Home Is Where Her Hog Is

A couple of years ago, a petrified little pig escaped the butcher, thanks to its new owner. Now the Herndon woman is fighting a zoning law to keep her 140-pound pet at her house.

Even in a pig's life, there are lean times that go along with the fat.

Last summer was the fat time for Bacon, a 3-year-old Vietnamese potbellied pig who moved into a house along a Herndon cul-de-sac with her owner, Bridgette Suder. Neighbors lined up to get a look at the sweet-natured 140-pounder with a bristly white coat and enormous pink-and-black snout that is the texture of "one big lip," according to Suder, who smooches it regularly. Kids came by to visit as Bacon cooled herself in the toddler wading pool that Suder set up in the back yard.

"We had a house full of people petting Bacon," said Suder, 23, a former kindergarten teacher who works for her father's educational consulting firm.

Then someone squealed. That started the lean times.

In early October, Suder received a letter from the town. It said that two inspectors "determined that you are keeping livestock, to wit: a Pot Belly Pig on the Property." They told Suder that swine are not allowed within the town limits.

She appealed to the town's Board of Zoning Appeals, and while the matter is pending, Suder and her neighbors have mobilized to save their Bacon.

Suder was encouraged when she looked at Virginia law, which indicates that if Bacon is not destined to be bacon, or otherwise sold for profit, she qualifies as a "companion animal." Herndon's zoning code also revealed an interesting exception. It bars town residents from keeping "more than one female fowl." Officials said that when the Town Council was getting ready a few years ago to crack down on people keeping chickens, roosters and geese, a little girl with tears in her eyes showed up at a hearing to plead for her pet duck, Gertie.

Thus was the Gertie amendment drafted into town law. Suder thinks there's also room for the Bacon exception.

"I love the town, and I'd like to stay here," she said, but not without her pig. "They know I'm gung-ho about it."

Just to drive the point home, Suder's year-end appeal to the zoning board included a 1994 Christmas poem from Phyllis Battoe, published on the Web site Pigs4Ever.com ("A Pot Belly Pig Gift and Information Center"). The poem ends:

We humans could learn a lesson well taught

By porkers in general who give us this thought.