WaiWai bedtime

4.30 pm and Wai the rescue potbelly is already making his bed. The bed-making can take a very long time because Wai likes to sleep in deep straw.

For those of you who do not know Wai (Wai means water in Maori),he came out to the farm after he was set on fire by persons unknown down South. An anonymous person left him outside a vet clinic. Badly burned. He was shuffled through vets and shelters until I found him dying in a cage in the basement of a pig rescue facility in Illinois.

I do not often get angry but I was furious at his condition and had him delivered to the farm immediately. I carried him into my barn and into this very room where he has lived ever since.

I figured if he was going to die I was damned if he would die in a dark basement in a dog cage, so into the barn with the others he came. He could not walk or see or even poop. He was rotting, the smell was pure evil. So under the tutelage of my vet I began to cut out the rot every day, debriding,, gagging, cleaning and irrigating, then drying and anointing and covering. Some of his burns went straight through the fat, through the muscle and to the bone. And it all needed cutting out. Over thirty percent of his body was in crisis. For the longest time he made hardly a sound. But he did not die.

Slowly. slowly WaiWai brought himself back to life. The Fellowship of the Farmy, my beloved readers at the Kitchens Garden rallied around, and paid for the vet and sent the lightest of cotton and linen serviettes in the mail to lay on his wounds to keep the flies off, they sent blankets to sleep on and potions and creams across the world and advice from doctors who worked with burns victims in war zones. For three months I debrided his burns twice a day, cutting out rotting tissue a little at a time so he would not go into shock. The smell was appalling but I maintained that he should sleep in the barn with the other animals close by, even if it meant I had to fight against fly strikes. But he did not die.

His eyes were burnt, his throat was burnt from hot fumes and his lymphatic system was in free fall.

But this little pig would not give up.

My vet started calling him the WonderPig. Because for the longest time he did not believe the pig could survive. He told me he visited to support me. The pig he had lost hope for.

But Wai and I did not give up. Pig-headed the pair of us.

He would only eat watermelon if I hand fed him (he could not stand for long at the beginning) mashed pumpkin and mashed potato, he drank a lot of water when I propped him up. After a few days and with encouragement he began to walk the circuit in the barn after milking every day and soon was strong enough to come outside in the evenings. For a year I did not let sun on his recovering skin. He still has daily suntan lotion and zinc spread on his thin skin.

That was June 2017. Six years ago. Though healed now he looks like a moonscape. And his skin sheers off if brushed up against anything. He cannot see and follows smells and sounds as long as the sounds are loud. He has never been caged again or locked up and is free to roam the whole farm, through the gardens and under the trees. He does not like other pigs or strangers or dogs but sleeps with a cat named LuLu. And in the winter he will begrudgingly let Tima in to sleep with him as his hot water bottle pig.

He is frequently found lying under the hydrangeas beside the steps to the house. Gets covered with blankets at night and is always first up for a breakfast of scrambled eggs in the morning.

He is a very determined wee pot bellied pig.

WaiWai means Big Water in Maōri.

He is the farm curmudgeon and we love him.

Celi

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