Piggy Backers : Animals: County may allow keeping one petite variety of swine as pets. But strict rules would be imposed on owning the little porkers.

Item 7, deep in the the Planning Commission agenda, was a pig of an amendment.

Nothing startling there. In the public mind, politicians and pork have always gone together--feeding at the civic trough, pork-barrel politics and all that.

This pork is on the hoof, though, and sometimes has names like Sophie and Elmer.

On Wednesday, the county commission acted on Item 7, setting an April 15 hearing on whether county residents should be allowed to keep Vietnamese potbellied pigs--the petite show swine of the rural wanna-be set--as pets.

The one-house, one-pig ordinance, drafted even as the pets’ popularity may be peaking and prices of pig futures are falling, specifies leash law, license and pooper scooper restrictions, spay and neuter requirements, as well as length, height and weight limitations--20 inches high, 40 inches long and 120 pounds, max.

“It’s not necessarily a large, tall animal, but it’s a block of cement,” said Frank R. Andrews, director of county animal care and control, whose office drafted one of the two ordinances needed to legalize the pigs.

His department has gone through this before.

“I remember the tiny horses,” he said. “Before that, pygmy goats were a big thing.” With pigs, “at first our attitude was, who needs one more exotic pet (ordinance) to contend with? After looking into it, it appears to be a non-problem,” even less so with the one-pig limit and sterilization requirements to keep anyone from trying to raise them for profit.

Mobs of miniature-pig owners have not exactly been hammering at the county’s gates demanding action. But Andrews sees this as a precautionary measure, to forestall episodes like the one when a Covina-area woman’s neighbors complained about her small pig. She was cited for illicit livestock, and she had to farm the pig out to a friend under a judge’s orders. “A very traumatic experience,” said Andrews.

Some cities, among them Burbank, South Pasadena and Monterey Park, already permit the pigs, and the county’s measure would apply only in its unincorporated areas. “Those communities that have licensed them,” said Andrews, “have really not had any great number of problems.”

And in the county, “we don’t anticipate any large rush of applications.”

Lest anyone think this is a silk-purse measure to slip some 800-pound Poland China hog past the authorities and into the family room, Vietnamese potbellied pigs-- Sus scrofa jubatus Muller or Sus scrofa (cristatus) vittatus-- are the Brownie Scouts of swine: clean, quiet, smart and little. Like the humans who love them, they can get sunburned, have a low pain threshold, and can come down with arthritis if they get fat.

A year or more ago, they were commanding prices in the thousands; now a few hundred can buy one in some places, Andrews hears. There are reports of rip-offs: authentic potbellies, which are entirely or almost all black, being crossbred with white laboratory stock, and the piglets sold as purebreds.

Andrews worries that when the novelty wears off and the price drops into bacon range, potbellied pigs may get dumped at animal shelters the way bunnies and chicks are after Easter, when they outgrow cuteness. “As with some of these things, they’re fads.”

If Andrews needed more evidence of that, there is Grunt, a plush Vietnamese potbelly his staff gave him. It snorts when you squeeze it and has a handy red plastic carrying handle. “I may bring it to the hearing,” Andrews said.