The dog was supposed to be the hero. That’s how these stories usually go.
But when Jo Ann Altsman collapsed on the floor of her family’s trailer, it wasn’t the dog who saved her. It was the pig.
It was August 4, 1998. Jo Ann, 57, was vacationing with her husband near Lake Erie, staying in the family’s trailer. Her husband had stepped out. She was alone inside when a crushing pain rolled across her chest and dropped her to the floor. A heart attack. She couldn’t get up. She couldn’t reach the phone.
The family had two animals with them. An American Eskimo dog named Bear, and a pot-bellied pig named Lulu.
Bear did what a lot of dogs do in a crisis. He stood over her and barked. Loud, frantic, and completely useless, barking at walls that couldn’t hear him.
Lulu did something else.
The pig took one look at the woman on the floor and squeezed her round little body straight through the small pet door, scraping herself getting through, and shoved her way out into the yard. She pushed through the gate. And then Lulu, a pot-bellied pig, walked out into the middle of the road and lay down in front of the oncoming traffic.
Picture it. A pig, lying in the road, refusing to move, while cars slowed and swerved and drove around her. She’d get up, waddle back toward the trailer a few steps to check, then return to the road and lie right back down. Over and over. Making herself impossible to ignore.
For a while, it didn’t work. Car after car simply went around the strange pig in the road and kept on going.
But Lulu didn’t quit. And eventually one driver stopped.
He got out, half expecting the pig to be hurt. Instead Lulu got up and started walking toward the trailer, looking back to make sure he was following. He followed. She led him straight to the door, where he could hear a woman inside calling weakly for help.
The man ran for the nearest phone. Paramedics reached Jo Ann in time, but only just. Doctors later told her that if another fifteen minutes had passed, she would not have survived. On September 15 she had open-heart surgery, and she came through it.
She came through it because a pot-bellied pig decided that barking wasn’t enough.
Lulu, it turned out, had never been trained to do any of it. Nobody teaches a pig to march into traffic and flag down a stranger. She worked it out on her own, for the woman she loved.
The story spread across the country. Lulu was honored with an award for animal bravery from the ASPCA, the sort of medal usually reserved for dogs. She got her picture in the papers. She got extra jelly doughnuts, reportedly her very favorite. And a whole lot of people who’d never thought twice about pigs suddenly reconsidered the whole species.
The dog barked. The pig lay down in the road.
And a woman got to go home because of it.
