He’s a 650-pound pig who fell off a northbound trailer on Interstate 25 near Frederick last week, possibly to avoid a horrible fate as a Baconator, or, even worse, a pork-belly taco at some Denver bistro.
No one really knows.
Now, other than being the butt of at least one bad pig pun, he’s getting a new lease on life.
You can call him Lucky.
“That’s kind of the verdict,” Hog Haven Farm owner and director Erin Brinkley-Burgardt said of Lucky’s new — and probably first-ever — name.
After 3-year-old Lucky bounced off of a trailer on I-25 on Sept. 30, the Weld County Sheriff’s Office unsuccessfully tried to find his owner. So now Lucky will instead get his own bachelor pad at Brinkely-Burgardt’s pig sanctuary in Byers.
Lucky will be pig No. 20 at the sanctuary, and Brinkley-Burgardt was expecting a 21st pig to arrive Wednesday evening.
Brinkley-Burgardt traveled to Colorado State University’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Fort Collins on Wednesday afternoon hauling a horse trailer to claim Lucky, who had been brought to the clinic a week ago.
Veterinarian Amy Kunkel said Lucky — who appears to be a Yorkshire pig — suffered some road rash during his fall, but is doing well.
“We just scrubbed that off with (an antiseptic) scrub and treated him with a topical antibiotic ointment,” Kunkel said. “We gave him some minor painkillers and he recovered really well.”
Kunkel said Lucky is a “pretty big guy” by pig standards, but she added that pigs can get even bigger as they grow older and vary in size from breed to breed.
“He was a pleasure to take care of and a very sweet boar,” she said.
Brinkley-Burgardt, along with several students and staff members at the hospital, used pieces of fruit and vegetables to coax Lucky out of a side door and down short fenced corridor to the trailer.
He didn’t seem to mind. Other than the occasional shudder of the trailer as he shifted all 650 pounds of himself around, Lucky appeared to curl up in a corner and wait for the ride to his new home to begin.
Hog Haven, located east of Denver, houses mostly pot-bellied pigs — which people buy as pets then often abandon as they grow too big — along with a couple of miniature donkeys that also started out as pets.
“He’ll get to live out his life,” Brinkley-Burgardt said, adding that a pig like Lucky can expect to live about 13 years in captivity.
“He’s got a good long life in front of him,” she said.
John Bear: 303-684-5212, bearj@timescall.com or twitter.com/johnbearwithme
