AN ESCAPED pig was rounded up by police officers after a night out on the town on Monday (Dec 11).
The porker, called Thumbelina, was captured using a mixture of ingenuity and Jaffa Cakes in Drefach Felindre.
PCSO Jeff Kedward told The Herald that he had been driving through the village when he was flagged down by a van driver who told him that he was on the phone to the police about the free-range porker.
“Sure enough she was wandering around the street,” he said.
“We got it out of the road, and I travelled to the farm I suspected that it came from.”
Checks revealed that the farm was indeed short of a pig, and the owner joined PCSO Kedward in his attempts to retrieve it.
“We tried to recapture her, but the problem is that pigs are very solid and very short, so it’s hard to get a grip,” he remarked. “If they see a gap, they will get through it.”
Initial attempts saw Thumbelina run under the back of the police van, until a concerned member of the public diverted its attention by feeding it Jaffa Cakes.
Going back to the drawing board, PCSO Kedward hit on the idea of using ‘pig boards’.
“If you show a pig a solid barrier, they won’t try and run through it,” he explained. Using cardboard boxes from a nearby shop, he made a makeshift corral leading to the back of the van, and Thumbelina was lured into it with the application of more Jaffa Cakes and ‘a shove at the right moment’.
“She squealed a bit, but settled down quite nicely when we got her in the van – in fact, she was one of our quietest passengers,” PCSO Kedward remarked.
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