A lucky fall on I-35 saves a piglet’s bacon

So this Indiana woman is driving up Interstate 35 through Olathe when a plastic bag flies out of the semi-trailer in front of her, which is no big deal until she realizes the plastic bag has legs.

It’s a pig. A pink little pig no bigger than a stuffed animal, and it hits the pavement and bounces and tumbles as traffic speeds past. Well, this woman — she’s involved now — pulls over to the shoulder to rescue the animal and it runs past her going the other way and starts to cross the highway.

It ignores her pleas to come to her, so she tries some bait.

“I’m out there in traffic with a cheese stick trying to lure this pig and we both about get run over by two cars, a semi and a UPS truck,” Madison Lee said Friday by phone from her home in Goshen, Ind.

Not entirely out of the woman’s mind is that she’s now a ways from her car, which she’s left wide open with her purse on the front seat.

Lee finally manages to corral the pig and flag down a police officer. And that’s how the last kennel on the left at Olathe Animal Control happens to be home to a pig named Baby Porky.

And years from now, when Baby Porky is Old Baby Porky and she gathers the grand-pigs around, she can tell them how the day she fell out of that noisy truck and bounced on concrete in busy traffic was the best day of her life.

They’ll cock their heads and go “Huh?”

She’s alive. Had she not fallen out of that truck, she likely would have been called something other than Baby Porky.

Like, say, bacon.

“I’ve been told that she’s going to a place that’s going to let her live her years, and one of these days I’m going to drop in to visit her,” Lee said.

James Brackett, an Olathe animal control officer, confirmed that Baby Porky, No. A028236, will be adopted Saturday by a woman who has pledged that the pig will essentially be treated as a pet on her farm.

That’s the prize for falling through a hole on a hog truck.

“You can see she’s got some road rash here on her ears,” Brackett said, bending to the little pig. “We think she landed on her head.”

The official info card on her cage says, “Arrive: Aug. 17. Breed: pig. Color: pink. Markings: road rash.”

Baby Porky seems at ease now. The dogs bark and she sleeps, a pink little pig curled up on a red blanket.

Another officer shrugged when asked what kind of pig food she was getting.

“Whatever they gave me at Tractor Supply,” she said.

This story was originally published August 21, 2015 at 3:41 PM with the headline "A lucky fall on I-35 saves a piglet’s bacon."