The love between a mother and her child is the most powerful force on Earth. When it comes to their children, women will do anything to keep them safe.
But the way this soon-to-be mom chose to protect her growing children is something that has never been seen before. In a story that has never been told before, a pregnant pig escaped from a factory farm to have her babies safely.
Anna Aston was surprised to see a mother pig and her young piglets while walking her dog in a park near Nottingham, England. At first, she thought they might be wild boars, but it didn’t take long to figure out they were farm pigs.
Then Anna knew she had come across something very strange. The woman told BBC, “I knew they weren’t wild boar because they looked like regular pigs.” “I thought to myself, ‘This isn’t right. You just don’t get them in a wood.”
Anna called Brinsley Animal Rescue because she was worried about the safety of the little pigs and their mother, who was caring for them. The next day, Beth Hewis and Jon Beresford went to look into it.
“We found she had escaped from an adjacent pig farm and had her babies in the woods,” Jon told The Dodo. “The baby looked well, but she was thin and able to graze but not forage for food as she had a ring through her nose.
Yet, as strange as it sounds, the people who came to help couldn’t do much to save the mother and her kids. They named her Matilda, but she ran away from a farm, so they couldn’t just pick her up and take her to the shelter.
“She had the maternal drive to escape and save her babies, but we couldn’t just collect them,” Jon said. “Ultimately, we needed the consent of the owners.” But finding the owners probed was nearly impossible, so the two rescuers took the media to save them.
Everyone was lucky that the story went viral and that a happy finish was closer than anyone thought. But not without a lot of hard work!
After Matilda and her babies are taken back to the farm from which she ran away, they find a safe place to live for the rest of their lives thanks to a fundraiser, many kind people, and much hard work.
The animal rescue wrote on Facebook, “Matilda and her eight piglets spent their first night of freedom with us sleeping.” “She’s such a good mom to them, and now she doesn’t have to worry about them anymore.”
h/t natureknows.org
