Porkzilla

Would you believe that this fine female exemplar of the species known as Sus scrofa domesticus (or, more simply, a domesticated pig) started out as just a 2.7 pound, not-much-bigger-than-a-Coke-can oinker? Strange, but true, that. She was a perfectly petite precious pink piglet!

But it became obvious from the start that Porkzilla was neither a typical nor average porcine resident of Farmer and Mrs. Brown’s sty, for within her first few hours she seemed to visibly inflate on momma’s milk. She grew visibly rounder and more oblate by the minute! While accurate measurement was difficult, given her ever-accelerating growth rate, it appeared that she was managing to put on about 14 pounds a day after just the first week, and within a month was packing in well over 75 pounds in each 24-hour period. Porkzilla zipped past the usual market weight of 4-H hogs almost before she was weaned!

So, Farmer Brown dutifully kept his spring harvest off the market, and instead simply settled and sifted all of it directly into Porkzilla’s personal pig-trough, one grainy ton at a time. Mrs. Brown supplemented their now-favored pet’s diet with every pea pod, tea leaf, eggshell, canteloupe rind, onion top, potato peel, bread crust, apple core and leftover lettuce head ever to cross the Browns’ rough-hewn oaken farmhouse dining table. Neighbors sent silage when they could.

Porkzilla grew and grew and grew. And then kept on growing. She swiftly surpassed the weights of both the legendary ‘Hogzilla I’ and ‘Hogzilla II’ — supposedly monstrous pigs that had reputedly weighed in at 1,000 pounds and 1,051 pounds, respectively — on her way to an individual weight record.

But who is to say what Porkzilla’s eventual weight will reach? After all, she’s still eating voraciously each and every day. And, as she now ranges several hundred feet in circumference — and is thus far too large for even the largest extant truck-scale in the continental United States — how will anyone ever weigh her?

Despite her enormous girth and weight, pert Porkzilla is still the same cute, playful, dainty and delicate girly Sus she has always been. She still readily comes running to the sound of Mrs. Brown’s high-pitched hog call, then waits at the back farmhouse door (or at least as close as she can get these days) for the favored afternoon snack of a single licorice drop. She will still follow Farmer Brown about the back forty daily, playfully tugging his faded red kerchief from the back pocket of his dingy decades-old denim overalls each and every time he puts it back.

So it is particularly unfortunate that this endearing pastel quadruped with the impish grin and loving demeanor should have been stuck with a name so remindful of a certain shrieking, vengeful, destructive, rampaging radioactive dinosaur resurrected from the Sea of Japan! Blame the media!

(It was the sound-bite first heard on CNN, and the YouTube video that went viral soon after, that indelibly branded this dear piglet with the offensive moniker.)