Yahoo News Family share home with giant pig found roaming their village
A family adopted a stray piglet which they treat like a pet – even though she’s now as big as a sofa.
The huge hog, Blossom, was adopted by the Lemon family after she was found wandering around the tiny village of Wilton, near Marlborough, Wiltshire.
She has since grown to around 20 stone – and is as long as the family Aga.
The sow wanders freely in and out of the house and is fully domesticated – she can even sit on command.
She eats a children’s sandcastle bucket full of pig food twice a day, won’t touch vegetables and enjoys snacking on bread, cheese and pasta.
Blossom often dozes off in the front room and the four Lemon children pop their feet on her as they watch television.
MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO
Mugshots of Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen released as Britain First leaders jailed for hate crime
Married couple realise their paths had crossed 11 years before they met in touching photo
KFC resolve great chicken crisis of 2018 by returning to former contractor
21 people have been treated for exposure to nerve agent that poisoned Russian spy
Mum-of-four Millie said Blossom was “quite little” when she joined the family home three years ago – but is now “enormous”.
Millie, 38, who works part-time at a stud farm, said: “”In the summer she comes and goes freely into the house, in the winter she mainly sleeps in an old cattle shed we have. She makes the garden look a bit like a battlefield.”
Millie, who keeps a menagerie of animals, including two other pigs, as well as horses, ponies, alpacas, goats, dogs, cats and a budgie, on the family’s arable farmland, added: “The dogs are quite happy having her around – but they’re also wary of her.
“She’ll sit down anywhere – so sometimes she’ll just plonk down on top of them and squash them.”
The family think she was saved from a pig market, then passed between a couple of people to be looked after.
Eventually she ended up with a neighbour but kept escaping and wandering about the village, so the Lemons agreed to take her on full time.
Blossom was only around 18 months old when she joined Millie and husband David, 39, and their four children James, 10, Douglas, nine, Georgina, seven, and Sophie, five.
Millie said: “My children’s friends love it. When they come round they’ll go, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s a pig in the garden’. Even adults who come to the house will ask if they can have a picture with her.”
And Millie added that she didn’t tell her husband David when she first took Blossom in, admitting: “The first he knew about it was when he came home late at night after a harvest and heard a funny noise, and there was Blossom on the sofa.
“If I’d asked him whether we could have a pig in the house, he’d have said definitely no. So I just did it – but he is very tolerant of her.”
