Pet pig sneaks out, gets lost in Vicksburg

Published 9:35 am Monday, March 28, 2016

This little piggy went wee, wee, wee all the way home.

Kelcy Pugh’s four-month-old pig Porkchop was nowhere to be found Thursday morning when she discovered he wasn’t in the backyard, but later that afternoon he wandered into a neighbors yard. With the help of Jana Vance just hours later the pig and owner were reunited.

Pugh said she fed Porkchop at 8 a.m. but when she returned to his bowl later and no food had been eaten, she knew something was wrong.

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“I went to look for him and he wasn’t in the yard anymore,” Pugh said.

She made phone calls to neighbors and walked the area around Candee and 2nd streets to see if anyone had seen her pig in the streets of Vicksburg, but no one had any answers for her.

“I knew he wouldn’t go too far,” Pugh said.

Later that afternoon a neighbor who lived about 200 feet down the street sat on his porch reading the mail he just took out of the mailbox when the pig walked right up to him.

“Obviously you could tell the pig was a pet,” Vance said. “Not only is it a little pig running around in town but it was obviously a tame pig, and [the neighbor] said it was immediately very friendly.”

A couple neighbors in the area got together and posted the lost pig on the neighborhood’s Nextdoor page, a community message board that verifies users by their address.

“What we use it for is just for is just to stay in touch about things going on in the neighborhood,” Vance said.

The post sparked Vance’s interest, and out of curiosity she went to see the pig.

“Of course we get, ‘Has anyone lost this dog?’ all the time, but when someone posts ‘Has anyone lost a pig?’ that catches your attention immediately,” Vance said.

She offered to keep the pig as long as necessary because she had a fenced in yard. Porkchop acclimated to the Vance’s backyard quickly and played with the family’s dogs.

“He immediately started running with the dogs, playing and had a big time,” Vance said.

She then began posting on Facebook to look for Porkchop’s owner. Luckily, Pugh’s aunt saw the posts on Facebook and got in contact with her. Porkchop and Pugh reunited at the Vance home in the area of Drummond and National streets around 5 p.m. Thursday.

“We probably only had him for a few hours,” Vance said.

Porkchop was intended to be an indoor pig, but Pugh said he chooses to stay outside most of the time. She thinks Porkchop crawled through a hole her neighbor’s dog dug under the fence. She thinks the pig may have followed the dog and forgot how to get back home.

The Pugh family has had Porckchop since he was six weeks old. Pugh and her husband chose to get a pig for their son Keaton, 2, to play with.

“We found the pig and he’s kept up,” Pugh said. “He does the job.”

Vance has offered to pig-sit Porkchop and is at work talking her husband into getting the family a pig of their own.