Pigs and Flip Flops

November 17, 2009 
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They look so cute harmless at this size don’t they?

DISCLAIMER: I am not advocating flip-flopping or barefooting around livestock, so please do not engage in this behavior at home or any other time.

This seems like a fairly simple concept, but I am a slow learner sometimes, or maybe just too stubborn to change my ways. For the first 12 years of my life I lived barefoot. This isn’t hard to do in Texas, even in the winter. And yes, I did spend time in the little snow and ice we occasionally got barefoot. Through this period, I also developed a paranoia and aversion to stickers. In East Texas where I grew up we had what I call onion flowers that came up every spring. I loved these flowers and still do. They are small white flowers with a wonderful scent (only the picked stems smell like onions) and perfect for a little girl to pick armloads of. However, they seem to grow quite well right alongside East Texas stickers. I don’t know the name of the stickers but when you step on them they come off in your feet in the hundreds. I remember more than one occasion of picking onion flowers barefoot and ending up in the middle of a huge patch of these stickers. Now I was in a real dilemma. I couldn’t sit down to get the stickers out because I would end up with stickers in my hands and other places, I couldn’t stand on one foot because they were both full of stickers, as soon as I put one foot down it would immediately be full of stickers again, and I didn’t want to walk on feet full of stickers to get out of the stickers. After standing a few minutes in pain and trying to find a place on my foot to stand that didn’t have stickers, I would painfully hobble out of the patch and get them out. I still wonder why I never learned to wear shoes while picking flowers, but being barefoot was just so natural it never occurred to me. So, add livestock to this mindset of mine.

When I started working with horses as a teenager I had to wear shoes to protect my feet from the inevitable occurrence of getting stepped on. This led to years of boot and tennis shoe wearing almost all of the time. As soon as I stopped working around horses for a living I ditched the boots. Of course I still wear them when riding and usually when working around the cows but I have to admit that I am a little lax when it comes to other areas. Now that I am a smarter and wiser adult, I don’t go barefoot, I wear flip-flops. This wise change comes from my sticker paranoia (although thank the Lord we don’t have those stickers in North Texas) and because our black land clay becomes so hard it is almost as bad as stickers, and of course there are the cow piles, although they are just a little warm and squishy, not too bad. Like I said, I don’t like my feet being in shoes, and flip flops are just so easy to slip on when I need to check on things. I have forced myself to wear them only when I am doing relatively safe things like checking water, but even this isn’t necessarily safe.

So, last week I was checking the water tanks in my flip flops. I mean, the animals don’t usually run over you when filling up water, USUALLY being the key word here. I filled up the horse’s water without incident, they were way off in the pasture and my toes were never in danger. The cows were fine so I moved on to the pigs. As is often the case, this early November has been quite warm. Although not warm enough to warrant filling up the pigs water holes, they apparently thought that it was and had decided to flip their water tanks over to make their own water holes—this was a first with these water tanks as they are quite heavy. Apparently they had done this right after I watered them the last time so they had been several hours without water. As soon as I started filling them up, here comes the entire herd of pigs acting like they had not seen water in DAYS (not true of course but they always exaggerate). Not only does this lead to lots of fighting over the water, but they are quite smart and know that the water comes from the water hose. This means that they are determined to get the water hose out of the tank so that they can get water NOW. SO, I have to stand right by the water tank holding the hose and exposing my bare feet to the sharp trampling hooves of 300-400 lb hogs.

After realizing I had them beat on the hose trick, they promptly decided to turn the tank over meaning that I had to try and hold the tank down along with the hose. In the midst of this, one pig grabs another by the ear (they always go for each others ears, quite brutal really) and the pig with the bit ear jumps backward onto, you guessed it, my foot. I was by myself except for the pigs and said some rather mean things which I won’t repeat. I also jumped around on one foot for several minutes (why does it always seem to feel better to move after smashing an appendage?) in which time the water hose had again been pulled out, pigs were trying to flip the tank from both sides which resulted in a 180 degree turn of the tank but no flipping, thank goodness, and one smaller pig was flipped into the tank by a big pig. The pain subsided somewhat, I returned the hose, left the tank in its new position, and the pig in the tank (she did figure out how to get out) and spent the next 30 minutes hopping from one foot to the other trying to protect my remaining toes.

The moral of the story isn’t earth shattering, and I probably should have figured it out before my foot was turned green and blue, but here it is: Friends don’t let friends water pigs in flip flops.
P.S. I thought about taking a picture of my foot for this entry but decided to spare you the gory details.

Ellen