Pet pig hogs the family couch again thanks to treatment at Veterinary Teaching Hospital 

Halloween brought a horror story for Elmer the pig.

Elmer typically splits his time between free ranging in the yard with two canine housemates and holding down his favorite spot on the living room couch, where he stretches out the full length of the cushions most days. 

But last fall, Alyce McAllister and her husband David found their beloved pet pig in misery, straining repeatedly.

Medicines prescribed by a veterinarian didn’t seem to help. After an uncomfortable overnight for Elmer, they made a drive of over two hours from their home near Covington to the Veterinary Teaching Hospital on Virginia Tech's Blacksburg campus.

Engorged bladder

Elmer hadn't urinated in days. When he arrived, veterinarians found his bladder swollen to more than 20 centimeters (7.9 inches).

"His was very large — the largest I've ever seen," said Victoria Whitworth, resident in large animal surgery.

Carla Enriquez, 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.  

"He had one of the biggest bladders I've seen on a pig," Enriquez said. "We drained about three liters of urine, and it was pretty gnarly looking — dark brown. It had been sitting there a while."

Complete urethral blockages are common in the hospital's goat and sheep patients but less common in pigs. The cause was sediment — a sandy buildup of minerals that left no way for urine to pass. 

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. 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's team decompressed Elmer's bladder, cleared the sediment, and confirmed his urinary tract was clear, then placed a temporary tube so he could urinate through his body wall while the inflamed tissue healed. 

Getting to know Elmer

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 his owners for advice, then tried the one snack that never failed.

"They brought him some Nutty Buddies, and he loved that peanut butter chocolate wafer cookie,” Whitworth said. “He just totally transformed after that."

McAllister and her husband made the long drive to visit as often as they could.

"You could tell he was very loved by his owners," Whitworth said. "They were absolutely wonderful — incredibly devoted, and just lovely people to work with. They just wanted to do everything right by him, which is all you can really hope for."

McAllister doesn't sugarcoat how hard the months were. "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."

Bumpy road to recovery

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 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.

A pig, not a pet dog — mostly

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. His owners say you'd never know anything happened at all.

The McAllisters purchased Elmer at a flea market in West Virginia. Elmer turned out to be even smarter than the family expected.  

"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."

These days, 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," McAllister said. "He's stubborn, but we love him.”