One of our kids came up to me highly agitated and exclaimed, “They killed the wrong pig!” My head snapped around and I simply asked, “What?” She explained, “They ate our boar (male pig)! No one in their right mind eats their prize boar!”  I was dumbfounded! My mouth fell open in a combination of despair and unbelief. “Why?” I asked incredulously. “They don’t even taste that good!” I shook my head and groaned. “That was a $1500.00 dollar pig!” I exclaimed. “He had the best rate of gain and the best conformation of any pig we ever had! He was good for at least 200 more litters! How come they ate the boar?” I asked, looking for some kind of logic to this disastrous folly.  I just shook my head in total astonishment as I called up the home pastor to find out what had happened,

I was never happier to find out that Mark Twain was a prophet! “Pa!” the home director responded to my inquisition. “It was the gander (boy goose), not the boar. It was a mistake.” It seems as though our romantically inclined 220-kilogram boar caught the scent of “Love in the air” from some comely gilts (young female pigs) next door and jumped his pen. Our kids, none of whom were one-fourth his size, were trying to stop the 220kg monster. One boy picked up a meter long pole and flung it at him, the stick whirly-birded through the air over the back of the boar only to catch our prize gander goose by the neck and snapped it. “He was getting kind of old anyway,” explained the pastor.  It turned out the excited girl that brought me the news had only overheard part of the story and assumed it was the boar. It’s been that kind of month, bad news with happy endings, including one fabulous goose dinner for the kids and staff.