HUNTINGTON BEACH : This Piggy’s Fate Goes to Council

Megan Oswald should know by early next week whether it’s legal to keep Lilly, a miniature potbellied pig that she’s had for about six weeks and has gone hog-wild over.

Oswald, who says she has been infatuated with pigs since reading a book about them as a child, went to City Hall in June, lobbying for a change in law so neighbors won’t squeal, she said.

Council members will respond to her request Monday when they consider changing an ordinance to give potbellied pigs the same distinction it gives rabbits, ducks and geese. It is OK now to keep one rabbit, one duck or goose in residential neighborhoods, but there’s no mention of potbellied pigs, a pet that has gained popularity in recent years.

With high hopes that she wouldn’t be “sty-fled” later by officialdom, Oswald took the black-haired Lilly into her home in mid-June.

“I really like pigs,” Oswald said. “I like them even better now that I’ve had Lilly.

“She’s a good little pig. She goes to her room (the laundry room) and puts herself to bed when it gets dark about 8:30, when there’s nothing much going on. She covers herself with a sheet.

“She climbs on our laps and watches television with us and she’s very intelligent. She’s learned to sit, and she can make a circle when I hold a piece of food out for her.”

Lilly’s main diet staple is a vegetable-based pellet. But she also likes plums and potatoes “and goes crazy over carrots,” Oswald said.

Lilly also developed a liking for gazanias and ate all of them in the back yard. But the flowers were a little past their prime and Oswald said she had been thinking of pulling them out anyway.

Lilly, who is 4 1/2 months old, weighs 13 pounds and is 22 inches long and 10 inches high, measured from the shoulders.

It’s the size part that prompted Councilman Peter M. Green to pose some good-natured questions “about changing the ordinance for Miss Piggy.”

How big can the pot of the potbellied pig be and still fit in the ordinance? he asks. “And if it goes on a high-protein diet, does it lose its rights under the ordinance of the city?”

Oswald counters, though, that the really large pigs are the result of breeding with hogs. Lilly comes from a strain developed in Vietnam and should get no larger “than a fat cocker spaniel,” she said.

Councilman Don MacAllister said that many farm animals have been domesticated to be pets and that the potbellied pig “is a proper thing because it’s clean and neat.”