The Day No Pig Would Die

  I just read that a woman in Berlin was taken by helicopter to Albany Med after a pig she was trying to slaughter fell on her.  The report said it was an accident. I doubt very much this is true, not if they took the pig's motivation into consideration. 
     I still suffer from PTPSS (Post Traumatic Pig Slaughter Syndrome) whenever I think of the double pig slaughtering  in the house where Warrens lived, later Mulligan's house.  The pigs had been raised and housed in the garage in the back yard of the house. No one paid too much attention to them until one day the word among the kids on the street was, "They're gonna kill the pigs today." The tipoff was the smoke.  Some cut-off barrels had been fashioned into tubs and filled with water, and set atop a flaming pyre of old rubber tires. The idea was to put the dead pigs into the water to scald the carcasses.  I can see and smell the acrid, suffocating  smoke from the burning tires, hear the ear-splitting squeals from the stabbed pig and its blood-crazed mate, and see Joby Andrew astride the frantic doomed  pig while stabbing it in the neck or heart.  His intention wasn't actually to ride the pig, but his arms were around its neck, with one hand wielding a knife. The pig did not go down easily, but ran round and round the confines of the garage,  Joby being dragged along with it, his heels digging into the muck while the other men tried to stop the desperate flight,  men and pigs thrashing around in the muck of the makeshift pigpen, a messy mixture of mud, pig poop, and fresh blood.  Some kids stayed to watch the death, but I felt sick and went home.  The smell of burning rubber still makes me sick
    I don't know the condition of the woman from Berlin, but it was said she suffered from a compressed chest.  No word about the pig.