When Pigs Swim

 

     In 2006, according to federal data, the state of Iowa contained 55,869.36 square miles, 2,987,345 humans, and 16,900,000 hogs. That works out to 52.4 humans per square mile and 302 hogs per square mile, or roughly six hogs per person. Memorize these numbers.

     Now, set the time machine to a few years ago, when several rivers began to flood the three percent of Iowa that lies along riverbanks and below levee height. In the interest of cheap math, let us assume an equal distribution of hogs across Iowa, meaning that about 480,000 hogs were going to get very wet. 

     Because today’s farmer is wired into various government GPS buoys and flow sensor devices, many hog producers had several days’ warning of what was going to happen and took preventative measures. For the most part, this involved shoring up the levees and trucking hogs to higher ground. Assuming that a hundred hogs fit in a hog trailer, it would’ve taken 4,800 truckloads to evacuate all the hogs. That didn’t happen at five bucks a gallon for diesel. Some of the farmers went to work on the levees, figuring that they could defeat the water. That didn’t happen either. 

    An average modern hog barn contains about 2,500 animals. Again, using fake statistics, lets assume that the residents of only four of these barns were left behind to fend for themselves, and we’ve got ten thousand swimming pigs. Given their porky body mass index, healthy active pigs can swim quite well, but the economic goal of hog producers is to raise a 250-pound animal in 160-180 days, so these teenage pigs were not getting a whole lot of aerobic exercise before they hit the water, and many of them drowned before they could be packaged as bacon. They just didn’t have the muscle power to keep on treading. 

    Some free-swimming hogs did make it to higher ground without pooping out, mainly by getting caught in eddies and swirling back toward the levees. This didn’t work out too well though, because just about the last place that you want to have sharp-hoofed, tough-snouted, 250-pound wallow-prone critters rooting around for tender shoots and bugs and worms is on top of the sandbags and dirt you’ve built to protect your human artifacts from the flood waters. So, in a nod to reverse Darwinism, various law enforcement agencies held an impromptu hunt and shot all the pigs on the levees. The smartest and strongest pigs did not survive after all.  

     But wait, what about those free spirits, those surfer pigs, those statistically conceivable Porky-types that went with the flow and floated downstream to safely dwell in strawberry fields forever? There is no hard data available about the overall survival rate of the swimming pigs, but you and I and Charlotte the spider know that at least one Wilbur is out there in the wild lands tonight, dining on truffles, trying to figure out how to dislodge his insecticide-impregnated, numbered, identification ear tag and trade it for a tube of sunblock and a headband.

     Which brings us to the real meat, so to speak, of this narrative. Before reading further, be advised that every member of my family has reacted to this idea with the same sneer of derision and the assumption that I’ve once again been carried away by a mental flood. These poo-poo attitudes did not stop Leonardo from inventing the parachute in 1493 (His design was successfully tested in 1998) and they are not going to keep me from sharing with you, Dear Reader, a ground floor opportunity to invest your refund check in this year’s Surefire Million-dollar Invention. Also be advised that this column is patented, copyrighted and guaranteed to cure warts, so if you rip me off I’ll dust off my Church of the Transcendental Oneness lawyer’s certificate and sue your butt clear to Bakersfield. 

    Ok. Ready? Let’s invent the PFD, the Porcine Flotation Device or, if you prefer, the PETA, the Piggy Emergency Treading Appliance. This is really a rather simple design problem. We need to come up with a life preserver for pigs, one that can be easily and quickly attached to a hog, or ten thousand of them, in case of the next flood. 

    Our invention should be able to support 350 pounds indefinitely, be brightly colored, with room for identification number or logo, and not take up much storage room when not deployed. (I see racks of these things hanging along the interior of the hog barn.)  To save space, I lean toward CO2 inflation rather than closed-cell foam. Based on my experience with trying to rope six pigs in the rain, I suggest not looking at a vest configuration. A pig doesn’t have much of a neck. So, let’s build something with a single strap around a pig just behind its front legs that deploys with the yank of a cord. (My daughter suggested that we look into modifying the thousands of unused ripcord life preservers found underneath decommissioned airplane seats.) We should also keep our manufacturing costs below ten dollars per unit so we can afford to sell them for thirty each. We can make them look like hotdog buns if we wish. 

    Now let’s run an imaginary beta test on our product. We are hog farmers. It is raining, as it surely will again, and the rivers are rising. The levees are failing, as they surely will again, and we don’t have trucks. We have 2500, 250-pound, hogs in one single barn, or 625,000 pounds of pork on the hoof, worth a market price of 75 cents per pound for a total of around $450,000. Luckily, we have at our ready 2500 Porky’s PFD’s (purchase price $75,000) and we have ten guys from Honduras to help. 

      The hogs are conveniently penned. If each guy can strap one PFD on one pig and jerk the cord in thirty seconds, we are suiting-up 20 pigs per minute. It takes two hours and twenty minutes to arm the hogs against the flood. We open the doors to the barn and head for high ground leaving the pigs in the pens, in their water wings, to float away if the water gets too deep. If the flood occurs and we save only 420 hogs we break even on the flotation device investment. If the water never rises, we send the devices back to Porky’s Pork Protection League for a ten-dollar per unit ($25,000) recharge and are ready for next year. 

     This entire notion is a product of my reverence toward bacon. You needn’t invest. I’ll use my Powerball winnings when my numbers swim home to roost.