200 Piglets Liberated in Foggy Crash Briefly Taste Freedom

Authorities in Allegan County, Michigan, spent about two hours around midday Tuesday rounding up some 200 young pigs that stampeded after the doors of a semi tractor-trailer burst open in a foggy three-vehicle collision. Twenty piglets died, and the driver of one of the vehicles was hospitalized.

From all accounts, capturing the newly liberated pigs was a chaotic, noisy endeavor undertaken by a small army of volunteers. The baby pigs took off for open farm territory, and it took a coalition of Dykhuis Farms employees, firefighters and local residents to corral them.

Of course, they were squealing wildly — and if you’ve never heard a herd of squealing pigs, their shrill volume is a reason farm supply stores can't stock earplugs quickly enough — and those trying to corral them had to tacitly employ plastic boards and plastic-netting fences. Then, factor in the dense blanket of fog that contributed to the accident in the first place.

“At the time, it was extremely foggy,” Hamilton Fire Chief David Haverdink told The Holland Sentinel. “Visibility was probably 100 yards.”

There were about 2,200 piglets loaded in the truck, and most of them were not freed in the collision. It took some time, but “I think we have them all rounded up,” Bob Dykhuis, president of Dykhuis Farms Inc., told the Holland newspaper.

When the piglets were rounded up, they and the approximately 2,000 that remained on the truck were loaded on two other trucks, and then they were back on the road to Indiana, where they will grow up and become bacon.

Photo by Maret Hosemann via Flickr Commons: This is how we imagine one of the pigs looked after it was liberated.