The love between a mom and her baby is undoubtedly the strongest power on Earth. When it comes to their little ones, mothers go above and beyond to protect them. But the way this future-to-be-mom decided to protect her unborn babies is something unseen. In a story like never before, a pregnant pig break out of a factory farm to safely give birth to her babies.
While walking her dog in a forest near Nottingham in England, Anna Aston was pretty surprised to spot a mother pig and her newborn piglets. Initially she thought they might be wild boars, but then she quickly realized there are actually farm pigs. It is then when Anna knew she came across a very unusual situation.
“I knew they weren’t wild boar; they just looked like ordinary pigs,” the woman told BBC. “I was thinking, ‘This isn’t right’. You just don’t get them in a wood.”
Concerned about the safety of the tiny piglets and their protective mom, Anna called Brinsley Animal Rescue, and the next day Jon Beresford and Beth Hewis went to investigate.
“[We] found she had escaped from an adjacent pig farm and had her babies in the woods,” Jon told The Dodo. “The babies looked well, [but] she was thin and able to graze but not forage for food as she had a ring through her nose.”
Yet, how surprisingly how it sounds, the rescuers couldn’t do too much to save the female and her babies. Because Matilda – how they named her – escaped from a farm, they just could not pick them and take them to the shelter.
“She had the maternal drive to escape and save her babies, but we couldn’t just collect them,” Jon said. “Ultimately, we needed the consent of the owners.” But finding the owners probed a nearly impossible task, so the two rescuers took the media in order to save them. Fortunately for everyone involved, the story went viral and a happy ending was closer than anyone expected. But not without hard efforts!
Eventually, after Matilda and her babies have been taken back to the farm she initially escaped, thanks to a fund raiser, a lot of kind people and tireless efforts, she and her babies find a safe place to live for the rest of their lives.
“Matilda & her eight piglets have spent the first night of freedom with us resting,” the animal rescue wrote on Facebook. “She is such a good mother too them, now she no-longer needs to worry about their plight.”