Death of a Pig

(Apologies to E.B. White, and my mother, who considered his to be a perfect essay)

I spent several minutes this morning with a disemboweled stuffed pig and I feel I might account for this stretch of time, though I threw away the pig, and I was only mildly inconvenienced, and things might never have gone the other way round. Only thanks to technology, and the video I made, at 10:30 a.m., can I recall the minutes sharply. This certainty afflicts me with a sense of personal responsibility; if I were not so distracted I could have saved the stuffed pig.

The scheme of buying a stuffed pig online, from Wag dot com in December of 2014, and giving it to Captain on Christmas morning, was an impulse, following the success of their online marketing.  It was a transaction enacted by many households with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder of the stuffed pig, being premeditated, is perhaps only remarkable in its delay. Captain’s vigorous attempts no match for the tough toy, lasting years and years, but the quick and skillful destruction came from the teeth and jaws of the much younger Fellow, and the strewn stuffing and disemboweled pig met an unceremonial ending in the trash. 

In the baffling sameness of days during this pandemic, today might have been yesterday or the day before. Fellow visited the basket of stuffed toys that sits on top of his kennel. He began to play with it, with Eggi looking on. The Bacon Provider, who never stops working now and certainly never did before, gravely tapped away at his laptop keyboard, answering a final email before his next call. Otherwise the kitchen was quiet. I looked over out of presentiment. Stuffing surrounded the busy young dog. Eggi, wholly innocent at this point, made eye-contact with me. The loss we felt was not the loss of a toy but the loss of tidy room. She stood and took the pig-shaped pelt from Fellow with a quick, low, bitchy growl, and set to work rending it herself.  But I am getting ahead of my story and shall have to go back.

From July of 2013 to April of 2017, I happily bought all of my dog and cat food from Wag dot com. What a convenience to have the drudgery of regular monthly errand replaced by a UPS delivery.  When Wag dot com was acquired by Amazon, the pet food specialty site was shut down, and absorbed into the soulless, impossible-to-search morass of the world’s largest online retailer. Surely this is the sort of anti-competitive behavior America has laws against? Oh well, the country had its hands full, utterly avoiding being ready for several of the main challenges we face today. I switched to Chewy.com and did not mourn the loss of another online retailer. 

It was in early December, 2014, when I bought a large Tuffy Polly Pig Plush Dog Toy, without understanding quite how large it was. It was quite large. You can’t always tell with online shopping. The dog it was intended for was Captain, and he enjoyed it, and was unable to open it and pull out the stuffing, which was a thing he did back then. In the years since, other dogs visited and played with it, and the pig endured. We got a puppy, who preferred smaller stuffed toys, and grew up. We got another puppy, and he is a large boy of almost two and a half years now. He plays with everything.

Is there a sock that came off with your muddy boots on the floor in the back hall? Fellow will bring it to you. Or, he will sneak it to his bed and chew it gently, eventually tucking it into the folds of the dog bed to save for later. Is there a stick in the yard, between the sizes of postcard and fencerail? Fellow will take that in his mouth and trot around the yard, clacking it in his jaws, or plowing up the turf and swinging it mightily and dangerously, with no regard for his or others’ safety. Is there a small, forgotten, cat-nip filled stuffed mouse in a basket of neglected cat toys? Fellow will have a romping good time with it, until you take it away on the grounds that he might swallow it. Fellow has a large basket of appropriate dog toys, too, and will on occasion, play with these, choosing one for himself after a studied selection process whereby he picks and rejects other stuffed squirrels and novelty plush sandwiches until he finds, at last, the one he was looking for. 

There is a blur in time now, as you may know, and our pets all love how much we are all staying home. Frankly, I might have forgotten the pig had not Fellow recently been picking it and shaking it and leaping about the kitchen with it. It seemed intact the last time I chucked it back in the toy bin at the momentary burst of tidying I do at the end of each day. Was it actually torn, or weakened in the seams? 

Fellow was silently pulling out the stuffing and going in for more. Stuffing expands as it is removed, and this plush pig had been made taut and hard as a drum it was so well-stuffed and sturdy. The fabric of its exterior, once penetrated, surrendered completely to the plucking teeth of the dog. Fellow surrounded himself with the extricated filling.

In the next moment, Eggi asserted herself and took it, settling nearby to rip and chewy and  involve her teeth in the texture of the fabric. 

I knelt, taking the pig from her without scolding. Though I didn’t see either dog eat any of it, it isn’t safe to let this continue. Eggi seemed disappointed, but Fellow had a mild look, expressive of the deep pleasure of toy-having and toy-killing, and no more hurt by my taking it from Eggi as he was in surrendering it to her. 

I carried the pig to the trash and went back for the stuffing. Two armloads. 

It is Thursday, my blog posting day, so the news of the death of this pig can travel faster and farther than in generations past. In my email, I was able to track down the stuffed toy, where and when obtained, and order another, to be delivered with our next shipment of kibble and cat litter from Chewy. 

The pig is so easily replaced it will be as if it never left.