Porky Pop-ins: Runaway piglet too wily for Cocagne owners
10 people participated in an event to catch Porky, but Porky got the gold medal
After outsmarting his Cocagne-area owners for two weeks, runaway piglet Porky Pop-ins was finally caught late Tuesday afternoon.
After 326 hours on the lam, Porky Pop-ins was finally captured at 5:15 p.m. AT and will be returned to the enclosure with his five siblings.
Porky's problems began two weeks ago when Tiffani Demmons said her fiancé was unloading their six new piglets from the truck when Porky, just nine weeks old, jumped out and ran into the woods behind their homestead.
Demmons believes the extremely smart and fast piglet evaded them by travelling a network of underground tunnels in her backyard to help him move under the radar, she said.
He came out of the woods three times a day for his meals, but vanished as soon as the couple tried to catch him.
"Every night that we see him … I try to distract him and [my fiancé] tries to get around him," she said in an interview before he was captured.
Demmons joked that it started to feel as though this little piglet was mocking her.
"He also usually has a black mask of mud on his face," she said. "Yesterday, he was spotted wearing muddy drawers. And he's pink, and yeah, you'll definitely be able to determine his evil oink."
She said every year, one of the couple's pigs escapes the enclosure, but the animal is usually caught within a day.
Porky the "peek-a-boo piggy" was the first to elude the couple for several days while regularly eating from his special bowl, placed near a trap made using a dog cage with the door attached to a fishing line, she said.
Demmons even organized an event for family and friends to try to catch the fugitive.
Saturday evening's "peek-a-boo piggy Olympics" involved searchers with lights, who headed into the woods looking for Porky, she said.
In a social media post, Demmons called the event "an absolute hit."
"Porky Pop-ins, our reigning champion, outsmarted us all with a gold medal in evading capture while maintaining maximum cuteness," she wrote.
Demmons has blogged about her piglet adventures on social media for about two weeks. She said it is a fun hobby, but she was getting more and more worried about Porky.
"I just have a comedic sense of humour and I was having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that we lost the pig, and we have been unable to catch it because it's in the wild."
She was concerned the piglet would become "pork chops" if it had remained in the woods because of the possibility of predators like bears and coyotes. Demmons heard Porky squealing during the night recently in what may have been a fight with a raccoon.
"Unfortunately, that's his outcome," she said. "But at this point, he's going to be entertainment for me until he meets the table."
Diane Goguen, Demmon's sister-in-law and neighbour, saw Porky running across her property.
"He is pretty fast," she said in an interview before his capture.
Goguen said she often joked that once Porky got a bit bigger, he would slow down enough for them to catch him.
"We talk about it every day — I come outside walking with my daughter daily, and I'm always peeking just to see, is he out?" she said.
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