The Good Good Pig

The Good Good Pig (2007) is Sy Montgomery's non-fictional account of the life of her adopted pig, Christopher Hogwood. From piglet to 750-pound adult, Sy recounts how she met Christopher and how her community came to embrace him.

The story opens as Christopher Hogwood travels to his farm one rainy day in April. He is contained in a shoebox that is perched on Sy Montgomery's lap. Sy, a naturalist, takes the piglet into her home in the midst of personal turmoil. Her father, a survivor of Japanese internment camps and the Bataan Death March, is dying of lung cancer. Sy's mother is in denial. An only child, Sy often flies from her home in New Hampshire to her parents' home in Virginia.

Sy is also in the middle of writing another book as a tribute to fellow researches and naturalists, like Jane Goodall. She has encountered many roadblocks in researching the book: she was hit up for money by guards in Rwanda, charged by gorillas in Zaire, undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, and stood up by Goodall herself.



Sy's husband, Howard, is writing his second book of American history. The pair lives in an idyllic 110-year-old home that their landlord intends to sell to someone else, despite Sy's protestations. Sy comments, "It seemed I was about to lose my father, my book, and my home."

Christopher was born in mid-February on a local farm. Sy and Howard are visiting some pig farmers they have befriended. They go into the sty with a sow and her piglets, knowing that their friend's sows are harmless whereas other sows might "crush a peach pit—or a kneecap" with their powerful jaws.

Sy strays from the story to relate that more people are killed by pigs than sharks every year and that children wandering in a pigsty are in danger of being killed. She says it is only fair that pigs eat people since people eat a "far vaster number" of pigs.



It's a record year for piglets, with each sow producing a bigger litter than usual. A sow generally has no more than ten piglets as she usually only has ten functional teats. When an extra piglet is born, the runt will make a squealing noise that attracts predators so the sow will bite the runt in half, only sometimes she bites the wrong piglet or tramples other piglets in the attempt.

At this particular farm, the farmers usually bottle-feed the one or two runts. There are eighteen runts the year Christopher is born. Christopher has black and white spots with a black patch over his eye. Believing that he won't survive, the farmers consider killing him multiple times. Eventually, the farmers call Howard to ask if he will take the pig into their already-stuffed household of animals. Howard, aware of Sy's hardship with her father's illness and her attachment to animals, agrees.

The neighbors are, at first, hesitant. Sy is a vegetarian and Howard is Jewish, so clearly the piglet won't be raised for slaughter. Howard names the piglet after the conductor, musicologist, and founder of the Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood.



Howard and Sy manage to purchase the farm where they’ve been living, and Christopher begins to show promising signs of health. Soon, Christopher begins escaping into the neighbors' gardens. Despite bungee cords and complicated bolts, the pig always seems to find a way to escape his pin.

As Christopher continues to grow stronger, growing into adulthood, he becomes a part of the community. The neighbors all pitch in, bringing leftovers and garden trimmings for the pig. Sy and Howard adopt a three-year-old border collie into the family, and a family with two little girls moves in next door. The girls, Kate and Jane Lilla, form an attachment to Christopher and begin coming over to give him warm, soapy baths.

More than a labor of love, Christopher is a counselor to the community. Kate is going to public school for the first time in the fourth grade and is suffering from dyslexia. She takes her complaints to the pig. Sy, too, is consoled by the pig when her father dies and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.



When Christopher dies in his sleep at fourteen-years-old, going to "hog heaven," Sy finds him in his pen and throws herself over him, crying, "How can this be? I love you!"

Sy is a naturalist who has encountered many different kinds of animals during her research. She has written books, articles, and films concerning animals, and in 2019 won the Environmental Excellence Award from the Antioch New England's Environmental Studies Department. In 2018, Sy published How to be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals and a children's book called The Hyena Scientist.