"Pork is a four-letter word in our home," said Priscilla Valentine, who trains and travels five months a year with her husband Steve and their troupe of miniature Asian pigs.
With their little pushed-up snouts, cheerful dispositions and straight tails that never stop wagging, the small swine are real crowd-pleasers. The star of the show, 11-year-old Nellie, has been bringing home the bacon ever since the Valentines filmed "Jurassic Pork," a homemade video, featuring a nubile Nellie running amok among miniature trees on the Valentines' rural Washington property.
It was a $10,000 winner on "America's Funniest Home Videos," and Nellie became an overnight sensation. The talented porker has been a featured guest on David Letterman's show, "The Today Show," "Animal Planet" and other national TV shows.
Snort opens the show, running through a variety of athletic feats from fetching a Frisbee, rooting through utensils to come up with proper Asian eating tools chopsticks and leaping through a paper-covered hoop.
Nine-week-old Petunia, weighing only 8 pounds, already is dancing in circles and jumping over a miniature hurdle.
Petite Petunia stole the audience's heart Monday afternoon when she pressed her small snout, trance-like, into the Astroturf, savoring the scent of her cheese treat for several long seconds.
Priscilla considers Petunia an understudy for Nellie, who has a vast repertoire of tricks and has already surpassed her predicted length of performance by several years.
"There's never a boring moment working or living with pigs," Valentine said.
One memorable scene of pig pandemonium occurred in a Las Vegas casino. The Valentines were staying on the ninth floor and Nellie had ridden the elevator up with no signs of anxiety. But the ride down later proved catastrophic. As soon as the elevator doors opened she leaped free of Valentine's arms and raced screaming and squealing into the casino proper, tearing under blackjack and crap tables and up and down aisles of slot machines before being corralled.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
We encourage you to add your comments. To prevent spam, comments with links are manually approved during the normal business day. Please be respectful of others with your comments, bear in mind anyone in the community may be reading your comments.
