Open Water Communications
Teri Saylor
Writer - Editor - Photographer
Picturing Pigs
Stories of Hope & Heartbreak
Hazel
Told by Alesja Daehnrich
The Blind Spot Animal Sanctuary
When pigs get to know each other, they bond. They create a family.
We once had a situation when two farm pigs clearly were best friends, and both were survivors.
Rosie fell off a truck and fractured her back hip. When a mother was taking her kids to school, she noticed this injured, half-alive piglet lying beside the highway. The family scooped her up and took her to a dog and cat clinic which was not sure how to treat a farm piglet. We were contacted and got involved. Rosie received complicated orthopedic surgery from an incredible surgeon here in North Carolina. She arrived at The Blind Spot in 2018 and lived here in safety and loving care. Read more
Roxie
Told by Joseph Purrington Sisu Refuge
Asked if he has any favorite pigs at the sanctuary:
We don't use that word around here, but it's Roxie. She’s Daisy's sister, and Daisy is one of the pigs on the billboards. Roxie’s just got this graceful presence, and she always smells like maple syrup. She’s just big, beautiful, very loving, and chill. Until you don't give her watermelon. And then she turns around and bites you on the butt. I was handing out watermelon one day, and she was standing behind me, and I completely forgot about her. And she bit me right on the cheek.
She's a woman who knows what she wants.
Eugene & Clayton
Told by Cindy Holm
Flip Side Animal Sanctuary
My husband, Gregg and I started Flip Side in California in 2015.
Whenever there was a wildfire there, people would say, this is the worst fire in history. And every year, when more fires blazed, they would say that again. So, we knew the fires were getting worse and worse.
During some of the fires, we would have ashes coming down onto our property, and we would try to hose everything down. I remember when a page from a book came down, and it was so clear that you could still read the words. It got to the point where we thought something bad was going to happen to us and all our animals.
In 2016 our pigs, Clayton and Eugene, were victims of the Clayton fire in California. Read more
Hurricane Florence
Told by Joseph Purrington
Sisu Refuge
When Hurricane Florence came through eastern North Carolina in September 2018, I was living in Jacksonville on the golf course. I was in the Marine Corps and I was recovering from a lot of medical issues. It had been raining for three or four days and our power was out.
We got on social media so we could figure out what was going on around us and we found out we were landlocked. Roads were shut down, flooded out, washed out.
And we caught wind of some animal rescues in the area that apparently had pigs that were washing up from the factory farms that had gotten destroyed. Pigs were starting to show up in residential neighborhoods. Read more
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