One day, our foster kitten, Victoria, disappeared. Mommy looked all over the house and could not find her anywhere. She looked in the morning, then she looked again at lunch time, then again in the afternoon- still no Victoria. Daddy wasn't home to help search, and Mommy was getting very worried. Daddy is remodeling our house and there is a big open space between the downstairs ceiling and the upstairs floor, and the kittens had been going in there to play.
Mommy thought that was probably where Victoria was, but she kept calling and calling and never heard anything. She hoped the kitten had just curled up and gone to sleep, and would come out on her own, but she never did. Finally, late in the afternoon, when Mommy stuck her head in the space and called "Victoria", she heard a very faint "meow" in response. But then she could not figure out where it was coming from. Mommy tried to crawl into the space but she was too fat. Then Matthew tried to get in there but he was too big, too, because he is a Teenager. Mommy was getting really worried because it was four o'clock in the afternoon and Victoria had been missing since before lunch time.
Finally, Mommy decided that she needed a skinny little kid to crawl in the space, but we don't have any skinny little kids. All we have is Matthew, and he is a skinny BIG kid. Then she thought of our Amish neighbors, who have LOTS of skinny little kids. Mommy says all the Amish kids around here are skinny cause they don't go to McDonald's drive through for Super-Sized Happy Meals, and they don't sit around all day watching tv, surfing the internet, or playing Wi. So, off to Freddie's she went, and came back with Mr. Freddie, and two of his boys, Simon and Louis. Simon is a very brave boy, and he crawled right up into that space like he wasn't even afraid, not even a little bit. He was just skinny enough to fit, too. Then he started calling "kitty, kitty, kitty", and he could hear Victoria meowing but he could not see where she was because it was very, very dark in there, even though Mommy had given him a flashlight to wear on his head, just like a coal miner!
Finally, Simon thought he could tell where the kitten was calling from, and it was from in between two sections of the wall- the kitten had fallen right down into the space between two parts of the wall and could not crawl back up! Mommy gave Simon a piece of rope to drop down to see if Victoria would crawl up it, but that did not work. Next they tried a towel, which also did not work.
They tried all sorts of ways to get that kitten, but none of them worked. Then Freddie walked around the downstairs of our house and said he wasn't sure that Simon was at the right spot anyway, but there was no way to tell for sure. Finally, they had to give up so that Simon and Louis and their Daddy could go home to supper. Freddie and Mommy decided that they needed to cut some holes in the wall, but Mommy wanted to wait until Daddy got home.
When Daddy finally got home he was not happy to hear about the kitten. But he knew the only way to find her was to cut open the wall. First he cut a hole in the bathroom wall, but there was no kitten there. Then he walked around some more, trying to listen for Victoria's cries, and he finally decided that she must be in the wall behind our clothes dryer in the laundry room. He and Mommy moved the dryer away from the wall, and Daddy made the first cut.
Then guess what? No Victoria!!
So then, he made a few more holes,
and STILL no Victoria!!
After that, he cut one more hole, way down at the bottom of the wall by the floor, and FINALLY, out popped little Victoria! She had been stuck in that wall for almost TEN WHOLE HOURS! But she seemed okay, except that she was hungry and thirsty and needed to use the litter box.
We were all very happy to see her again, especially her littermates and her own mommy, Veronica. Mommy was afraid she would be traumatized but after she ate she acted completely normal! The very next night she got adopted by a nice family with a little girl and a little boy, and she went to her forever home, and we have six new holes in our drywall to remember her by!
She was a very good pig and we got her moved with no problems. Here she is, settling in to her new home where she will have her babies soon. She has lots of fresh grass and weeds to eat and Daddy takes water to her so she can drink and have a mudhole to wallow in. I never knew that pigs eat grass, but they do, just like cows and horse. Neat! I think she looks very happy.
Whenever she did that, I figured out that if I just nipped her a little on her rump she would start moving again. Like this-
Here I am, watching, just in case I need to get that silly pig moving again-
Here I am showing my RR brother, Tsavo, how to herd pigs. Once he knew how, he wanted to try it, too!
And that is how I became a pig-herding pup! 