Both the cruelty and the resiliency of nature was on full display this week in the story of Rex, the pot-bellied pig. The 10-month-old cutie survived an attack from two neighbourhood dogs in Shelley last week and his recovery made local, provincial and national headlines.
When Dayna Denman takes him home, hopefully next week, Rex won't be the same pig he was. Along with his other injuries, both of his ear flaps are gone and the tricep tendons on his front legs were ruptured, permanently taking away his ability to walk on his own. Still, Rex endures.
The staff at Green Mobile Veternarian Clinic have built Rex a little scooter so he can move around. Rex isn't the first pig to have his own wheelchair, however.
An adorable little three-year-old pig named Chris P. Bacon has his own Facebook page and Twitter handle. He was also featured in The Bionic Pet, a 2014 episode of Nature on PBS that looked at how artificial limbs are being successfully used to help injured animals, both wild and domestic. Chris was brought to veterinarian Len Lucero to be put down shortly after he was born in January 2013 with a defect that meant his rear legs didn't work. Instead, Lucero fitted Chris in a wheelchair normally used for dogs and took the otherwise healthy swine home.
Today, Chris lives a quiet life on a farm and gets out to visit kids in schools and hospitals, putting smiles on faces wherever he goes. Hopefully, Rex can follow Chris's example.
It's important to stress that Denman certainly doesn't blame either her neighbours or their dogs for what happened to Rex.
"Dogs will be dogs," she said. "I don't want any negative comments about them."
She's certainly correct about the dogs. Besides being close genetic relatives to wolves, dogs, as well as cats and a host of other wild animals, love to play. Some of that play borders on cruelty and torture, as Dan Riskin notes in Mother Nature Is Trying To Kill You.
Killer whales are the wolves of the ocean, hunting in pods and working as teams. Riskin explains that animals, like people, don't like their food moving when they eat because of the risk of injury. Killer whales will throw captured dolphins and seals high out of the water to break their backs. Like a cat with a mouse, the whales will continue to play with their food long after it has been crippled and died, before finally enjoying their meal. It's a horrible way to die for the prey but it's happy fun times for the hunter.
Riskin's book was also one of the sources for Todd Whitcombe's hilarious but somewhat alarming Citizen column in June about how a parasite commonly found in cats can dramatically change a rat's behaviour and also influence the actions and choices of the humans who own cats. The point of that story and Riskin's entire book is that the natural world is not peaceful and gentle, it is violent and deadly. As Ferdinand the duck shouts in Babe, a great movie about another special pig, "Christmas means carnage!"
Evolution has provided a shocking array of ways for living things to inflict great harm on others, from bacteria, parasites and plants up through the variety of hunters who use brawn, teamwork, cunning, venom or a combination of all of these to land some lunch and/or eliminate those who would make them lunch.
The stories of Rex, Chris P. Bacon and their devoted human owners are heartwarming, as are those news items about interspecies adoption but they are the exception to the rule, actions taken by animals who don't perceive the helpless stranger in their midst as a threat and are not worried about where the next meal is coming for themselves and their offspring. Most of the time, that's not the case. That stranger is either food or something that could eat the food and is treated accordingly.
This is not scientific cynicism. As a biologist, Riskin loves the diversity of life, past and present, on this planet but he refuses to romanticize it. Nature's resiliency is rooted in that constant tension between birth and death, renewal and decay.
Not only is nature resilient but so are her creatures. Through the hard work of local veternarians and the love and devotion of his owner, Rex will get a second chance at life that so few animals - or humans - ever get.
He won't become a sheep dog like Babe but he can still be a great pet and live a good life.
That'll do, pig.
That'll do.
