Flying pigs Butch and Sundance evade the chop
BLAME it on the El Niño effect, but the August stories are happening in January this year. As Tony Blair trots up and down the country trying to root out support for welfare reforms, the great British public is more concerned with the welfare of a couple of heroic swine who escaped their destiny with a fried egg and hit the road (all right, the bramble thicket) like a porcine Bonnie and Clyde.
The two Tamworth pigs gave their minders the slip at an abattoir in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, 10 days ago and have since consistently hogged the headlines (generating a lot of pig-puns, some rasher than others). Originally dubbed Fred and Ginger — after their fancy trotter-work — they transmogrified on the run into Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Pig.
According to the Wiltshire police spokesman PC Roger Bull (no relation): “These are obviously cunning and devious animals and it appears to be a well planned escape.”
The celebrity of the Tamworth Two began shortly after their arrival at Newman’s slaughterhouse in Malmesbury. To start with they were the Tamworth Three, but one of their number — a sort of Pete Best of the group — dropped out and, according to the slaughterhouse, was “processed in the usual way”.
The Two, however, each weighing a hefty 110lb, made a bolt for it and wriggled under a fence. What happened next is perhaps most movingly described by the in-house poet of The Independent, who wrote a ballad in their honour:
For having gained some distance
From the slaughterhouse’s thugs
They swam the River Avon
Like a Chinese team on drugs.
Fording the Avon was a daring snouts-above-the-water mission that stirred folk memories. Just as we cheered for Steve McQueen to leap his motorbike over the wire in The Great Escape, so we backed the bacon-dodgers.
“On behalf of our Women’s Institute,” said Betty Ross, 75, who works in the village Oxfam shop, “I’d like to say: go for it, pigs!”
As police opened a “pig hotline” for information and warned that the pair “may be headed towards Prince Charles’s home, Highgrove, which is only a few miles away”, public sympathy snowballed. Offers of sanctuary arrived from, among others, the Born Free Foundation in Surrey — “they should be given another chance after being clever enough to run away”.
Careless of such temptation, Butch and Sundance remained snuffling for apples in a thicket on Tetbury Hill on the outskirts of Malmesbury. Like their outlaw namesakes they did not realise the firepower gathering against them.
The Daily Mail dispatched 10 reporters who, after a night of muddy chases, claimed to have captured Butch — and in the best Fleet Street traditions promptly whisked her off to a safe sty to be “grunted an exclusive interview”. Meanwhile, the Daily Express promised to buy them for an animal sanctuary. The Times ran an editorial: “Ze swine have escaped”. ITN hired a helicopter. And never mind Malmesbury, the global village could not resist stopping to talk about the pigs as they appeared on French television and CNN.
A pig’s life is by no means an easy one. As the columnist Beachcomber (JB Morton) once noted: “One disadvantage of being a hog is that at any moment some bloody fool may try to make a silk purse out of your wife’s ear.” Yet the Tamworth Two episode made us reflect on the ambiguous relationship between pig and man. “Dogs look up at us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals,” said Churchill.
As the net closed on Sundance, NBC, the American television network, sent a correspondent to keep viewers posted. A price had been put on Sundance’s head. His owner, Arnaldo Di-julio, a council roadsweeper, had sold his pigs for £15,000 to the Mail, whose proprietor, Viscount Rothermere, counts among his clubs the Beefsteak.
Sundance, cornered in a thicket, still needed the efforts of eight men and the local vet to immobilise him. He was carted off to solitary confinement on a nice bed of fresh straw at the local veterinary surgery. A policeman stood guard — there were fears of pignappers among the press — until yesterday he was taken out to be reunited with Butch at an animal sanctuary. Honourable retirement beckons.
Butch and Sundance still live at the Rare Breeds Centre at Woodchurch, Kent. Peter Taylor died in 2002 aged 56
From the archive:1998
