By S. Jayasankaran
If we are not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?
It’s not easy being a pig. On the one hand, you could feel like a leper in Biblical times, pursued by accusatory chants of “Yuck” or “Unclean!”
And on the other hand, you might be regarded affectionately, even covetously. This is always perilous with flashing red lights written all over it. Heading for the hills with all possible haste is generally recommended, as covetous eyes of that sort generally measure pigs as so much bak kut teh (braised pork ribs).
There’s even more swinish stuff in the adjectives associated with the beast. “Pig-like” is uniformly nasty whether in reference to one’s eyes or one’s behaviour.
But our story belongs to Buffalo, a city in the state of New York and close enough to Canada to render refrigerators redundant during winter.
More importantly, our pig was a native of Buffalo and had been brought up by its owner, one Norman “Norm” Brezinzki, an affable Polish-American policeman who never met a beer he didn’t drink.
Everybody loved Norm because he loved life and lived it to the fullest. In 2016, for example, he gave up alcohol and women.
He later confessed it was the “worst day” of his life.
The life-loving cop also adored his food, although he believed “you are what you eat”, so he avoided fruit and nuts altogether. He thought steaks were as American as the flag and insisted bacon was an essential food group.
In short, he did not so much eat food as inhale it, and he thought sacred cows made the best hamburgers.
He was also deeply prejudiced and felt vegetarians were Communists, homosexuals, or both.
Even his friends noticed that farm animals, such as cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry, seemed uneasy in his presence. Once, a goldfish in a neighbour’s tank actually suffered cardiac arrest after Norm stared at it.
You can see which way this story is heading. By the way, did I mention that the pig he’d nurtured, nourished and fattened so lovingly was named Breakfast?
The same realisation did not escape the perspicacious porker either.
As a sensitive swine of the sort that had seen Babe, Breakfast could read the writing on the wall. He could add up two and two just as well as the President and he’d noticed the signs: the covetous glances, those greedy eyes and, worse, the furtive sharpening of blades when Norm thought he was asleep.
He knew the stakes as well as anyone. A hen might contribute to bacon and eggs but, for the pig, it was a lifetime’s commitment.
He was a sensitive grunter and so, as sensitive grunters go, he went.
In short, Brezinski’s Breakfast Bolted.
You might say the pig hogged the headlines the next day.
Residents in Victor Place of Buffalo said their neighbourhood erupted into chaos Wednesday afternoon when “a large pig” ran through the area, chased locals and dug up gardens looking for truffles.
Why truffles, you might ask? Why not, was the porcine perpetrator’s answer.
He was terrified of Norm and had been planning the breakout for some time. The cop discovered a tunnel that led under his back fence.
It was Breakfast’s finest hour or, as Hollywood would have it, The Boar Shank Redemption.