Happy National Pig Day!
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If you loved January’s one-two punch of strange animal-themed holidays, Squirrel Appreciation Day and National Penguin Awareness Day, as much as we did, you’re sure to enjoy National Pig Day! It’s celebrated this year, as it has been every year since 1972, on March 1.
Mary Lynne Rave, a North Carolina woman who started National Pig Day with her sister Ellen Stanley of Texas, once explained that the idea behind the holiday was ‘to accord to the pig its rightful, though generally unrecognized, place as one of man’s most intellectual and domesticated animals.’
Despite the sisters’ apparently noble ambitions, some folks have been known to celebrate the day by eating pork products -- although that’s not a manner of celebration we’d recommend. The pre-Pig Day party held last Friday by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is more our style: The group invited the public to help make a giant fruit salad for the three adoptable pigs at its shelter. Later, a group of kids got to watch the pigs chow down on their healthful snack.
Unfortunately for us, we don’t have any porcine friends for whom to make a fruit salad, so we’ll just have to settle for celebrating the day with some virtual terrific, radiant, humble pigs. A double-feature of ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and ‘Babe’ ought to fill that bill nicely, we think.
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-- Lindsay Barnett
Video: framerkat via YouTube