lynnerkat

Streetdog foster mom.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Brian has a pup. The fell has not seen one in a while, and the fell has opinions, and so does the pup, and almost none of them are correct yet.

His name is Moss. He is a Border Collie, fourteen weeks old, black and white and entirely convinced, and he has arrived on a Cumbrian hill to learn the oldest job a dog has in this country, which is to move sheep without harming a hair on them, using nothing but position, patience, and the strange ancient power that a collie carries in its eyes.

Because that is the thing about a collie, the intricacy that makes the breed what it is. A collie does not herd by chasing or biting. It herds by "the eye," a fixed, crouching, predatory stare inherited straight from the wolf, the look that says to a sheep "I am a hunter and you will move," delivered by a dog that has been bred for a century and a half to feel the entire predatory sequence right up to the final pounce and then stop, and hold, and never complete it. A working sheepdog is a wolf that has been taught to do everything except the last thing. The control is the whole art.

Moss has the eye. He does not yet have the control. He has, this week, "gathered" a watering can, a wheelbarrow, three hens belonging to the neighbour, and Brian's wife's washing, dropping into the crouch and giving each of them the full ancestral stare before attempting to move it somewhere it did not wish to go.

Brian is not worried. Brian has done this before, more times than he will say, and he knows that the instinct arriving wrong and early is exactly how it is meant to arrive, and that the job now is years of patient shaping, the pup working beside an older dog and an older man until the wolf in him learns the one rule that makes him useful instead of dangerous: everything except the last thing.

Moss gave Doris the eye on Tuesday.

Doris, who has been stared at by better, carried on grazing.

Moss sat down, confused. The first lesson on the fell, delivered free, by a ewe: the look only works on something that believes it. He has a great deal to learn. He is exactly where he should be.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In January 1998, for approximately one week, the British public stopped whatever it was doing and gave its full attention to the fate of two pigs.

This actually happened. Newspapers cleared their front pages. Television news led with daily updates. Office workers asked colleagues whether there'd been any sightings. Pubs debated strategy. Children wrote letters. And somewhere in a damp thicket in Wiltshire, two young Tamworth pigs, blissfully unaware that they had just become the most followed fugitives in the English-speaking world, were curled up in a mud wallow they had built to their own specifications, having the time of their lives.

They stole the nation's heart in a week.

This is how it happened.

On the morning of 8 January 1998, a man named Arnoldo Dijulio loaded two five-month-old Tamworth pigs into a lorry bound for V & G Newman's abattoir in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.

They were a sister and a brother. Ginger-coloured, leggy, bright-eyed, of the oldest native pig breed in Britain. Worth approximately £40 each. Nobody had told them any of this.

The lorry arrived. The ramp went down. The pigs came out. And then, in a moment that would shortly consume the attention of three continents, the pair of them took one look at where they were, assessed the fence, and left.

They squeezed under it. They crossed a field. They came to the River Avon, a river most pigs, if asked, would probably decline on principle.

They swam it.

On the far bank they shook themselves off, had a brief consultation, and disappeared into a dense thicket near Tetbury Hill, where they proceeded to do what every Tamworth has done since the Domesday Book. Root. Forage. Sleep under brambles. Ignore humans entirely.

Within 48 hours, the story had escaped the thicket more comprehensively than the pigs had. ITN sent a crew. NBC sent a crew. Japanese television dispatched a helicopter. The Daily Mail installed a reporter in Malmesbury essentially full-time. Every national paper carried daily updates on the Tamworth Two, named after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is what happens when a nation is trying to work out how to describe two pigs who had outwitted an entire abattoir staff.

A woman thought she saw them in her rhubarb. A man was certain they'd crossed his lawn at dawn. A postman swore he'd made eye contact with one of them near a bus stop. In the thicket, Butch and Sundance were doing none of these things. They were asleep in the mud wallow, occasionally emerging to eat something, before returning to the wallow.

On day four, the owner was interviewed on national television and stated, somewhat tactlessly, that if recaptured the pigs would still be going to slaughter.

The nation, briefly, lost its composure.

The Daily Mail, sensing a story of the sort that does not come around twice in a career, stepped in and bought both pigs from their owner in exchange for exclusive rights. The bidding, it was reported, had reached £15,000 by the time he cracked. The pigs were now, legally and commercially, Daily Mail property.

This was probably the only time in recorded history that being purchased by the Daily Mail constituted a happy ending.

Butch was captured on 15 January, foraging in the garden of a local couple who had popped out to the shed and found a pig in their flowerbed. Sundance, sister now gone, made a break for the thicket again. He held out one more day.

He was flushed from cover by two springer spaniels and darted by the RSPCA. The first dart bounced off. This was worth remarking on at the time. Veterinary examination later revealed that Sundance was in fact half wild boar, which explained both the thick skin and the week-long refusal to co-operate with any human institution.

He was eventually subdued. He was not pleased about it.

The pair were transferred to the Rare Breeds Centre near Ashford in Kent, with the Daily Mail covering their upkeep. A generous enclosure. A large wallow. A woodland run that Sundance, in particular, approved of.

And there they lived.

Butch was the boss. Her keeper described her as a grump who could move fast when she felt like it and had strong opinions about who was allowed near her breakfast. Sundance, free at last of any agenda, became extraordinarily mellow. He spent his days wallowing. He lay in the sun. He greeted visitors with a sort of detached amiability that suggested he had thought about life and found it, on balance, acceptable.

They lived together for twelve more years.

Butch died in October 2010, aged 13. Sundance was quieter after she went. He had been in her company since the day he was born. He carried on for seven more months, pottering along, and was put down in May 2011 after his arthritis worsened beyond comfort.

They were buried in a quiet corner of the Rare Breeds Centre.

Two young pigs, on a cold January morning in Wiltshire, decided they were not going to do the thing everybody had planned for them to do. They squeezed under a fence. They swam a river. They held out long enough that the entire country stopped what it was doing and paid attention. And when it was all over, they went on to live twelve more years in a Kentish paddock, visited by the occasional tourist, neither of them with any idea that they had briefly been the most famous fugitives on the planet.

They would not have cared if you'd told them.

They cared about the wallow.

They cared about each other.

That was enough.

[Mistress Dividend @mistressdivy]

losing an hour on international women’s day feeling very 75 cents on the dollar

[Scarlet💌🐾💋 @brinabusywoman]

Happy international women’s day to this scene

[LibertyJ @LibertyJen]

Good morning.
I can’t stop thinking about this.

[lynnerkat @lynnerkat]

@TheRealHoarse My friend got a watchman inplanted and is doing well. Trying not to go all nurse rachett on him when he wants to do too much.

[Blue Georgia @BlueGeorgia]

John Oliver's brilliant take on why he's voting for Kamala Harris. And he featured Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman.

[Devin Nunes’ cow 🐮 @DevinCow]

May they never know rest🐮♥️🧙🏼‍♀️

[lynnerkat @lynnerkat]

@MollyJongFast @SRuhle I love nobody wants this.

[Christopher Mathias @letsgomathias]

Speaking before Trump at Madison Square Garden, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe says: “These Latinos love making babies, there’s no pulling out, they cum inside, just like they do to our country”

Calls Puerto Rico “floating garbage island”

Joke abt black people “carving watermelons”

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Trump rally speaker goes on vile racist tirade against Latinos

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

adding this moment, which is of particular interest to Latino voters, to my thread 👇 https://t.co/xF3pFmwmi7

[Tristan Snell @TristanSnell]

BREAKING: Inflation drops to lowest levels in 3 years, back down to 2.4%

US inflation has historically been around 2-3% per year

US recovered faster from inflation than any other top economy

So if you still see prices climbing out of control, that’s PRICE GOUGING by retailers

[chris morran @themorrancave]

FYI: Billionaire LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who decided the paper would not publish its endorsement in the presidential election, paid no federal income tax for 5 consecutive years, @propublica found in 2021:
https://t.co/IDvzL1ceLu

[Victor Shi @Victorshi2020]

Please take a few minutes out of your day & just feel the sheer joy, happiness, & optimism that Gov. Tim Walz brings. It’s infectious. He is such a good, kind, & decent person & we need people like him serving our country. You will smile watching this.

[Jared Moskowitz @JaredEMoskowitz]

Trump Debate Team: stay calm, focused, stay on policy, stay serious, focused

Trump: they are eating dogs

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

“Not everyone got handed 400 million dollars on a silver platter and filed for bankruptcy six times”

Now he’ll address that instead of answering the question. Beautiful job by Harris.

[Adam Parkhomenko @AdamParkhomenko]

Hi, yes, 911, I would like to report…

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

OH MY GOD.

THIS IS FANTASTIC!!!! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽