypig's name. A lot of them rushed out to either say "hello" or ask for more food. I'm not sure which! 

I was trying to think of a Christmassy name for him, one that I have not used before. I couldn't call him Santa, I don't like the name Noel and as he is a mostly black piggy, all the snow, frost and ice style of names were out. Then I started thinking of things that one is pleased to see at Christmas. It is freezing cold here and when I looked out of the window yesterday morning the frost was so thick that it looked as though it had snowed in the night. My mind wandered to thoughts of a mediaeval Christmas with entertainers coming to a snowy castle for the Yuletide festivities and I came up with the name Minstrel. I was cogitating this when the piggies were eating their breakfast and I was looking at the BBC news website whilst they munched. Every day there is a section called "England's Big Picture", in which a small section of a picture is shown and one can guess what the large picture is going to be. It is usually on a topical or whimsical theme, not serious news, today's example showing a dog bowl and the large picture was of the first dog having a meal at Battersea's new "Soup Kitchen for Dogs" in London.

The picture yesterday showed a small piece of a stained glass window and when I clicked on it, the large picture showed a Christmas angel and the title of the image was " Minstrel Angel ". What a coincidence! So that was settled. My piggy's name is Minstrel.

Thank you M and Fugly for telling me that the Grant for whom he was originally named is bald, which this piggy certainly is not. I am assuming that the other piggy, Phil, was named for another character in this programme, which I have never seen.

Thank you also to everyone who has welcomed him in advance.

He is eating up really well but did not know what to do with a cucumber slice! A pile of grass cut from under a garden table where it was not too frosty ( and subsequently thawed by a radiator ), a carrot with its leaves, some flat leafed parsley and a piece of broccoli have all been appreciated and he is currently nosing in his dry food bowl in between chatting to Daisy and Nova in the pen next door. I think that he will soon fatten up.

Birdie, will you add Minstrel to the Piggyfriend boys on the Roll Call. There are 26 piggies now.

I've written far too much but everypig deserves to have his story told.

Minstrel says "hello" to all the GPDD piggies ( in between mouthfuls of hay ).

Penny and the Piggyfriends.