MOUNT VERNON — Emma will grunt at you if you linger in her sleeping area and she will protect her family if she thinks someone is threatening them.
But most of the time she’s quiet, sleeping through long stretches of the day, except when she gets up for meals, a little visiting and maybe playing with her buddy, Hank.
Emma, by the way, is a 2-year-old pot-bellied pig owned by Mildred and Jerry Yates of Mount Vernon. She also weighs close to 300 pounds, which is a lot bigger than the breeder told Mildred’s granddaughter the pig would get when she bought her.
“The breeder told my granddaughter the breed would grow to only 40 pounds or so. You can see that’s not true,” Mrs. Yates said.
Yates said they wound up with Emma when her granddaughter was dissatisfied with the piglet.
“I said she should let us take her,” Yates said.
So they took the pig and, despite its exceptional growth, “We became so attached to her we couldn’t throw her out,” Yates said.
She’s easy to live with, Yates said. Emma gets up in the morning for breakfast, a cup of mash (a commercial hog feed she gets at a farm supply store), then joins Hank, a part-Labrador mixed breed, and they sit on each side of Jerry Yates while he eats breakfast, until he shares some toast with them.
He’ll tell them, “thanks for eating with me,” and they will leave the kitchen.
Yates said Emma and Hank will sometimes play together, running through the house, and when Emma gets up from her afternoon nap for dinner, she will visit for a while.
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