The Pig Won

The season of shoving and spending suddenly took on a tender new meaning the other day when I heard that a city council, armed with taxpayers’ money and a herd of lawyers, had gone to war with a pork chop and lost.

I thought to myself: Yes, there must be a God on high to create such juicy symbolism for a struggling newspaper columnist at a time when, due to the demands of December, he is at his lowest creative ebb.

Peace and goodwill, while nice to sing about, lack the conflict necessary to compose a satisfying essay, but a pig triumphing over a city council in its own sty has it all.

So join me in hosannas to Montana the pet porker who has finally won the right to remain in the city of La Puente despite efforts to place it in the same category as cobras and wild elephants in order to force its removal.

It took the state Court of Appeal to lay a wreath of victory around Montana’s hairy neck by affirming an earlier court decision overriding a city ordinance that outlawed pigs. The ordinance, simply put, was ambiguous and unenforceable.

Faced with that reality, the La Puente city fathers gave up the fight. It took only three years, three court appearances, eight public hearings and the expenditure of $63,000 for them to figure out that there might be more pressing problems in town than trying to deport a pig, but who said we were dealing with top-of-the-line primates here?

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Montana is the pet of Greg and Michelle Walker. It is no ordinary porker, but a Vietnamese potbellied pig, a dwarf breed brought into this country in the mid-1980s to satisfy the mothering instincts of those for whom the needs of dogs and cats are no longer sufficient.

To hear the Walkers tell it, Montana is loving, gentle, housebroken and smart, which places it in a slightly higher category than most city council members. Also, it doesn’t crow, bark, yowl on a back fence, use a leaf blower or otherwise upset the tranquillity of their neighborhood.

Then why, I hear you ask, was the city busting its butt to declare Montana Sus scrofa non grata? One council member suggested that pet pigs were bad for La Puente’s image, but since La Puente, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, has no image, the argument was quickly set aside.

It all began in January 1995, when the Walkers were cited by an animal control officer for violating the city ordinance against lions, tigers, poisonous snakes, oxen and swine. A pig, the officer correctly reasoned, wasn’t a snake or an ox so it must be a swine, right?

The Walkers, ordered to get rid of the pig, appealed. They had purchased Montana a few years earlier for $1,000 and loved it dearly. Their three daughters considered the pig sort of a half sister, which to some might seem a little peculiar, but then they probably aren’t pig fanciers.

After several public hearings, the council decided that the law was the law and must be applied as equally to a pig as it would to, say, a Ted Bundy or a Jeffrey Dahmer and went to court to have Montana run out of town.

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Leading the fight was City Councilman Lou Perez who, some have said, hates Montana because he dreamed one night that a giant pig was terrorizing the city. Not so, says the councilman. He was simply trying to uphold the ordinance adopted in 1967 to eliminate the barnyard image of La Puente.

“I have nothing personal against anyone’s pet,” he said to me, “but the code says no pigs, and if something walks like a pig, looks like a pig and makes noise like a pig, it’s a pig.”

The Walkers, faced with a battery of city lawyers seeking to drop-kick Montana over the city line, hired attorney C. Robert Ferguson, who led an army of pig lovers to ultimate victory. “What would you rather live next door to,” he asked anyone willing to listen, “a pit bull or a pig?”

“I’m delighted,” said Sally Holguin Fallon, the sole council member who stood foursquare for the pig. “It was ridiculous to begin with. We have gang violence here, a terrible drug problem and twice as many murders this year as last, and we’re concentrating on trying to run a pig out of town?”

The city has acknowledged spending $43,000 in legal fees but Fallon estimates that it probably cost another $20,000 in staff time. Others guess the figure to be more like $80,000.

The Walkers will only say they spent all their savings plus $3,000 or so raised through carwashes and cake sales. “We’re just glad it’s over,” Michelle Walker says. “It got so bad at times we thought they’d get a search warrant and kick in the door to take the pig.”

They’re so glad, in fact, they’re hosting a barbecue in January to celebrate. Pork, of course, won’t be on the menu. They’d consider pot-roasted councilman but I think there’s an ordinance against that, too.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com