It was a simple job, you would have thought. But no, not for a bunch complete f***wits.

This is how it went when my parents sold their two very big breeding pigs (weighing about 350kgs each), they were pets to our family. We hand fed them, and regularly gave them belly rubs. We raised them to be very gentle animals, and as tame as any household pet.

We live at the top of the North Island of New Zealand, we sold the pigs to a nice couple down in Nelson (South Island) so they could continue breeding them. So obviously transportation of the two 350kg pigs would be a bit of trouble.

The couple we were selling them too seemed to have organised a straight forward plan of transporting them down there. She arranged for a stocking company to pick them up from our house, then take them to Tirau (around the middle of the North Island), then they would move the pigs onto a different truck and continue down to Nelson. Like I said, straight forward. Right? No.

The first step was to get them onto the truck. The sow had no problems and pretty much walked herself up the ramp into the truck. But the boar didn’t want to follow. We put boards up on each side of the ramp so he could only see straight ahead and then coached him up, but it took over half an hour. The truck diver said that he would keep the pigs on the truck and make a walkway through to the transfer truck down in Tirau. Instead of letting them out, and having to start the entire deal of trying to get the boar to climb back up another ramp. Of course, we thought this was a good idea.

Two days later we get a phone call.

Something went wrong. They didn’t make it to Nelson, they made it to Blenheim (an hour and a half in the wrong direction). The phone call we received was from the couple that had brought the pigs, they had been told that they were having troubles getting the pigs back onto the truck. We asked the question of why they were taken out of the truck to start with, but we have no answer to this; nobody knows. The sow was okay, they could get in and out of the truck easily. But again the boar was being stubborn.