This Little Piggy Came to S. Pasadena--and Stayed

A pig wearing a red kerchief around her midriff runs out of the two-story Colonial in South Pasadena.

Sophie seems very happy this morning, and it’s easy to see why.

As her owner’s party guests gather in the kitchen, Sophie is back in the dining room, sneakily eating out of one guest’s purse--chewing gum, then lipstick, then a bottle of headache pills.

Once Sophie’s foraging has been discovered, her owner offers a hasty apology and an explanation: It isn’t easy living with a pig, especially if she eats like one. But, still, pet pigs have many virtues.

“She’s very affectionate,” says Rosemary Wilson, who received her Vietnamese potbellied pet for Mother’s Day. “Every time I come home, she comes to the door to greet me. It’s very hard to be in a bad mood when you have a pig wagging her tail at you. She’s a day brightener.

“She’s so responsive. If I go in the back yard and call her, she comes running.”

Sophie, a present from Wilson’s four children, weighs 55 pounds and is about a foot tall--the size of an average dog. A black overlay resembling a saddle covers her back, and black also frames her squared, pink nose and erect pink ears.

She is housebroken and sits or wags her tail on command. If Rosemary’s husband, Gerry, a retired executive, lies on the floor to do back exercises, Sophie nuzzles his shoulder. When Rosemary sits on the couch, Sophie puts her head in her mistress’s lap.

Sometimes Rosemary, a substitute teacher, dresses Sophie in pearls and a pink tutu and shows her to children at her granddaughter’s school.

But while Sophie can be a ham at such performances, she won’t do much if she’s tired. She burrows under a blanket and naps on three pillows in a corner of the den, only her rump visible from the pile.

Potbellied pigs may have been domesticated in China thousands of years ago. They are popular in Asia but relatively rare here, although they’ve enjoyed a boomlet of popularity in recent years.

Rosemary fell in love with the pigs while visiting the Honolulu zoo years ago. Returning to the mainland, she decided the $5,000 purchase price was too expensive. Prices dropped, and her children bought Sophie for $1,200 from the Pig-A-Dilly Ranch, a breeding farm in Banning.

When Sophie arrived, Rosemary put a red kerchief on her “just to let people know that she was a pet.”

The pig’s effect on neighborhood traffic was immediate.

“Cars slow down and circle, and drivers just stare,” says Kathy Weber, a neighbor whose four children play with Sophie in the Wilsons’ front yard. “People get out of their car and say, ‘That’s really a pig!’ ”

Trouble loomed when the South Pasadena City Council found an old ordinance that forbids raising pigs on residential property.

Rosemary and pet-store owner Gail Matthews, who also owns a porker, took their animals to a council meeting to seek an amendment.

“The two pigs munched on grapes in our laps while Gail gave a little talk about how clean they were and how smart they were and what nice pets they were,” Rosemary says.

At one point, the council members petted the pigs, which have coarse hair.

“It’s kind of like petting a shoe brush,” says council member Jim Woollacott Jr. “We were getting quite a kick out of it. They’re real friendly animals, but by the same token, we’re not going to start (allowing commercial) raising (of) pigs in town.”

An amendment allowing one pet pig per household passed easily, although other cities have fought similar changes.

Sophie seems content in her surroundings. She usually gets up before everyone else, Rosemary says. “She goes to check on everybody to see what they’re doing. She’s innately curious. Once that’s done, she’s on her own. She likes to go outside and root around. She grazes. She eats a little of the grass.”

Sophie also plays with the Wilsons’ large Irish setter, Red. And she will walk, snorting, from room to room. If she finds someone who will scratch her stomach, she’ll roll over on her side, her top rear leg suspended in air, luxuriating in the attention.

Until she smells food, that is.

Sophie likes to eat pig kibble and grapes (“They’re pig candy,” Rosemary says) and almost everything else you offer her. In the old days, whenever Rosemary made a salad, Sophie came running and butted Rosemary’s leg with her nose, begging for trimmings.

“That nose is tough,” Rosemary says. “They root with that nose. We learned that we (should) only feed her in her bowl.”

But Sophie would not deliberately hurt anybody. She is, above all, affectionate.

She follows children around as they play in the yard. When Gerry works outside, Sophie is at his heels while Red sleeps in the sun.

“She talks to you all the time,” Rosemary says. “If she thinks she’s home alone, she’ll go in the front hall and call to see where anybody is.

“I’ll be upstairs and I’ll say ‘I’m up here, Sophie.’

“Then she comes up the stairs, and gets in (the) upstairs hall, and calls again.”

“I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’

“Then she comes in and says, ‘Oh, there you are.’ ”

In pig Latin, of course.