Elaine's Reviews > The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood

I've been a sucker for books about animals since I began reading -- at the age of 3. I must have read Lightfoot the Leaping Goat at least 100 times in my childhood -- and every other animal book the public library had. I am a fan of James Herriott and every book about gorillas, chimps, dogs, horses, Elsa the lioness...and I found Moby Dick unbearably sad. Just thinking about those whales gives me pangs of empathetic suffering. I also have read widely in the scientific literature about animal cognition and emotions -- even a study on mice and their social groups!

I didn't think there was an animal book I could dislike, but Sy Montgomery managed to write one.

To begin with, I was especially drawn to a book about a pig because of my father's tales of his boyhood in Ukraine and the neighbor's pig that he played with. Also, my aunts, who had the job of taking their horses, cows and sheep to the common pasturage in the village and then taking them back home, always spoke with wonder and joy at how the pigs ran ahead of the pack of village animals, squealing all the way home. So, I was prepared to read about the intelligence of a pig kept as a pet.

Well, this "good good pig" did nothing but eat like a pig, grunt, produce high quality good-smelling manure, and get out of his pen, then root up the neighbors' lawns. The only reason he got famous is that his owner used his picture on her Christmas cards and also invited the neighbors' children to scratch his belly, which, predictably, the pig loved. But so do my dogs and even wild rhinos! There is not one thing in the entire book that shows that this pig ever had a thought or that pigs in general have any intelligence at all. Montgomery reiterates throughout that pigs are like people, but she doesn't show it, except to note that their skin is like human skin. As for the pig's ability to get out of any gate she was locked behind, we had a sheep, hardly the genious of the mammalian community), who could get out of her pen no matter how we contrived to fasten the gate: with wire, with wood, with latches, from the inside, from the outside. Even when we padlocked it, she figured out how to loosen the inner block of wood so that the padlock fell down. Then, when she got out, as she always did, she came to our back door, knocked on it, and, as soon as someone opened it, ran upstairs to our son's bedroom. The "good good pig" never did anything so interesting.

The author spends most of the book, the parts when she's not congratulating herself on her brilliance, gooddness, and what-all, on recounting how she got the whole town to contribute slops for the "good good pig," and how she went through the slops every day to ensure that no meat was in it. That's fun reading? The contents of slop buckets? Or the quality of the pig's manure?

This is a real gross-out waste of time. I started out thinking pigs were intelligent, interesting creatures like every other creature I've known or read about, and ended by thinking that pigs are stupid and boring. Oh, she did mention the pig would greet her happily when she went to feed him --as did her chickens. That is hardly surprising. Having had many animals over the years, I know that all of them will go as fast as they can towards the person who feeds them. How did this thing get published, and why did I buy it? Why does anyone?