The Pig Who Tours the U.S. Reading to Children

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From Atlas Obscura:

Children’s Literature is full of pigs. There’s Wilbur, the relatable runt who makes interspecies friends in Charlotte’s Web. There’s Babe, who learns to herd sheep with kindness. And don’t forget Olivia, who has had a whole series of picture book adventures in her signature red dress.

For the most recent generation of children, there is also Daisy (and even more recently, Daisy II): potbellied pigs who, like characters loosed from the page, spend much of their lives traveling from library to library, helping to teach children that reading is fun.

It all started, like most fairytales, long ago and far away—in this case, around 1995, in Bristol, Connecticut. Paul and Victoria Minor had just watched their youngest child, Jessica, leave home, and they were starting to feel a bit lonely. One day, Victoria, who’d always wanted a potbellied pig, drove by a sign that advertised piglets for sale. She picked out the runt of the litter, named her Daisy, and brought her home to Paul.

The pig took to her new family immediately, clambering into bed with the Minors on her very first evening home. “We had to get a king-sized bed,” says Paul Minor. Her love of humans made her a natural fit for the Boys & Girls Club’s annual Kiss-A-Pig fundraiser—in which people pay money in order to get community notables to kiss a pig—and from there, her star kept rising. The Hartford Library children’s librarian asked Minor if he’d consider bringing his famous pig in for a story hour, so he did.

. . . .

“I’ve been doing this for sixteen and a half years, but who’s counting?” says Minor over the phone from his Baton Rouge motel room. He and Daisy II are currently miles away from home, but they’ve made themselves comfortable—Daisy is flopped down on the bed snoozing, says Minor. The two are now on the road about nine months out of the year, occasionally accompanied by members of their entourage: Victoria, or their two pugs, Lily Pug and Dixie Cup.

Link to the rest at Atlas Obscura

PG doesn’t usually include two posts from that same source on a single day, but Daisy and Farmer Minor required an exception. There is much more information and many more potbellied pig photos at Atlas Obscura.