St. Paul pig back home after going on the lam

Can a pig rule Twitter?

For part of a day it can, if that pig is seen wandering on Grand Avenue in St. Paul. And it's photographed. And those pictures prompt more than 50 people to tweet, and more than 80 others to retweet.

It all made for quite the pig tale indeed.

First, some corrections are in order. The pig was not, as one person commented Thursday on Twitter, the St. Paul Saints mascot. Nor was it an escapee from the Handsome Hog restaurant about a mile away. And there was no spider web nearby with the words "radiant" or "some pig" woven into it.

The wandering porker was just Rue, a gentle, cuddly, 50-plus pound "mini-pig" belonging to area resident Sarah Garner-Cullen.

Rue, who loves warm weather and munching on grass or plants to supplement her diet of special pig food pellets and veggies, must have slipped out of her fenced backyard while Garner-Cullen was raking leaves, her owner said.

"She's done it a couple of times," she said. "But she never goes far."

Garner-Cullen bought baby Rue about a year ago. An Iowa native but not a farm kid, "I've always been obsessed with pigs, I don't know why," she said.

What she's learned since then is that her oft-snorting pig doesn't like the cold, loves to roll herself up in a blanket "like a burrito" to sleep — and has pretty much a one-track mind.

"Like her whole motivation in life is to eat," Garner-Cullen said. "So we have to kind-of monitor her diet so she's not a 500-pound pig."

Anyway, Garner-Cullen finished her yard work Thursday morning and decided to leave for a bit. Rue, she assumed, was snoozing in a corner of the yard somewhere. But about 10 minutes after she left, Twitter blew up with pictures of Rue walking near and between a couple Grand Avenue shops.

Vanessa Beardsley posted first: "Random pig wandering around Grand Ave. Nobody knows who it belongs to. Anyone missing one?"

She'd been on her way to pick up some edibles at Nothing But Hemp on Grand, she said, when she saw what she thought was a dog. "Then I said, 'Nope, it's a pig.' I went up to it and just petted it."

Somebody gave Rue an apple, Beardsley said. Someone else called Animal Control. Then, "someone else said, 'Oh, I know where it lives.'"

Becky Erickson lives next door to Garner-Cullen.

"Someone came and knocked on my door and asked if I knew where the pig lived," she said. She went to the alley, where she saw Rue.

Erickson also saw the animal control officer nearby. The officer had a rope leash out to nab the pig, Erickson said, but allowed her to use the device to get Rue back into Garner-Cullen's yard.

"She doesn't mind people," Erickson said of Rue.

The feeling is mutual. "I love having a pig next door," she said. "I love listening to her rooting around and snorting."

That's what Garner-Cullen thinks Rue was doing when she became a Twitter star Thursday: rooting around for a snack. And while a pig on Grand Avenue might seem a novel thing, the neighborhood has a surprisingly diverse animal population. One neighbor has chickens. Another wants to get sheep.

"If it was cold, like today, she never would have left," Garner-Cullen said Friday as Rue snorted and sniffed around the living room and dining room of their home. "She's not a wanderer."