[Gpdd] ANNOUNCE: Virgil

[pat schuett]

Hi everyone,

I've been checking the website of my local Humane Society for a number of months now, hoping to adopt a friend for my new little boar Floyd (formerly Sugar Plum --- this same shelter told me he was a girl when I adopted him!).  For months, they had no piggies at all, then suddenly two weeks ago, there were two: one a young boar and one adult, marked as "gender unknown".

The following weekend, I had dozens of errands to do, but in the middle was a trip out to the shelter, carrier in hand, to see the little boar.  As luck would have it, when I got there I found he had been adopted an hour earlier.  I did take a quick look at the other piggie (all white, long-haired) but then got distracted and raced off to the next errand on the list.

Well, I'm sure you can imagine what happened next.  I
 couldn't stop thinking about the white piggie's sad little face as I walked away, and I wondered why on earth it hadn't occurred to me to take him home.  My fate was sealed when I was e-mailing Penny Charlesworth about something else and happened to mention him to her (for your information, do NOT do this unless you are prepared to end up with another guinea pig!) and before I knew it, I was back out at the shelter again with my carrier, filling out the adoption form for the white piggie.

The shelter told me they had picked him up after a family on the edge of the city had called them --- he had been living in their back yard under the deck for about a month, and they were worried a cat would get hold of him!  Apparently he was crawling with fleas and badly in need of a bath when the shelter picked him up, but after being treated for the fleas (twice) and cleaned up, he seemed none the worse for his "walk on the wild side".   (I did take him in for a vet check before I even brought him home, and she gave him a clean bill of health, too.)

The family's kids had named him Ginny (apparently thinking any creature with those white flowing locks must be a girl, but by the time I came to get him the shelter had correctly identified him as a boar), so I gave that a bit of a male twist and named him Virgil.   

He is a wonderful piggie, very calm, sweet and easy to handle.  It's just amazing to me that anyone would have let him loose, or had him escape and not looked very hard for him; he obviously was well treated at some time in his life, because he loves being petted and has even stood still quite patiently for some hair trimming.   He's now been at my place just over a week, and met the other piggies (the girls, Doris, Olivia and Apple, and of course, Floyd, who looks tiny next to Virgil) for the first time yesterday. 

I can't tell yet whether he and Floyd might get on well enough to live together, but I'm going to try introducing them (on neutral territory and with a large plate of veggies for distraction) in a few weeks --- wish me luck!

                                                                                                           Pat S.