Pigs Eat Man

News about the Bandon, Ore. man that was eaten by his 700-pound pigs has been getting some traction since it broke yesterday. It actually happened last Wednesday, but the folks at the Coos Bay District Attorney’s office didn’t release the news til it began to leak and they realized , “Wow, people are kind of freaking out.”

How did this happen?

DA Paul Frasier tells The Eugene Register-Guard. “For all we know, it was a horrific accident, but it’s so doggone weird that we have to look at all possibilities,”

The details are little Stephen King-ish.

First, the family member found Garner’s dentures on the ground. He then noticed pieces of Garner’s body scattered throughout the enclosure, Frasier said.

While investigators are certain that the hogs consumed most of Garner’s body, they do not know how he died. An investigation is continuing.

Any time someone dies I think it’s tragic, but there are so many things ever so wrong with this incident. Vegans might disagree; they might think being eaten by a 700-pound pig is karmic payback for bacon. Or more precisely for the upcoming bacon shortage that was caused by folks going hog-wild and slaughtering their pigs early  thanks to the drought in much of the U.S. and in Europe.

Let’s start with the 700-pound pig thing; that, as the spider writes in the web in everyone’s favorite childhood book about a cheerful and plucky swine, is “some pig.”

I bet Wilbur would NEVER eat a farmer.

The R-G reports:

John Killefer, who heads the Animal and Rangeland Sciences Department at Oregon State University in Corvallis, called the incident involving Terry Garner both “very unfortunate” and highly unusual.

Although domestic hogs are not typically known to be as aggressive as their feral cousins, “there is some degree of danger associated with any animal,” Killefer said. He added that pigs “are more omnivorous than other farm animals, (such as) cows.”

Killefer said 700-pound pigs such as the ones that Garner kept at his farm for breeding purposes are abnormally large.

And just what was the unfortunate Mr. Garner doing with the 700-pound pigs? According to the news story, he had a boar named Teddy and several rather large sows, and he bred them to sell to 4-H kids. Yup, there are kids in rural, coastal Oregon raising Wilburs of their own, that are descended from Teddy and his fellow human-eating sows. No word in the story as to what to happen to Teddy and his crew, but let’s just saying making THOSE particular pigs into pork would be so, so wrong.