The Value of Social Media Through the Eyes of a Dead Pig

The small southern town I grew up in was made up mostly of farmers. the majority of our neighbors were at least a half-mile away and not visible from our home. A few neighbors, however, weren’t a part of the farming community. There were a growing number of residents who worked in a nearby city that housed a number of high-tech companies, including a NASA facility — but I’ll get back to this later.

Our farm wasn’t commercial. My grandfather did raise acres of watermelons that were sold to local grocery stores and sometimes on the side of the road out of the back of a truck, but we mostly raised crops for our dinner table. What couldn’t be eaten fresh was frozen or canned for winter. Even leisure time at our house often involved watching television while shelling peas or breaking apart various nuts that would eventually be used in Christmas pies.

When I was young, we had some livestock but eventually, the only animals on our farm were either wild or pets. While we still had cows, part of my farm chores involved going to the barn to bottle feed a calf and put out fresh hay. Needless to say, I was surprised when I went to do this one morning and found an enormous black pig standing in one of the open stalls where chickens used to reside, eating what was left of some grain. I say it was a surprise because we didn’t have any pigs.

Now, when you live in a farming community, you watch out for your other neighbors. I had no idea who this pig belonged to but I was sure that they would be looking for him and I didn’t want him to escape again before they could come and pick him up. So, I closed him up in the stall, finished my chores, and went back home to tell my father that there was a pig in the barn.

For a couple of weeks, Dad tried to find out who the pig belonged to, but none of the other farmers were missing a pig. We asked every neighbor who had pigs or might have pigs if he belonged to them and no one claimed him. We kept him fed and waited to see if anyone showed up looking for him. No one did.

After we could find no explanation for how this pig came to be in our barn, my father made the decision to send him to slaughter. If anyone came to claim him after the fact, then we’d just have to give him back in the form of food that he’d likely been destined to be anyway.

I know some of you will think that’s horrible, but it's just how things were with farmers. So, the pig ended up being processed by a local butcher and in our freezer.

Still, no one ever came to claim him. He ended up on our table, as well as a few of our family, friends, and neighbors’ tables.

Fast forward about twenty years. My sister is having dinner with her husband, her in-laws, and some friends they’d invited over. The friends begin talking about how their parents used to live near where my sister told them she had lived growing up. They told a story about how once when their parents were out of town for an extended period of time, they had been tasked with staying at their house to feed their pets.

One day, they found that the black pig their mom and dad raised as a pet had simply disappeared from its pen. It was never seen again. They called their parents and they told them to ask their neighbors. The parents were a part of the folks who worked in the tech city, rather than farmers. No one really knew them in the community and we’d have never expected them to have a pet pig.

The children asked their closest neighbors, none of whom were farmers, and were told no one had seen him. After a while, they assumed he’d been stolen or been eaten by wild animals and stop looking.

My sister called me later that night after she’d left her in-law's house and began telling me this story about the neighbor’s pig. They lived in a house that adjoined our property, but there were thirty acres of land and a large bank of trees between us. Apparently, Mr. Oinkers had gotten loose, made his way through the trees and across our pasture before finding shelter in our barn — or so he thought.

Between realizing the horror of our having eaten someone’s pet and the laughter of how ridiculous it was to finally find out where the pig came from after two decades, I asked my sister the obvious question.

“Did you tell them what happened to the pig?”

My sister said that she just couldn’t — and that was probably best for everyone involved.

I know you are thinking to yourself, “but what does this whole pig story have to do with social media?”

This —

As much as we disparage social media these days, there is one thing it does well. It brings people who don’t normally associate with one another together in one place. It allows people to reach a large audience when they’ve found something and are trying to locate its owner.

If we’d had social media in the early ’80s, Mr. Oinkers would most likely have been back at home the same day he was found instead of ending up meeting his unfortunate end after hiding in the wrong barn.

In a strange twist to this story, this same neighbor’s pit bull wandered down to our property about a year later and killed one of my cats. At that time, we still had no idea it had been his pet pig we’d eaten.

I guess karma really does exist.