Translator: Katrin R. Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
Derek Walter: Why would you change your entire life for a pig?
That's something that we get asked all the time.
I was a professional magician,
so I went to work pulling rabbits out of hats.
And Steve, he was a real estate agent.
But with the click of a mouse, everything, and I mean everything,
changed one day
when Steve got a message on Facebook asking if he wanted a mini pig.
Steven Jenkins: I always considered myself an animal lover.
I've been drawn to them since I was a little boy.
I'm sure most of our friends weren't surprised
when I came home unannounced with a mini pig.
and it took him a few weeks
to even warm up to the idea of keeping her.
See, we knew nothing about pigs when Esther first arrived,
but during those first few weeks,
we saw an incredible personality developing.
Both of us were really shocked at how similar she was to a puppy,
but one thing in particular really stuck out to us
and that's just how smart she was.
Within a few days of arriving, she found one of the dogs' treat balls.
They had them for years and played with them all the time.
They'd roll it around, get it stuck somewhere,
or get bored and just give up with it.
Esther, however, she'd take that treat ball
and go in a straight line from one end of the room to the other
until it was empty.
It was amazing.
She was super curious too. She loved to explore the house.
She had to check out anything that was new or out of place.
Any time a guest came over and left a purse or coat within reach,
fair game, as far as Esther was concerned.
And the more interested she was, the more money I'd be willing to wager
that there was ChapStick or a pack of gum in one of the pockets.
DW: I resisted at first.
I even refused to give her a name.
I called her Kijiji ...
(Laughter)
after that online auction site I had intended to list her for sale on,
only half-joking.
But it wasn't long before I was falling for her too.
I remember practicing magic in the living room one day,
as I often would,
and Esther took an interest into what I was doing,
so I went and got a cookie, and I made it disappear.
I did it all the time for the dogs,
and they would wag their tails and they would bark like crazy.
I wish I had a video camera for the moment when the cookie disappeared
because you could literally see the amazement and wonder in her eyes.
I did the trick one more time, anticipating the same hilarious result.
Yet, this time,
Esther was sniffing around behind me.
You see, she knew where the cookie was this time.
(Laughter)
The dogs could be fooled over and over and over again,
but not Esther.
The term "pigpen" also came to mind when I first met her
because I thought she was going to be a stinking smelly mess all the time,
but she was surprisingly clean.
She had a pen with her bed and her litter box,
which she almost always kept clean.
Now I'm not going to pretend
that she maintained a 100% perfect potty record,
but teaching her to use the litter box,
that was not the problem.
She got along really well with our other animal friends too,
and it was amazing to see her try to fit in that pack.
All that she wanted to do was just follow them around.
It was pretty cute.
One concerning fact that remained, however,
was that we lived in a part of town that wasn't zoned to allow mini pigs,
so we had to keep her quiet from the neighbors,
and we found a vet out of town that would see her,
and we thought we were all in the clear
until the vet dropped a bombshell.
SJ: I went alone to that first appointment,
and it was probably a good thing
because among the first words out of his mouth were, "Mini pig, eh?
I'm afraid you've got a commercial pig on your hands here, Steve."
I nearly died.
How could something so small, so cute, and so smart
be the same thing I ate for breakfast two days earlier.
It turns out her cropped tail
was a clear indication to any knowledgeable person.
It's common practice on commercial farms to cut off their tails.
It's often done without pain medication,
using nothing more than basically a pair of pliers.
It was my first introduction to what life could have been for Esther.
And it was upsetting, to say the least.
Keep in mind, at this point, we hadn't even discussed the fact
that she would be at least 250 pounds, best-case scenario.
That's substantially larger than the 70 pounds
I'd been led to believe by the girl I got her from.
DW: When Steve came home,
he totally downplayed the information that he shared with me.
(Laughter)
When he started with, "Weeeeeell ..."
I knew I should have probably sat down.
"It turns out she's going to be
a little bit bigger than we thought," he said.
"Maybe 200 to 250 pounds."
OK, that's not so bad.
"And it turns out she's not a mini pig, she's a commercial pig."
A million things were going through my mind at that moment,
most of them were swear words.
Steve immediately tried to reassure me that everything was going to be OK.
But it was not OK.
We had just come to terms with the fact that we were going to keep her,
and this was a huge setback, literally.
We did some soul-searching, but after a few days ...
(Laughter)
... animals have a way of stealing your heart.
And even though we had only known Esther for a few weeks,
we both couldn't stand the thought of giving up on her.
SJ: We carried on for months with nothing more than a hope
that she wouldn't get as big as we knew she could.
But every time somebody came over, it was the same thing:
"Oh my god, she's huge!"
(Laughter)
"How big will she get? What will do with her?"
We were wondering these things ourselves
and that's actually why we called her Esther, the Wonder Pig.
Aside from her astonishing rate of growth,
which was almost a pound a day at its quickest,
her intelligence was becoming increasingly apparent.
Our freezer was below the fridge; we had to keep it closed with box tape.
All of our cupboards had childproof locks, but they were no match for Esther.
By the time she was eight or nine months old,
she could open every single door in our house.
She'd use her snout to operate lever-style door handles.
Even giving her medication became a battle of wits
because no matter how well we thought we hid those pills,
she would find and reject them.
Sometimes she'd even make us think she swallowed them
only to spit out a pill after I gave her a cookie for taking them.
(Laughter)
DW: She was like little Houdini too.
She could read our minds, and she was always one step ahead of us.
One of the most amazing displays of thoughtfulness
that I ever witnessed from Esther
is when she concocted a whole plan to steal food from the cupboards.
Typically, she would open the cupboard and steal whatever she wanted
as quickly as she could.
She realized that that would get her into trouble,
so she started opening the cupboard really quietly
when nobody was watching.
She'd circle around to the living room to see what we were up to,
and then she'd return back to the kitchen
and pull out the basket of food she was wanting.
Then she'd go back into the living room for one last check on us
before returning to the kitchen to steal her prize,
haul ass down to the bedroom, so she could eat it.
(Laughter)
She'd literally broken that down into steps,
being as quiet as possible to avoid detection.
She was a little devil.
And as annoying as that was, there was no denying
that there was something special going on in that big head of hers.
SJ: It felt like we were battling with a two-year-old sometimes,
and in many ways, we were.
Scientists have proven that pigs can be as smart as human toddlers.
They excel at video games using their snout to operate the joysticks.
And they're among only a handful of animals
that have been shown to recognize themselves in mirrors.
Pigs are astonishingly intelligent.
It was incredible for us to watch her grow up
and experience the world around her.
We had our fair share of laughs,
but I'd be lying if I didn't say we had our fair share of headaches.
There were thousands of dollars in torn beds and bedding.
She even shattered an iPad once
when I left it on the couch, and she decided she wanted a nap.
We had to watch her at all times, and it was taking a toll on both of us.
We had toilet training issues too.
When she got too big for any practical litter box to handle,
a kiddie pool at its biggest,
we had to start telling her to go outside.
You'd think that would be hard enough to undo months of toilet training.
Not when you're dealing with Esther.
She had to add an entirely different layer of difficulty
by fake peeing when we took her out.
We tried to teach her, just like you do with a puppy.
We take her outside, tell her to go pee,
we'd get really excited and give her a cookie when she did it.
So when she started asking to go by herself and more frequently,
we thought that was amazing.
Until we realized, most of the time she wasn't even peeing.
She'd go out, face us, and squat for a few seconds,
then come running for her cookie.
She totally played us,
and we felt like complete idiots compared to her sometimes.
(Laughter)
DW: All of that combined with the fact that she was getting larger each day,
having grown past 250 pounds before her first birthday -
that made for some pretty trying times.
And finding a home for a pig like Esther is next to impossible.
And the thought of just sending her to some farm or, worse, market,
that was unthinkable.
We loved Esther the way we loved our dogs and cats.
She was a part of our family,
and we were going to see it through, no matter what we needed to do.
Aside from adapting our lifestyle to accommodate Esther in the house,
we had both never really been able to shake the fact
that she was a commercial pig.
Getting to know Esther
made us want to know more about where she came from,
so we started to do some research into animal agriculture in general.
We watched some documentaries,
and we found some pretty startling things,
like the fact that animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gases
than planes, trains, and automobiles combined,
and that it's responsible for species extinction,
habitat destruction, water pollution, and ocean dead zones,
and way too many other mind-boggling facts
to cover in these moments that we have today.
Either way, we learned more than enough
that we didn't want to be part of that anymore,
so we adopted what we called an "Esther-approved lifestyle."
(Laughter)
And we gladly stopped consuming animal products altogether.
SJ: We accepted the fact that this was our new normal.
And we'd finally come to a place
where we thought we could share what life with a Wonder Pig was like
with our more removed friends and family.
We lived in a town that was illegal to have her,
so we kept her off of our own personal social media pages.
So we decided we'd start a dedicated Facebook page just for Esther.
Little did we know that page would go viral.
We started getting messages from people all over the world
that were falling in love with her and retelling us our own story.
"I had no idea how smart pigs were."
"I won't look at them the same way again."
"I'll never be able to eat bacon."
It was incredible. They were coming in by the hundreds.
And the page was still really new,
so we were trying to figure out where we all fit in
and decided we take a more vegan approach to our messaging.
It couldn't have been more wrong though.
People started fighting.
Somebody would comment on a post, "I'm never eating bacon anymore."
The vegan police would say, "What about cows and chickens?"
"You're hardly an animal lover if you still eat cows."
It was brutal, and it drove us crazy.
DW: We had seen in the early weeks on Esther's Facebook page
that she was having an effect on folks without any vegan messaging.
And we knew that we could have a bigger impact on non-vegans,
so they became our target audience.
We realized that creating a relationship between Esther and her new friends,
using cute and funny photos, was almost always more impactful
than telling somebody that you need to change
or by showing them horrific images.
We didn't change because somebody yelled at us
or showed us something horrifying.
We changed because we got to know what those products were
by literally living with one in our house.
We didn't see bacon anymore. We saw Esther.
And that's what we wanted to replicate on our social media pages.
So we dedicated every free moment of our time
to answering comments, questions, emails,
and helping people relate with her on a very personal level.
SJ: We were putting ourselves out there in a really serious way.
And we knew it was only a matter of time before the town came knocking.
Esther was also pushing about 500 pounds by this point.
So social media star or not, we knew that we needed to move.
During one of our low points the previous summer,
when we weren't even sure
if we were going to be able to keep Esther,
we'd found out that there were places called farm sanctuaries
that rescue abused and abandoned farm animals.
But most of these places are struggling for funding and volunteers
or they're overflowing with animals.
So we started to think,
"Well, what if we opened our own farm sanctuary?"
We had all these people watching us,
expressing an interest in Esther and what we were doing,
so why not just buy a farm?
To be honest, we couldn't afford it.
We lived in one of the most expensive real estate markets in Canada
and also had jobs to consider.
So we couldn't just pack up and move north to become farmers.
So we started a crowdfunding campaign with an incredibly ambitious target.
Somehow, we did it.
We hit our goal and we were able to buy a farm in Campbellville, Ontario,
and established Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary a few months later.
DW: When Esther arrived at her sanctuary for the first time, she was nervous,
but as soon as she saw the dogs, she walked straight off.
She got so much joy just from being able to go wherever she wanted to go
and do what she wanted to do.
And we got to see her run full out for the first time. (Laughter)
That right there, to be honest, is the most special moment for me,
getting to see her run like that.
And that's something that she never would have had the opportunity to do
if she was raised on an industrialized farm.
Since then, managing Esther's social media following and her sanctuary
has become a full-time job for the both of us.
But why, why would we allow that to happen?
It's because Esther elevated pigs to a position
that we had previously only held for our companion animals.
Esther is smart, she's funny, and she's kind.
She's all of those things,
but so is every pig, and that's the problem.
While Esther was swimming in her pool or playing with the dogs
or taking a nap in the house,
her littermates were locked in dark barns on concrete floors
without access to the outdoors or sunshine or anything to do.
They would have been taken away at about eight months of age
for processing.
But not the unlucky females.
Esther's sisters, maybe even Esther herself
could have been turned into a breeding sow,
forced to produce litter after litter of piglets,
confined to a small metal cage, not larger than her body.
The cage is about six feet by two and a half feet wide,
so small that all she could do is stand or sit down.
The only love that her piglets would know from her
is when she sang to them when they nursed.
Yes, pigs do sing to their young, just like humans do.
Their time together would be short-lived though
because at about three or four weeks of age,
the piglets would be removed from mother,
so that mom could be reimpregnated again,
starting that whole vicious process again.
She would literally be driven into madness from lack of activity and depression.
SJ: I think about Esther's birth family all the time.
I remember our trip from our old house to the sanctuary,
and we were with Esther the entire time in that trailer,
but she was still so scared and so nervous,
no matter what we did to try to comfort her.
I couldn't help but think if that was the day
that maybe her sister was taking a ride in a trailer too.
She was about two and a half when we moved.
It's pretty consistent with life expectancy of a breeding sow
in commercial operations.
So my mind wandered, and I fixated on that.
I started to imagine what her day would have looked like.
She'd have been loaded into a trailer
with up to 200 other scared and confused pigs,
where they could legally spend
up to 36 hours on the road without food or water,
in any type of weather.
It'd probably be the only time
any of them ever felt sun on their skin either.
Upon arrival at the slaughterhouse,
they would be put into cages, using electric prods,
and lowered into gas chambers where they'd be humanely stunned
prior to slaughter.
The agriculture industry wants you to think
that they don't feel a thing,
but they literally fight for their lives until their very last breath.
That could have been Esther.
We spent our entire lives believing the myths of humane meat and free range,
and telling ourselves those crazy videos never happened here,
that's got to be from another country.
We'd been led to believe that farm animals were stupid,
that they were mean, or that they didn't feel pain.
But we were wrong.
That does happen here. It happens everywhere.
We just spend our entire lives trying to ignore it,
and looking the other way
when one of those trucks go by on the highway.
DW: So that's why we dedicate our lives to a pig.
Because Esther made us stop looking the other way,
and she made us realize that we could do better.
We couldn't possibly know what life could have been like for Esther
or the impacts that animal agriculture is having to the world around us
and pretend that we're okay with that.
SJ: "When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change."
And Esther definitely changed the way that we look at things.
A pig that was born to be our dinner had become an integral part of our family.
And when your food has a name, a face, and a personality,
you'll never look at it the same way again.
Thank you.
(Applause)