Elmer, a pet pig from Covington, was in obvious agony – the docs at Virginia Tech would find out later, due to a swollen bladder caused by a sandy buildup of minerals that left no way for urine to pass.
Elmer, per his pet parents, Alyce and David McAllister, usually splits his time between free ranging in the yard and hanging out with the family’s two dogs on the living room couch.
The McAllisters purchased Elmer at a flea market in West Virginia, and “he was litter box-trained in less than a day,” Alyce McAllister said. “For the first probably three months, he was litter box-trained, and then he would just go in and out with our dogs.”
When Elmer wants outside, he goes to the door and oinks until someone lets him out, then oinks again to come back in.
He’s picky about food — he won’t touch lettuce or cucumbers, though he’ll eat almost any vegetable if there’s enough salad dressing on it — and his favorite treat in the world is a York Peppermint Patty.
“He’s super smart, he’s stubborn, but we love him,” Alyce McAllister said.
Which made the agony that much harder to bear.
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Medicines prescribed by a veterinarian didn’t seem to help, so the McAllisters made the two-hour drive to the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at Virginia Tech, to see if the docs there had any ideas.
When they arrived, veterinarians found Elmer’s bladder swollen to more than 20 centimeters (7.9 inches).
“His was very large — the largest I’ve ever seen,” said Victoria Whitworth, a resident in large animal surgery at Virginia Tech.
Carla Enriquez, an assistant professor in large animal emergency and critical care at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, said the blockage had been building for days.
“We drained about three liters of urine, and it was pretty gnarly looking — dark brown. It had been sitting there a while,” Enriquez said.
Because a pig’s urinary tract curves in an S-shape, there was no way to clear it with a simple catheter, the way a vet might for a dog or cat, meaning, surgery was Elmer’s only option, and it came with its own complications.
“Swine and pig surgeries are always a challenge,” Enriquez said. “Pigs have a thick layer of tissue and fat between their body wall and their belly skin, that is what gives them that pot-bellied appearance. It looks like a big incision from the skin and the outside, but once you’re in, it’s like a keyhole.
“It’s probably as close as it gets to human surgery, honestly — there’s a lot of fat under the skin, so it’s like doing surgery through a little tunnel,” Enriquez said.
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The surgical team decompressed Elmer’s bladder, cleared the sediment, confirmed his urinary tract was clear, then placed a temporary tube so he could urinate through his body wall while the inflamed tissue healed.
After the surgery, Elmer spent weeks in the hospital, rotating through two or three groups of veterinary students who learned his moods, his food preferences, and how to talk him into taking his medication.
“He’s quirky,” Whitworth said. “You had to scratch him the right way, you had to sneak his meds into him with marshmallows, and when we worked with his tube, you had to get him to roll over on his back and pretend like you weren’t doing anything. He was funny, but he was also very sweet.”
Whitworth became Elmer’s primary point of contact after surgery, and it was her job to keep him eating when his appetite dipped during recovery — no small task for a picky pig recovering from major surgery.
She called the McAllisters for advice, then tried the one snack that never failed.
“They brought him some Nutty Buddies,” Whitworth said.
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Alyce McAllister doesn’t sugarcoat how hard this whole process was.
“It was a horrible experience,” she said. “Don’t want to repeat it, but if we have to, we have to. But everybody there — the surgeons, the doctors — was amazing to him. He was in great hands.”
Most patients pass a series of “urinary challenges” — gradually longer stretches with the tube clamped shut — within about two weeks and go home tube-free.
Elmer, frustratingly, kept failing his.
A contrast study using dye and imaging suggested his urethra may have narrowed slightly where the blockage had irritated it, though clinicians never pinned down a single fixable problem.
With no clear next step, the team laid out the options for the McAllisters: stop treatment, manage Elmer long-term with the tube in place, or send him home with medication and more time to heal.
“This could be a pig that lives with a tube, the same way a person can live with a tube,” Enriquez said. “But the owner didn’t care. She said, ‘We can do that. We have to do that.’ She loves Elmer.”
Elmer went home with the tube still in before Thanksgiving, He came back to the emergency service in December after the tube’s retention balloon deflated and it slipped loose — not an unusual complication for a low-riding pig.
This time, when doctors removed it, Elmer finally urinated on his own. He stayed a few more days for observation, then went home for good, with no tube but on a daily medication that helps relax his urinary tract.
Elmer’s case reflects a shift the veterinary college has watched grow for years: potbellied pigs and other mini breeds increasingly living indoors as pets rather than on farms, sleeping on couches and going in and out with the family dogs.
Today, Elmer is back to what Whitworth calls his “semi-dog things” — free ranging in the yard, sleeping on the couch, and greeting anyone who might be carrying a treat.
The shaved patch on his stomach has mostly grown back over with hair.
The McAllisters say you’d never know anything happened at all.
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Chris Graham
