Her name is Wiggles but she's not doing a lot of wiggling right now. That's because the baby piglet is recovering from surgery. You might think breaking a leg is one of the worst things that can happen to an animal. But in this case, it might just have saved her life.
We were the first to tell you about the
cuddly cutie on May 25th, when she apparently fell off a truck heading along the 401. A passing motorist saw this little piggie in distress and stopped to help, carefully tucking her into a blanket in his trunk and speeding off towards the Toronto Humane Society with the wounded porker in the back of his car.
"She was shivering and quaking," remembers Brian Bowes. "And I was like, that pig's alive. So I can't leave it here."
The THS took her in and operated on her last week, keeping her in a separate area away from the other dogs and cats that populate the shelter. "Her knee and her leg had actually come apart," recalls spokesman Ian McConachie. "And what we had to do was pin her leg back together. There's three pins in here now putting her knee and her leg bones back together. And now we just have to wait for the natural healing process to take place."
The prognosis is good and getting better every day. "She's doing very well," McConachie agrees. "She's eating on her own. She's walking around. She's staying off her injured leg."
It will be almost impossible to know where Wiggles - named after a tag around her neck that was waggling back and forth in the cage - originated. "We don't know where the truck was coming from or where it was going so it will be virtually impossible to track down who owned her," the Humane Society spokesman admits.
But McConachie knows Wiggles is one lucky pig. He suspects she was being taken to a farm to be fattened and then eventually to be slaughtered for pork. But the THS insists that won't happen.
They won't give her up until they can find a petting zoo or a hobby farm where she can spend the rest of her days oinking away in peace and acting the ham for kids, a fate that only came because of an accident and the kindness of a man who simply couldn't pass her by.