Pig’s Defenders Trying to Bring Home the Bacon

Living on the sunny Palos Verdes Peninsula can be wonderful, unless you’re a homeless pig named Grunt.

Grunt was abandoned about three months ago, and since then residents, animal rights advocates and animal control officials have been unable to find him a new sty to call home. If he is not adopted from the Los Angeles County Animal Control Shelter in Carson within two weeks, Grunt may be put to death, shelter officials said.

The problem with finding someone to adopt Grunt is that most people are put off by his size.

The porker is about five feet long, four feet tall and from 800 to 1,000 pounds. One person who cared for Grunt compared him to a Volkswagen Bug.

“They are cute when they’re small, but they get big,” said Leslie Mitchell, district supervisor for the Carson shelter.

Family Moved

Grunt’s sad tale began in a spacious home in Rolling Hills Estates, a semi-rural, well-to-do community on the peninsula where a family raised him from the time he was a piglet.

In January, the family prepared to move away and decided it would be too difficult to take the portly pig along, Mitchell said. And the family’s attempts to find him a new home were unsuccessful.

Jerye Mooney, a representative of the Fund for Animals, a national animal rights group, said neighbors told her that the family finally turned Grunt over to its gardener for slaughtering.

Neighbors Heard Squeals

The neighbors saved Grunt. When the gardener and some friends tried to kill him in the back yard of the family’s home by stabbing him in the neck, the pig’s squeals caught their attention and they quickly called the sheriff’s station in Lomita, Mooney said.

As deputies rushed to the scene, the gardener and his associates fled.

The rescuing deputies contacted animal control officials, who took Grunt to the Carson shelter, said Levonne Rodstein, a volunteer there.

Grunt stayed at the shelter until March, when Dee Keese, a 4-H volunteer, offered to care for him and find him a new home. Keese took Grunt to her one-acre ranch in an unincorporated area near Rolling Hills Estates, where she keeps goats, horses, possums and llamas.

Keese said she tried for more than a month to find Grunt a new home. She called such animal rights groups as Friends of Animals and Last Chance for Animals, but after seeing Grunt they all declined to take him.

“Even though these people were nice to pigs, it was just too big,” Keese said. “It’s sad but I’m trying to keep a sense of humor about it.”

Grunt met with some more bad luck when one of Keese’s neighbors complained to animal control officials that he might be dangerous to children if he ever broke out of his corral. In fact, Keese said, Grunt is tame and likes people. “I have pictures of my fourth-grader riding on his back,” she said. But after looking into the complaint, shelter officials realized that his temperament was not the issue. It turned out that county zoning laws prohibit pigs in the area.

So, last Thursday Grunt was loaded into a trailer and taken back to Carson. “Right now he’s just kicking back at the shelter,” Mitchell said.

Grunt, who is believed to be no more than 3 years old, gets along well with the dozen or so chickens and ducks that share his corral, his keepers said. The brown-and-black swine prefers slop over hay. His favorite food is a runny mixture of leftovers and dog food.

When he is not eating, Grunt is usually lying in a mud hole in the corner of the corral.

Grunt’s admirers haven’t given up their efforts to help him, but they realize that time is running out.

“I’d just like to find it a home where it won’t be turned into bacon,” Mooney said.