Whistle Pig Wars

Being a gardener means yearly tactics of fighting off pesky bugs and animals. Squishing potato bugs and yearly rotating our plants. Covering our corn to keep blackbirds from pecking through the silk. Shooing away the bunnies that come and nibble. But there is one animal that will fight back. They are clever, they are bold, and they have eaten half of our broccoli crop and our entire first planting of lettuce. They are the whistle pigs.

I am an animal lover and typically have patience for most of them. But when I shoo them out of our garden and those suckers boldly strut their fat selves right back in five minutes later, I feel like a parent who has been talked back to. And I don't like sass. This means war.

Picture this. It is five o'clock on a Sunday evening and we are watching the feasters come and go into our garden. They are a family and they are many. There are two of us and at least four of them popping in and out. One is the fattest one I've ever seen and the rest are itty bitty and clueless. Chris is not much of a hunter but when the opportunity arises he seems to rise to the occasion. He heads out with a three pronged potato fork. I first wonder if he will actually catch them. I then wonder what his plan is with a broken pitch fork. A glimpse out of our window shows Chris perched on a five foot hay bale waiting to play Whack a Mole with unsuspecting hole peepers. But they never peep.

We needed a less primitive approach. We needed artillery and ammo. We don't have much of that. But we do have some. So Chris grabbed his bb gun and sported the army crawl through our yard as to stay very low, lower than the whistle pig perched on his hind legs in our lettuce patch. And before he knew what happened the unsuspecting rodent had a bb lodged in his spine. But they are feisty and off he gimped back into his hole. Small wounds, little by little, this sucker was going down.

But this is rural warfare. You might say warfare needs rules of engagement but not on this Menno farm. When a whistle pig riddles your crops, you show no mercy. Just ask our landlord. One summer he killed over one hundred of them.

We decided to team up with the smarts of our neighbor. Plan A: Purchase rodent sized D-Con poison pellets. Soak them in apple juice and dump them down the holes. Cover up holes. Plan B: Place a live have a heart trap directly at the opening of one hole. Plan C: Watch how one tactic leads to another.


This is Mama Whistle Pig. She is wishing she had looked around a little more when she darted out of her hole. She therefore darted to her death. But not immediately. We left her in there for a few days until someone with a real gun could do the deed a bit more humanely. In the meantime we pondered what to do with her. Our neighbor suggested placing the cage directly in the center of our garden to make her think long and hard about what she had done.

Now, while Mama living her last days, her unsuspecting, not so bright babies were scooting around, nibbling on small somethings here and there. But without the direction of their wise Mama, they not too smart. Once again, a small bb in the spinal cord left one a little slow in making it back home. Only, home was a newly covered hole thanks to plan A. In his desperate attempt to dig back down, Chris took him out with a few more shots. It's hard to know how many shots when you're pumping a bb gun.

So the current score is Long's 2, Whistle Pigs 0. I doubt they will score in this game. Perhaps a nibble of lettuce and a chomp of broccoli, but that will only earn them a pop in their furry ass. They can be bold and smart but we are stealthy and a little smarter. This is war against hunger and we plan on winning.