Another Bonus Post!
By way of some explanation, in the late 70's I was an anchor and reporter at KAKE-TV in Wichita, KS. (Well, for that matter, I was the first female anchor in the state but that's another story for another time.) What I did love to do was find stories that no one else was covering, and so I tracked down a hog breeder who had found that putting heating pads under baby pigs made them grow faster. (They're not using calories to keep warm, don't you see. It turned out that this guy was VERY BIG in the world of hogs.) Perhaps we know why no one else was covering this story.

The Elephant in Kansas

One day, on my way to do a story about the largest artificially-inseminated hog herd in the world, I was distracted by an elephant.  On the access road to the freeway, a man was walking an elephant down the road.  I should have stopped but I didn’t want to be late to the hogs.

By the way, do you know how they artificially inseminate hogs?  Or did, in the late 1970s.  It seems that lady hogs have a very short period of fertility.  So they castrate a few male hogs as “teasers” who go into the pens of lady hogs.  They sniff around and when they find one in the mood, they mount her.  All of this action is being closely observed by the staff, rather like bouncers in a disco. 

They pull the lady pig out of the pack to be inseminated.  So far, nothing too strange about this process.  Labor intensive, but necessary. But here comes the part that needs to be considered.  They stick a catheter of sperm (special sperm, from very special breeder boars) into her cervix, and blow.  Yes, that’s right.  The staff member is blowing a straw of sperm into the lady pig with his very own mouth with a pretty short straw.  (It should be noted that the farmer told me his staff was very well paid, and I should think SO.)

Apparently this works well because this farmer had 25,000 beautiful pigs.  There are two other things worth noting.  All of these magnificent pigs came from three award-winning boars, who were the luckiest pigs in the world.  And here’s why – to collect their sperm, they were led to a fake lady pig (actually a 5 gallon lard can, covered with burlap, on four legs) where they would hump away until they would squirt their valuable stuff into a jar.  The collectors were the same guys who would ultimately blow it up the lady pigs.

These were very valuable boars, and very happy.  The farmer told me that when they were led into the shed where all this transpired, they would go right to the lard can-lady pig, mount her immediately, and get on with business.  They would live on forever, or as long as they could do it, in the equivalent of a horny pig’s dream.

And here is the second thing worth noting.  The farmer asked us to join them for lunch.  We had pork.

Speaking of animals:

The Day My Daddy Burned Down the Chicken House.

We had a chicken house at the edge of our property.  I remember it as fairly large but unattractive, made with random lumber and black tar paper.  There was a fence around it, and the chickens were free to get out and walk around. 

Our pointer dog, Duchess, would often sneak in and suck a few eggs.  All in, this was a bucolic setting except that it smelled and annoyed what few neighbors we had.  (There had been goats but they would get up on the roof and eat the tarpaper so they had to go.)

Two big, unexplainable events are stuck in my memories of the chicken house like a cocklebur in a sock.

First, there were two roosters that my mother considered to be rapists.  It would seem they were overly enthusiastic, or perhaps she just disapproved of roosters and their barnyard sex lives.  Either way, one day she’d had enough of their shenanigans.  She killed them, cleaned them, then put them in the pressure cooker.

When they were done, she opened the pressure cooker but, as she told the tale, she was “still mad at them” so she reset the pressure cooker, and cooked them again.  By now they were jellied roosters.  She took them outside, and poured them around the chicken yard so the hens could eat them.  And they did.

Here’s the second event.  One day my Daddy burned down the chicken house.  He said it was getting to be too much work and the foxes killed chickens and Duchess sucked eggs. It seemed futile, I suppose.

So one Saturday, when mother and Susan and I went shopping, he set fire to it.  We were coming home, and started to wonder where the big plume of black smoke was coming from.  Surely not from our house!  And yet, it was, sort of.  We lived in an unincorporated area then, so the city fire departments of two cities came to their city lines (actually just across the roads from us) and parked their trucks and watched.  Eventually it burned down, as buildings will do.

So, here’s the unexplainable thing.  (Just the one?) I never thought to ask my Dad why he burned it down, or chose that day.  Was it planned?  Spontaneous?  I would like to think that on that Saturday morning he just said to himself, “enough of this” and torched it.  Let that be a lesson to foxes, roosters, and egg-sucking dogs everywhere.