…I’m bad…so bad
The Doclopedia #65
Pigs Is Pigs: Brenda, The World’s Smartest Pig
In 1997, on the Earth just next to ours, geneticists at the University of California at Davis injected a sow and a boar with human genetic material in the hope that it would raise their intelligence to near human levels. The results were disappointing, but not entirely bad, so the bred the two together and then injected their offspring. Of the 6 piglets born, all were somewhat smarter than the parents except for the runt, a little sow named Brenda. She was way smarter than her siblings. In fact, she was way smarter that the humans around her, one of whom was a Nobel prize winning biologist.
The more they tested Brenda, the more amazed they were with her capacity to learn and use her knowledge. Inside of a year, they were communicating with Brenda using software based upon the type used by Stephen Hawking, but vastly improved by Brenda’s suggestions. Six months later, Brenda was equipped with two mentally controlled robotic arms of her own design. By now, the former runt weighed in at 300 pounds and was 6 feet long from snout to tail.
At any given time, Brenda would have 5 or 6 projects in the works, in fields as diverse as biology, computer engineering, psychology and chemistry. She became an international celebrity and appeared on all the talk shows as well as hosting her own highly rated program on the Science Channel. Naturally, she was an ardent supporter of animal rights, although being a natural omnivore, she was not against eating meat (which rather pissed PETA off, but nobody really cared), with pork being the exception, of course.
Despite the government putting a ban on raising animal intelligence, Brenda and her human colleagues did it on the sly and with a good deal more success than the initial scientists had. They raised the intellect of hundreds of mammalian and avian species, then quietly released them into the wild with the goal of protecting the environment. This worked out very well indeed, but is another story.
At the ripe old age of 45, Brenda retired and spent her remaining days writing. Oddly, she specialized in complex murder mysteries, most of which were made into VRE (Virtual Reality Experiences).
Upon her death at age 60, Brenda was responsible for a restored environment, about 2,000 technological advances, all of the bases & settlements off Earth, cures for cancer and many other diseases and, of course, the vast reduction of the human populace and the establishment of the Worldwide Trans Species Government.
The Doclopedia #66
Pigs Is Pigs: Porkchop, A Boy’s Best Friend
On Earth 7A, a plague killed off all of the domesticated dogs in the world in the year 1620. Needing something to replace dogs in their lives, people tried breeding foxes and wolves and other Canids, but unfortunately, whatever causes them to rapidly evolve into protodogs also made them susceptible to the virus that was still in the evironment.
And then somebody gave pigs a try.
As we know, even the dumbest pigs are a good deal smarter than the smartest dogs and the smartest pigs are as intelligent as the average chimpanzee. This means that it did not take the porkers long to realize that if they helped humans out, life could become pretty sweet. Thus was born the pet pig. In under a century, they were fulfilling pretty much all of the roles dogs once had.
Now we flash forward to 1959 and the premiere of a television show based on the books and movies about Porkchop, “A Boy’s Best Friend”. The series starred Ronnie Howard as Tommy Dayton, Andy Griffith as his father Roy, June Lockhart as his mother Betty and a young sow named Wendy as Porkchop, the beloved family pet and constant companion of Tommy. Each week, Tommy and Porkchop would get into funny and/or mildly dangerous situations from which the pig would extract them. On some shows, Porkchop would come to the aid of Roy, Betty or any number of neighbors (most often Reverend Parker, played by Don Knotts).
“Porkchop, A Boy’s Best Friend” ran for 12 years and won 15 Emmy awards, including 3 for Wendy herself. The series finale, which saw Tommy heading off to college with Porkchop tagging along, was the highest rated television series of all time and held that position until the famous Doctor Who/Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover episode in 1997.
Wendy passed away at the Motion Picture & Television Home For Acting Animals in 1979, at the age of 22. Her direct descendant, Abigail, starred in the 1999-2008 revival of “Porkchop, A Boy’s Best Friend”. Wendy has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame and her hoof & snoutprints are preserved in cement at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Ron Howard, who went on to become an Academy Award winning director, named his eldest daughter Wendy in her honor.
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