Happy as a pig

Ozzie Osborn had the look of a contented man this week.

In fact, he looked as happy as a pig in the Upper Ojai. Also happy as a pig in the Upper Ojai was an 800-pound porker named Grunt, lately saved from an untimely death.

Grunt and Osborn, a 68-year-old plumbing contractor who is no relation to the rock star of the same name, got together Saturday at Osborn’s Spring Water Ranch in the Upper Ojai, and the two appeared made for each other.

“I think he’s going to be happy here,” said Osborn, scratching his new charge between the ears.

“Uuunhhhnnkkkkmmm,” replied Grunt, guzzling at a pan of corn as dogs yapped and roosters crowed and Osborn’s granddaughters sang songs for a small group of visitors.

Early Saturday morning, the black-bristled boar had waddled onto a horse trailer at a Los Angeles animal shelter. TV cameramen and newspaper reporters bade him farewell, gazing regretfully at the back end of a running story.

This was, after all, the hog that had rooted at America’s heartstrings.

The tale began in January when sheriff’s deputies chased off gardeners trying to slaughter Grunt in a back yard in Rolling Hills Estates, a high-on-the-hog semirural enclave on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The 18-month-old hog, waist-high to a man of average height, had been left behind by a family that moved.

Grunt resided in a shelter and faced the prospect of being put to death. A 4-H volunteer took him in, but angry neighbors bearing zoning ordinances forced him out. Grunt was back in the shelter, and the clock again was ticking.

The Fund for Animals, an animal rights group, contacted Osborn in an attempt to find Grunt a home where he’d have a place in the family instead of the freezer.

Osborn was chosen over more than 200 pig-fanciers who had opened their homes to Grunt after stories of his plight appeared from coast to coast.

“They heard I liked pigs,” said Osborn, who now has 12 of them in addition to 20-odd cats, some dogs, goats, geese, guinea hens and a couple of peacocks. “They knew I had a good home for them.”

Osborn’s penchant for pigs took an unfortunate turn in 1984. He was feeding the 18 he had at the time when 20 hundred-dollar bills he had just gotten from the bank fell from his shirt pocket.

“I didn’t miss them until 45 minutes later, but it was too late,” he said. “Those bills have fiber and sugar in them. . . . “

But Osborn still loves pigs. Jerye Mooney, a representative of the Fund for Animals, even presented him with a plaque Saturday.

It bore a spider web and the legend, “Some Pig,” a reference to “Charlotte’s Web,” the E. B. White classic about a spider that saves a pig from the slaughterhouse.

Grunt, however, didn’t know from literature.

He had to be coaxed from the horse trailer by Osborn and two farmhands.

He waddled into a fenced four-acre enclosure with its own spring-fed lake.

He gingerly stepped over two old tires in the shade of an oak tree, sniffed around a porcelain plumbing fixture next to a fence post, peered into a shed and finally plunged into the pond.

“There go my waterlilies!” shrieked Osborn’s wife, Rhonda.

A bunch of geese came honking around from a nearby cove to harangue the intruder. Roosters were crowing. A dog named Vidal Sassoon was barking.

Osborn’s granddaughters debated whether such a big pig could drown in such a small lake.

Grunt was home.